Throwback Thursday: Ultimatum | Computerworld


It’s 1977, and this pilot fish’s company is moving to a new data center. “The old facility was in the basement of the headquarters building,” says fish. “Access was via an ancient magnetic strip reader with no special capabilities. You either got in or you didn’t.

The new facility has state-of-the-art card readers, supported by a small midrange system. It has lots of capabilities — which can be a bit of trouble when you have a security department that’s paranoid about access to the facility.

And trouble does arrive, about a month after the move to the new building, when the security department programs the system to allow admission only during scheduled working hours.

For mainframers such as fish, that’s 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., and anyone who arrives early has to stand around waiting to get into the office.

And then the inevitable happens. A few days after the new security rules are enabled, one of the system programmers gets a call at home in the middle of the night to come to the office and fix a problem.

He drives in, gets to the door — and can’t get in. The security system won’t unlock the door for his access card.

Copyright © 2019 IDG Communications, Inc.



Source link

?
WP Twitter Auto Publish Powered By : XYZScripts.com