And thus what I said last night: MVS has been around longer, so it's had more opportunity to find and plug holes. Give it another two decades and we may find that even Windows is much more secure.
Not perfect, of course, even then. Iron sharpens iron, so the Good Guys and the Bad Guys continue to get smarter together. In 1978 and '79 I worked for a university that had a DECsystem-10. I learned a ~ton~ back then about...well, I didn't think of it as hacking, but I could start a program, then <Ctrl-C> it and inspect the machine code at my leisure. I made substantial progress toward figuring out Colossal Cave's "magic mode" before I left there for another job. It's primarily by remembering those days that I came to understand why MVS users nowadays need special authority to create a program dump. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* A fanatic is someone who does what he knows God would do if God knew the facts of the case. -found at http://www.algonet.se/~parlei/quotes.html */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Seymour J Metz Sent: Tuesday, May 7, 2019 13:21 While the old mainframes were too expensive for individual users, that changed by the 1960s and moreso by the 1970s. Reme4mber the Honeywell Kitchen Computer? The DEC PDP-5 and PDP-8? As for mainframe security I don't believe that such operating systems as IBSYS/IBJOB cleared storage between jobs. ________________________________________ From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List <IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU> on behalf of Jesse 1 Robinson <jesse1.robin...@sce.com> Sent: Tuesday, May 7, 2019 1:12 PM When I explain mainframe security to the unwashed but curious, I cite history above all. The mainframe emerged from the primordial bit bucket soup at a time and in a form that utterly precluded individual users from possessing their own computers. The notion of one-computer-one-user was monstrously unthinkable. Mainframe was of necessity a shared environment in which utter strangers were obligated to breathe the same digital air and excrete into the same pools. Preventing cross contamination was the first commandment. This overriding concern guided and often dictated decades of evolution. There was never a moment in the mainframe's lineage where security or integrity could be architecturally compromised for *any* other goal. Contrast that with any sort of Pee-Cee, where Pee stood originally for 'be sure to close the dorm room door when you toddle down the hall for a cold one'. Likewise for the U of xNIX. Each machine had one devoted owner whose needs were paramount. Unfortunately the computer could not discern its master by nose, a simple trick any dog could perform instinctively. Then the throwable machines, by virtue of price and availability, were ushered on to the big-boy stage, and shareability was suddenly de rigueur. So began still-developing Rube Goldberg mechanisms to keep multiple users out of each other's shorts. After decades of flailing around, the only 'security tool' trusted by weenie-ware folks with something important to protect is server isolation. Let's be clear. The major reason for the mind-boggling proliferation of midrange servers is not the need for more MIPS and gigabytes. It's the fundamental distrust common to all non-mainframe users that anyone else allowed onto MY hardware is a potential mugger. One app, one server. You got a problem with that? The boss will buy you your own server. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
