In the very 90s I worked for a few different tech or engineering / services companies and at more than one I learned that the early days of the company were full of similar stories.

I think it had more to do with the nature of an early tech startup combined people with a white collar office setting and sometimes long hours that allowed for social mixing, goofing off, encounters the left people saying 'check the sofa for stains', etc. Add in some corporate success in lines of business that weren't 'mature' to the point of being cut and dry and it was easy to blur the lines, especially with younger people who were not married / didn't have families (though that didn't stop some).

I guess this is the modern day equivalent of the corner office.

When I was young I got one of those (corner locations) and thought it was the schizzle. Turns out the big pillar running through it made the space much less usable and nobody cared anyway.

I haven't run across this yet. What sites are doing it?

I see many other posts making the same point, and I'll add my specific story from the 1980s.

In 1987, I was doing some work for a local chain of auto-body shops that had some software to do job pricing. In the process of understanding how the business worked, I got to know some of the guys who did sheet metal, welding, body repair, mechanical, etc. These were your typical blue-collar young males for the most part.

In the corner of the main shop area there was a dedicated terminal (VT100ish) and modem for connecting to the state DMV mainframe, where you could do basic queries. There were a couple legit uses for it, which is why the shop had it, but the only time I saw it used was by a couple of the guys who would enter the license plate number of cars they saw driven by pretty women, to pull up the registration info to find out the names and addresses of the car's owner. No checks or balances or access control; the logon info was taped on the side of the terminal. Any access logs would have been somewhere in Austin.

Totally creepy stuff then, still creepy 30 years later.

Nope, he's describing the LDIR instruction, which was useful for block copying or filling memory.

See: http://z80-heaven.wikidot.com/... for more details

And Initially, programs storage was achieved via saving and loading to/from cassette tap. The use of floppy disks was only enabled later via the Expansion Interface, which needed the Level 2 ROMs (which included a version of Microsoft Basic, not the Tiny BASIC that the Level 1 models had).

I think you're the one doing the babbling.

We're a tiny shop and one of our products is a compression product. Lots of data is processed, and it's worth it to our clients to have beefy hardware, as they run jobs that take hours to complete.

Out top test machine is an Ivy Bridge -era 2 socket workstation that we had Puget Systems custom build for us -. 2x Xeon E7-4650v2 CPUs - 20 cores / 40 threads. Spent over $7K on the CPUs alone.

We're needing a couple more high thread count boxes for our newest product. We're waiting a couple months to see what ThreadRipper systems look like, but almost certainly we're getting one. or two...

Felgercarb!

More seriously though, pancreatic cancer is one of the worst ways to go.

I always respected his efforts to revive the BattleStar Galactica IP when there wasn't much interest in doing so. Reminds me of what I did with AoE 2.

...someone attempts to exert their copyright of "their pictures" of these "public domain artworks"?

This is old news, just newer tech.

I remember in the late 1980s the guys at the auto body shop using the DPS terminal to access the state license plate database and get the name and address info on cute girls they saw in their cars.

The base urges to and desire to gain an advantage if they think there are no consequences have always been there.

I don't have the full story - there's aspects she can't share with me, but I gathered that the politics of switching that stuff to Oracle are more complicated than just the SOX issue... but SOX compliance was the nail in the coffin so to speak. And it was a departmental decision, not just her. I do know their projects involves the handling of employee data for tens of thousands of people in many countries, as well as customer data and their compliance department is rather large and scary.

> Not controlling your own security will make things like, oh, HIPAA and PCI compliance problematical.

Add Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Compliance to the list as well.

My wife just dealt with this at her Fortune 500 company. Microsoft will not disclose completely what the telemetry in SQL Server 2016 is phoning home. They have no choice with respect to compliance , and have made the decision to migrate their older reporting from SQL server (older versions) to Oracle.

She wishes she had a recording of their MS sales rep telling her team that it doesn't matter.

> But... but... you forgot to mention they're using previous-generation processors in their brand-new laptops! That takes courage!

Not really. The Kaby Lake equivalents of the Skylake CPUs they are using have not been released yet, so they are the current generation CPUs in those configurations.

Also, it wasn't until the early 60s that the earliest photocopiers appeared, courtesy of Haloid Xerox corporation, and a good decade after that before most people could usually get access to them for personal use.

That brought about a change in thinking. Prior, unless a print shop was going to get involved, you only really thought about making copies at the time of creation - via carbon paper, or mimeographs. People weren't used to the idea of creating copies of something after the fact.

The writing habits of authors and people like Roddenberry were already well developed. Today we think nothing of 'backing things up', but at the time it must have been a strange idea to them.

Ahhh. David H Ahl's 101 BASIC games - those were written on a mainframe I believe, and required a little bit (not much usually) of work just to translate to the BASIC dialects found on the common machines of the time (Commodore PET, Apple ][, TRS-80, Atari). The Atari BASIC was the hardest of the bunch because it's string handling differed the most (not being based on the Dartmouth/Microsoft BASIC interpreters of the time)

For real fun, I remember at about age 14, taking a commercial game- Starbase Hyperion - that was written in Atari BASIC, but had a few 'anti-hack' measures, and undoing them to make it readable when listed (like coming up with meaningful names for all the variables - they were in a table that had been replaced with control characters).