Surprised they knew about it! -- : Ethan O'Toole

DEC had some employees with clearances all the way up both primary sides of the classification ladder, General Service (GENSER, which includes some "black" programs), and Special Compartmented Intelligence (SCI, which has its own alphabet soup, including other kinds of "black" programs). They needed this because magnetic core memory was used in PDP era systems that processed up to the highest classification levels deemed prudent to not require completely manual handling (including typewriters and carbon paper, at least until pressure-sensitive carbonless paper was invented). That included communications processing systems that, when the hardware reached end-of-life (which happened to coincide with the upgrades made for Y2K), the software was wrapped essentially in virtual machines that ran on current-technology hardware and OSes. The cost of porting the original code would have been horrific because it had been mathematically proven to be correct, and introduction of a single bug could not be tolerated. Long after PDP hardware had become commercially extinct, but the government never throws anything away, DoD was still paying DEC lots of pretty pennies to maintain a special secure version of the RSX-11 OS for feature enhancements until the wrapping could be performed. Core was so expensive that it was economically necessary to repair it, rather than just replace it, especially in overseas systems where supply lines were tenuous, at best. As you might have heard, core never forgets - at the Computer History Museum, when we resurrected our 1960-vintage IBM 1401, every bit of the auto parts database that it ran when taken out of service was still intact over 30 years later. That meant that military commissioned officers had to escort double-wrapped/sealed/authenticated packages containing such core devices all the way from almost-literally Timbuktu back to DEC. Plus, because of two-man rule handling requirements, two people with the necessary clearances had to keep it in their presence when it wasn't secured in a vault, and it was signed in and out every time it moved or changed hands. One of the benefits of volunteering to do this when flying space-available on leave was that such couriers got to get on military aircraft before anyone else, so we got first choice on seats. Well, it was as "choice" as it gets when often on tactical aircraft with jump seats used by special forces and conventional paratroopers. Civilians would describe the seats as ballistic nylon material stretched between round aircraft-grade aluminum tubes ... aka a high-speed, low-drag cot ... with nylon webbing, similar to seat-belt material, cross-woven vertically/horizontally, with gaps equal in width to the webbing, hung behind serving as a "back rest". Military aviation seat belts were thoughtfully provided passing through the webbing and secured to the inside bulkheads of the fuselage ... mostly to make it easier for recovery crews to gather the bodies in case of a crash ... So, yeah, there's a whole world of physical security associated with NV memory devices, alone, even if the technology has changed. BTW, it's not physically possible to reliably degauss every bit on rotating magnetic storage media with a flux density higher than about that of a 1.44 MB floppy disk, no matter how strong a field is produced. It has to be physically reduced to dust smaller than a specified particle size, or incinerated. On Wed, Nov 28, 2018 at 7:47 AM Paul Koning via cctalk < cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote: