Redaction means it’s still classified for some reason. Makes me wonder what they think might still be sensitive on a 40+ year old lecture like this, when DOJ guidelines call for automatic declassification of “records having permanent historical value” after only 25 years unless they fall into a handful of very specific categories, like divulging the identity of an active agent.

I graduated college in 1990 and one of the places I interviewed for a job was with the Electric Boat division of General Dynamics. They build the submarines for the US Navy.

During my interview they told me that the computers on the current generation of subs were programmed by punch card. The punch cards were sent to the one contractor that had the ability to convert them to the magnetic tape actually used to load them onto the subs systems.

Perhaps by now they have indeed upgraded from punch cards & mag tape to floppy disks of some sort…

We did that (with Rackspace) for years before migrating to AWS. AWS is still far better from a service & flexibility perspective.

My employers website has certain times of the year where we see a huge increase in web traffic. When we had a hosted solution it took weeks of preparation to provision additional web servers to handle that load. We had to submit formal requests for additional servers, document how to wire them into our network & required firewall rules, etc. Then we had to wait an arbitrary number of days for them to do the work. And then we had to repeat that whole process when we no longer needed the additional capacity.

With AWS we just define an auto scaling group and additional web servers are spun up automatically when demand is high, and frees them up again when no longer needed. Even if we didn’t use auto scaling we could easily automate this sort of thing via terraform or other tools and spin up additional instances in minutes instead of days.

Having done everything from building my own servers 30 years ago to managing hundreds of servers in data centers to now managing hundreds of instances and other services in AWS, I’ll gladly stick with AWS. The hardware management alone makes it well worth the overhead.

25 or so years ago I had to troubleshoot a hardware issue in a SCSI-based server with 6 hard drives in it. A drive appeared to be failing so I replaced it and immediately another drive failed, then another, and so on. After almost a full day of troubleshooting later and we realized the power supply was actually the culprit and could no longer provide sufficient power to the full set of hard drives.

20 years ago while managing 700+ servers in a datacenter we had to manage a recall of about 400 of them thanks to the Capacitor plague that caused a handful of our servers to literally burst into flames.

Hardware failures like the above and dozens of others were mitigated in most cases thanks to redundancies in the software we wrote. But dealing with hardware failures and the resulting software recovery was a real PITA.

With AWS I may occasionally have a Linux instance lock up due to a hardware failure but it’s usually fairly easy to reboot the instance and have it migrate to new hardware. It’s also trivial to migrate a server to run on more (or less) number of CPU’s, RAM, etc. with only a couple of minutes of downtime.

The more advanced services AWS offers like object storage, queues, databases, etc. are even more resilient. We occasionally get notified that a replica for one of these services had failed or was determined to be on hardware that was failing, and it was automatically replaced with a new replica.

I’d much rather work this way than the way I did 20+ years ago.

It’s not currently in the best interest.

IF Trump wins the election then it would be in the best interests of the US. It would be akin to a judge throwing out a juries verdict because the jury clearly made the wrong decision.

Not to mention that lots of malicious attacks occur late at night or on weekends in an attempt to delay getting noticed. My company has rotating on-call schedules for our security, devops, and even engineering teams. I’ve had to hop on late at night or on weekends to help mitigate attacks. Luckily my employer is really good about letting folks take a day or two off after such events.

Ask Jeeves was a “question answering service” back then. They had a staff of human editors who curated answers to popular questions. Nothing they answered back then was done via search.

Source: I worked for a search engine startup in the 90’s that was acquired by Ask Jeeves when they realized they needed a true search technology since human editing wasn’t scalable.

Ask Jeeves was doing this before Google existed…

Try using “curl -A” to specify a User-Agent string that matches Chrome or Firefox.

These people should read up on well known bunkers like Project Greek Island at The Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. A secret bunker was built at the resort during an otherwise routine renovation in the 1950s as a shelter for Congress. It was decommissioned in 1992 after The Washington Post revealed its existence.