OT: Employees and the snowflake generation

Also true for many contractors working short-term on Engineering projects in clients' offices. Their office hours dictate allowed work hours and (in areas that I have worked in) security prevents working outside the office (documents that cannot be taken elsewhere and/or computer networks certified for the level of marking of the documents). Sometimes even dictating that work is carried out in a specific room within the building, to which non-approved personnel (even senior management) have no access, with an isolated network, servers locked in a ventilated safe and workstation hard-disks being locked in a safe when not in use.

SteveW

WoW

I've never worked anywhere that took disks out of machine at end of day

I would have thought that created a greater risk of loss through damage than from anybody stealing the information on them

tim

You come and go as you please.

But not usually choose the hours they work. Only time I've done that in broadcast as a freelance - and only to a limited extent - was when dubbing.

Really? You can decide to work any time you fancy? ;-)

Quite.

Neither have I. but then I suspect we are talking 1960s mainframes with removable disk packs

Then you would be wrong. Back in the day disk sizes wre limited and even a mainframe only had so many. The payroll data and teh payroll programs would be loaded once a month to input and crunch the new data and produce the new printouts used to generate payslios

Computers were all batch processing.

By whch time harddrives could hold enough data for an inexpensive minicomputer to be kept fully occupied, and taope backups were the order of the day.

Computer terminals with screens and keyboards really dint get started until the late 1960s and IIRC winchester hard drives made their apperance in the mid to late 1970s.

I have. Early 1970s.

They were put in a fire safe.

The 5th episode of the "13 minutes to the moon" radio series

#Paul

I worked with someone who used to run a secure site like that - full Tempest level protection etc. He said the visiting service people were always a bit miffed when he explained to them that yes, he could insert their disk of favourite utilities for them, but they could not have it back again *ever* (it would be shredded after use).

Wouldn't it have been removing the tapes in the early days?

But here, my first HD was external to the machine. Would have been simple to lock it away if needed.

A friend of my mother worked for the US embassy.

For really secret stuff the typewriter platen was shredded after use.

Owain

Oh

but you took those out because you had to swap them over for a different one every few minutes

I assumed that the discussion was about today

with 1960 disk packs I would agree, they were designed to be used that way

but I was taking 21st century technology, which, in the main, is not

Yes I know

tim

Nope, few had just tapes. DECtape was that but it was unusual.

That was also unusual, the first ones were internal with PCs.

No, the workstation disks hold no information, that is all on the (locked in) servers. The workstation disks simply hold the OS and software (MS OFfice). The disks are removed each night, as no-one can be sure what information remains on them where temporary and cache files might have been used and might be recoverable.

Similarly, where a little less security is required, but still a fair bit, photocopiers/scanners/printers must have their hard-disks removed and destroyed before the device can leave the building at the end of its usefulness. You don't know what may still be recoverable from that disk.

SteveW

Not necessarily

SCI - remember SCSI?

Those weren't the first ones except with the Mac and were internal with the Mac.

All our SUN workstations had external hard drives My first computer had external floppy drives

Yes the IBM XT started a trend for internal drives, but that wasnt the only kid on the block back then.

Blimey! What about the ribbons and the poor typist was she brainwashed after use;!...

The ribbons were also shredded/burned.

The typist kept her gob shut. Nicely brought up girls did in those days.

Owain

There was actually a famous case where the Russians manage to hack IBM electric typewriters in a US embassy, such that they disclosed what was typed on them.