• Spudd86 (unregistered) in reply to Been there, Done that
    Been there:
    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.

    The real WTF is not putting the people through for clearance so they can do their job.

    It makes far more sense to just use people who have or can get the appropriate clearance for most of the the data (and from the sound of it, it should not have been too hard... it didn't sound like they data was all that sensitive)

Leave a comment on “Secured Debugging”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article