It was fun on the C64 but I didn't really get into it until I got my C128 and a second floppy drive. Program in one drive, data in the other. 80-column screen! Whoo boy that was fun.
"...better file management programs at the time..."
including from Microsoft itself. DOSSHELL, included with DOS 4?, 5? (been too long) was a file management and task switching environment that actually was more stable than Windows at the time. YMMHV (...May Have Varied)
Heh, heh. Soon after I got out of the Army, a writer for Rolling Stone was reminiscing about his days in the Navy. They had had approximately the same mission we had, just offset a little bit geographically. I'm not sure if he got in trouble for it, but he "declassified" a LOT of information.
Let me just repeat the motto of the Army Security Agency: In God we trust, everyone else we monitor.
A good question. An analog from simpler times:
More years ago than I care to count on my fingers I was a cryptanalyst in...let's say, near, the Mideast. The traffic we were intercepting and working on was in Russian, Italian or one of several dialects of Arabic, none of which I speak, or more to the point, read. But when you are applying decryption techniques you don't necessarily have to know what exactly what the message says to make progress, just what the plaintext should LOOK like.