Last century there were frequent panics going around about viri conveyed by email: "If you get an email whose subject line is 'yada yada', DON'T OPEN IT!!! It'll delete your hard drive, give you boils and trigger an earthquake!". I spent quite a bit of time reässuring my friends and relatives that you can't get a virus just by opening an email, that for a program to do anything you have to give it control (by double-clicking on an attachment, for example).
Then Microsoft made it possible for the hoax to become a reality, through their handy-dandy auto-run event processing. I was not an inveterate MS-basher, but I nearly became one for a while. Then they finally began to see the light - ~very~ late, in my opinion, but better late than never. --- Bob Bridges, robhbrid...@gmail.com, cell 336 382-7313 /* I don't want the cheese, I just want out of the trap. -Spanish proverb */ -----Original Message----- From: IBM Mainframe Discussion List [mailto:IBM-MAIN@LISTSERV.UA.EDU] On Behalf Of Tom Marchant Sent: Tuesday, May 7, 2019 14:47 The earliest microprocessors had nothing equivalent to supervisor state, privileged instructions , or storage protect keys. PC operating systems, including several releases of Windows, were written without the benefit of any of these. Every program had full access to everything that the processor could do. And when some "genius" at Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to be able to embed arbitrary code in a document, it meant that someone could do anything they wanted to do to your computer just by sending you a document. --- On Tue, 7 May 2019 17:12:48 +0000, Jesse 1 Robinson wrote: >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. ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
