Path: csiph.com!news.mixmin.net!weretis.net!feeder4.news.weretis.net!storethat.news.telefonica.de!feedme.news.telefonica.de!telefonica.de!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: RS Wood Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.misc Subject: DEC and The Americans Date: Mon, 25 Jan 2016 17:26:04 +0300 Lines: 49 Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net pEx4u53rnG5KzKamQEqhgw2mTax+Ra5E7/zpFUYRM/1WvzBECw Cancel-Lock: sha1:68/sWQ53Js230rrmxujBGXyuYd8= User-Agent: Unison/2.1.10 Xref: csiph.com alt.folklore.computers:157616 comp.misc:10116 Anyone here familiar with that TV series, The Americans?[1] If you're not, I can recommend it - it's pretty well done drama, set in about 1982 Washington DC, where undercover KGB agents and the FBI are facing off. Thought I'd mention it because every scene shot within the Russian embassy to the USA (ie, the USSR's building in Washington DC) features a lot of prominent shots of DEC VT100 terminals gracing everyone's desks. At first I thought, typical Hollywood - they chose DEC because the terminals look a bit more dated than the more modern PCs sitting on the desks of the FBI, but poking around a bit [2], it might be accurate: the VT100 reigned from about 1978 to 1982, so that would correspond with the show. That got me thinking about how likely it would be for a diplomatic mission to invest in DEC terminals (and presumably a mini somewhere in the basement to which you could connect) to do business. What would you do with them? Word processing, maybe database work, but would they have invested in custom software for something or other - processing visas or equivalent? Then I thought, the Soviets had their own hardware around that time - I'd think they'd have chosen something native to the USSR rather than buying American hardware (which would run the [very real] risk of backdoors). In 1982 would VT100s still have been anchored in academia, science and research, or would they have already made the jump to other sectors - such as diplomacy and bureaucracy? Final thought (mostly because I just finished Bruce Schneier's _Data and Goliath_ - a highly recommended read that will show you in no uncertain terms just how deeply the modern surveillance state goes[3]): I'm wondering if there isn't room for a new age of minicomputers. If surveillance scares customers out of the cloud, there's room again for something serious in the workplace. Other than software-as-a-service, why run the risk of offloading all your data to some cloud provider (read Schneier's book!) when you can keep it in house. It might look different, say thin clients and VMWare serving centralized desktops and a couple racks of storage servers etc., but is the move to the cloud so inevitable? I kind of like the idea of everyone going back to a terminal on their desk and some behemoth of a machine in the basement, quietly keeping everything in-house. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Americans_(2013_TV_series) [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VT100 [3] http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22253747-data-and-goliath