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We'll have to wait for the comment system to be secured before the first comment can be added.
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Seriously, is this just completely made up?
Or did Dave just one day think "Hmm, 40 years ago I wasn't allowed into a computer room. I'd better email TDWTF as I'm sure it'd make fascinating reading".
40 years ago it wouldn't have been interesting. It hasn't got any better in the invervening time.
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I am pretty sure that this story was submitted soon after the occurence. You have to realize two things:
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My gov't asked me to fix the 8200, so I looked at a bunch of scissored core dumps, blamed the hardware team and then NOTHING happened. LONG LIVE THE LONGEST STRAW!
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Isn't that the truth. :) I remember the one error'd image I submitted, in january, was finally displayed a few weeks ago!!
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Well, without any real data with which to work, what do you expect?
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So like once i got a message from chkdsk that said the MFT bitmap was corrupt and im all like @#$@% windows but it turned out to be a bad disk and somebody else replaced it. True story man.
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Reminds me of the short time I spent working at a software company on Wall St. The company was developing an automated trading platform. The idea was that this framework would handle things like capturing market data and sending orders to brokers, and our clients would write the actual trading algorithms.
Being a lowly junior developer, I rarely got to work on the core product itself. Instead, I had to help clients debug their algorithms whenever they ran into problems. Which was every day. Also, their algorithms are super secret so I never got to see the algorithms or the client code myself. I had to try and convince the traders to show me the steps that caused the problem. Maybe I had a stack trace or two.
The problem could either be in the core product, in which case the client would call us idiots for writing shitty software, or the bug would be in the algorithm, in which case the client would call us idiots for writing an API that allowed them to write shitty software.
Anyways, long story short, debugging software sucks, especially when you don't get to see the software!
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Well, Dave had to wait for somebody to invent TDWTF first. And before that could happen, he had to wait for somebody to invent the internet.
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Sure, scissor the sensitive data out of the core dumps, makes sense to me. In fact I think I'm going to try that on our developers.
But, given that no one is allowed to see the data, who does the scissoring?
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The Senior Scissor Sargent, of course. And he's blind.
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insert tired old Al Gore joke even though he never actually claimed to have invented the internet in the first place
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_gore#Second_presidential_run_.282000.29
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He really didn't say that? I would think he must have said something LIKE it at least, otherwise how would the running joke have started? I could be wrong....Darth Vader never said "Luke, I am your father," but most people think he did; could be the same type of thing with our friend Al.
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Now you just pull your Halliburton truck up under the hopper and they dump the money in.
Oh, wait, that was a year ago.
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What's with the Latvian army?
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Yeah, nowadays the name on the truck is different, and the hopper is much bigger.
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Wow, I got a wave of nostalgia with that story.
The WTF, in case you didn't notice it, was the obsessive and borderline-absurd secrecy.
Evidently, not all the fine TDWTF crowd is buying it. Either they're jaded or just don't believe it.
I never worked with a mainframe that old, but the technology and culture I came up in as a military enlisted computer programmer in the early '80s was pretty much the exact same as described here. Except that the authorities did give us full clearances so we didn't have to used expurgated dumps. OTOH, if I had to dig through only 1 inch of core dump to find a problem, it was a good day. Usually, our snapshots were 3-4" of white (not greenbar, the Air Force is cheap!) 14" fanfold.
So... I guess I'm jaded. There's no WTF in that story, not if you've worked in that environment. The reaction of the crowd here is more WTF, but that's also to be expected.
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True that.
I worked in a similar environment.
You can't imagine the attention my shop got when a newspaper once published classified information that was supposed to be generated by software run in a secure machine room.
"Ouch! Hey! What are you doing? Why the hell do you have to look in there?"
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Our army is great. We have 6 helicopters and 2 tanks that were dug out of the swamp (http://www.geocities.com/military_archeology/tanks.htm) literary...
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I think you meant 'littoraly'
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Sometime after this WTF I was called in to troubleshoot a problem at a well-known snack food company named after the founder's granddaughter, who eventually grew up to be "Big Debbie". Because the offending program managed their super-secret recipes for cupcakes, I was not allowed to actually view the results on the monitor. I could click the keyboard and have one of their employees describe to me the display on the monitor.
Fortunately, the problem was eventually resolved, and their super-secret recipe for snack cakes is still secure.
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No, that's only if a ship was used to pull them out of the swamp. But it should be 'littorally.'
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TRWTF is that your link at the footnote links to itself rather than back to the callout.
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This comment has been redacted by the Department of Defense the man.
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No, that's only if you didn't realize I was making a double play on words. Littorally (I know what it means and how to spell it) vs. literally. I spelled 'littorally' incorrectly on purpose because the OP couldn't spell either(literary). Actually I take that back. Maybe they can spell, but they used the wrong word.
