[Gllug] MS grumbles (was: take a lookat my photos on Facebook)

[JLMS]

On Thu, Nov 5, 2009 at 11:56 PM, Dan Kolb <gllug at eco.li> wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 05, 2009 at 06:48:05PM +0000, Christopher Currie wrote:
>> Someone wrote that Bill G decided against passwords in about 1989. No,
>> presumably in 1980-1, when he bought what became MS-DOS. With the 8-bit OSs I
>> was used to, I was *astonished* to discover, when I started having to use MS-
>> DOS, that it had no passwords.
>
> Yes, it's just shocking that a single-user, single-tasking OS, designed for a
> standalone computer didn't think that passwords were necessary.
>
> Dan

Yes, it is shocking. Anybody could have walked to my computer, put a
diskette (5 1/2 inch of course) and walk with all my data. I find that
shocking.

Naivety and carelessness can be shocking once we have the benefit of hindsight.

People failed to realize back then that the most important asset in a
computing system was the data and failed to protect it properly  (to a
great extent it still isn't done today, Ubuntu is doing some
interesting work on that regard by providing a transparently encrypted
folder in your home directory by default).
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