"Martin Gregorie"  wrote

| I started programming in 1978 and have a slightly different take on it. I
| was in the industry 2-3 years before COBOL appeared. Before that almost
| all commercial software was written assembler and the lifetime of a lot
| of systems was 3-4 years. No online access - the programmers friend was a
| 12 key card punch and the main problem was that there was no
| documentation maintained and bugger-all comments in programs, so a lot of
| code was unmaintainable.
|
| I ran into online programming (on a teletype) in 1970 and by 1973 'glass
| teletypes' had appeared. From 1973-1975 or so terminals started to appear
| on mainframes but most commercial programming was in COBOL and a lot was
| still done with card input and source held on mag tapes or disks. We had
| local greenscreen terminals and no connectivity outside the office. This
| was on a job in 1976/77 on an ICL 2903 but I don't recall any more than
| cursory attention to security: it just wasn't an issue in those days.
| Throughout this era that was little attention given to security or to
| maintaining system documentation - one company (Smiths Industries) had a
| fixed policy that all documentation was destroyed as soon as a system or
| fix went live despite this being the period when systems lifetimes
| started to extend quire drastically.
|
| After a year off, I started work at the BBC in 1978 (ICL 2966 / COBOL
| IDMSX database) and in about 1980 I did my first real online system, an
| online music planning system for Radio 3. Again, no external connectivity
| and 24 x 80 greenscreens, but we did use online logins and the login name
| controlled what a logged-in user could do: music producers could enquire,
| the music planning staff could update programs, their supervisors could
| update the music and performer catalogues used to plan, record, perform
| and reuse musical programs and concerts, and the sysadmin could do
| everything. We wrote better documentation that for any earlier system I
| worked on, but it still wasn't great.
|
| Its fair to say that I never saw either good documentation or serious
| concern about system security until I joined Logica in 1984: there both
| were de rigeur.
|
   That's all before my time. I remember having a
housemate in '82 who bought a Commodore 64.
$300 to play hangman on a B/W TV screen about
5 inches across. I thought he was out of his mind. :)

  But in my limited experience it doesn't seem like we've
really needed security until recently, except maybe
at the CIA. Only recently have people banked online,
used electronic credit card readers, and so on. In
2000, what could people steal from your computer
or gain from hacking into your online connection?
Not very much. Maybe they could steal your AOL
password.

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