9 Jan
1998
9 Jan
'98
3:15 p.m.
Actually they drop them in acid. It's a lot
more thorough than a
chainsaw. Did you see the message that I posted a few weeks ago trying to
find a new home for a mint IBM XT minus the hard drive? THAT's what became
of it's hard drive. But even that is preferrable to the previous approach.
Not all government computers get thier drives removed. Of course, just
about any NSA or drives relating to contractor R&D programs get destroyed,
but many do not. Look at some of the surplus catalogs the GSA puts out -
some of the lots are just hard drives.
They used to drop the entire computer into acid!
That's what happened the
first twelve computers in the world. They were built during WW II and used
to decode German codes. After the war they were completely destroyed. Most
people are completely unaware that they ever existed.
The only machines that really get destroyed are crypto and high-end
weapons systems computers. Obviously with the above mentioned machines,
they were destroyed because the government did not other countries knowing
just how ahead the U.S. was in cryptography. After all, even allies spy on
each other.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net