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Having someone describe the results on the monitor. Isn't that just ordinary telephone tech support?
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Does the USA have any sort of time-limited official secrets legislation?
Over here you could be in deep trouble for telling people, even tangentially, about security arrangements - until 30 years later when most of the government stuff gets published anyway.
Perhaps Dave has been itching to tel his tale for 40 years, and his lawyer's just told him it's OK to talk now!
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to all the people commenting on the age of the story.
Did it ever occur to any of you that, having worked 50 years ago, the author of the story would be in his 70s now? Now not all 70 year olds I know are active enough on the internet to have been following thedailywtf since its conception. Maybe... just maybe.. this guy just recently discovered this site...
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He was probably busy keeping kids off his lawn until now.
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This is why we have Remote Desktop or equivalent access to all our significant clients, so 99% of the time we don't have to wade through that particular circle of hell any more.
The company that makes the base software (we mostly customize it for clients who need it) insists on using the same web-based service for everyone (it works, but they have to call every time and have someone establish the other side of the link), or else blithely suggests uploading a copy of the database (possible but tedious when the compressed file is 50 MB, more so when it's 2 GB).
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Another WTF is that the documentation is still preliminary 42 years later.
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The real WTF in this story is that he was put to work without getting a proper security clearance. I definitely believe the story -- the exact thing would be (appropriately) happening today, in any environment where uncleared staff needed to work on a classified data processing system. No surprises here.
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Yeah, now the pick-up truck is a full-sized dump truck.
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6-bit bytes, which made reading 9-track tape from Honeywell systems very interesting. Back in the early 80's I think I helped Xerox sell a 9700 printer by figuring out how to unpack that data.
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I am sorry. I am accustomed to have mystery at one end of my cases, but to have it at both ends is too confusing. I fear, [dear sir], that I must decline to act. --"Sherlock Holmes", The Adventure of the Illustrious Client, Arthur Conan Doyle.
-Harrow.
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Gore never claimed he invented the internet. What he actually said, in a 1999 interview with Wolf Blitzer was this:
During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the internet. I took the initiative in moving forward a whole range of initiatives that have proven to be important to our country’s economic growth and environmental protection, improvements in our educational system.
And this was entirely true. He was the man who wrote/introduced/sponsored the “Gore Bill” which allocated funding and resources to making the internet available to the public. Entirely true. The two men who literally invented the internet (that is, the internet protocol- IP- that you’re using right now to read this), Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, backed up Gore’s statement 100%:
[A]s the two people who designed the basic architecture and the core protocols that make the Internet work, we would like to acknowledge VP Gore’s contributions as a Congressman, Senator and as Vice President. No other elected official, to our knowledge, has made a greater contribution over a longer period of time. Last year the Vice President made a straightforward statement on his role. He said: “During my service in the United States Congress I took the initiative in creating the Internet.” We don’t think, as some people have argued, that Gore intended to claim he “invented” the Internet. Moreover, there is no question in our minds that while serving as Senator, Gore’s initiatives had a significant and beneficial effect on the still-evolving Internet. The fact of the matter is that Gore was talking about and promoting the Internet long before most people were listening. We feel it is timely to offer our perspective.
Gore took the initiative in Congress, that nobody else had taken. He pushed for funding of a public “information superhighway” (he popularized and may have even made up that term by the way), when nobody else seemed interested in it. But he never claimed that he invented the internet. And the two people who literally did invent the internet say that what he said was entirely accurate, and that he wasn’t giving himself too much credit whatsoever.
http://www.thedailybackground.com/2006/12/24/associated-press-repeates-tired-false-claim-about-al-gore/
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When I was younger, so much younger than today...
...I lived in a strange foreign land, whose language is completely incomprehensible to people like me (but whose people are very friendly; especially the female ones ;-)
Job was good too (money wasn't, but that didn't matter with all the rest being so swell) and the company was very well connected and manage to pull of some very interesting (and probably quite lucrative) jobs from all the big players and the government, too.
One of this government jobs was to program the software that was actually used for computer-based driving license tests. Quite a good one, I must say, it was later also sold to a number of other countries, and the government made a nice little profit from this development.
However, there was one issue: the actual database with the questions was of course highly sensitive. No one could be trusted to see these questions.
No one? Wait, we have this guy here who won't understand a word!
Oh, that's OK. He's got to do it.
That's how I won my first public tender :-)
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I'm not going to apologize. Instead, the Latvian army will be sent to thedailywtf datacenters with demands to cut out the incorrectly posted word from DB table with scissors.
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Brillant!
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