PDP1 3617

Security through obscurity has existed for a long time.

The Cold War response to do intellectualy stuff because of Sputnik was a new way of waging war (NSF, DARPA, NASA, AEC (a civilian agency), etc.) redefined "victory". We had never had a Cold War. We could not lob atomic plants without serious internal damage. We are not alone. Indian and Pakistan have the same problem.

No one ever forced vendors to make an add an "ADD". Either at the symbolic level or in binary, octal or hex characters. I am amazed that the Endian "wars" happened as late as they did.

Or as I learned, the dd(1) command is your friend.

Fortunately, I never had to use a Series-1 (NUXI was never my problem). I remember the Usenix talk however. Quite amusing.

Well the evolution of UUCP late in the Eastern bloc was amusing.

Talking with a friend (an ME at Lam Research) who used to work in the semi fab industry, he was amazed of the lack of standardization of simple screws in the former SU. He had one woman engineer who was gast that you could simply buy screws from catalogs (National Coarse or National Fine (makes me wonder how kids learn this today)) whereas she told stories of designing hardware from the ground up specing even thread count.

A better world example in warfare came in an obscure brief little war between Chad and Libya. The Libyians had Soviet tanks. Chad had Toyota pickups and anti-tank missiles. The pickups would drive faster on the sand and the turret slew speed. The tanks got abandoned and their crew ran home. That's only half, the old half, of the story. Normally in the past it was a spoils of war story. But as the French back citizens of Chad learned why keep obsolete tanks? That is the world we now live in.

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They still developed thermonuclear weapons with it. I would not say wildy creative as their still had peer review. But more than other fields.

I do think about 2nd derivatives.

I see it as a description more than a precription. The above is to a 1st approx. Life gets complicates with cartels, buttociations, etc.

We are not even raising seed corn. Cold War over. Not need to have leaders predict, plan, think about national future, "Stay out of my way" is fine. Just be reactive han proactive.

Well I have certainly seen covens of librariens work. In some case gossip going faster than light.

Or ask directions. Barry was speaking generalizations. Any more elaboration would take too much text.

Agreed. But I (and history) would be wise to document the thinking (think about the opposition) and the reasoning process.

It's very pragmatic. The Soviet-Russian-Chinese-Cuban, Korean (more of a joke),Vietnamese embrace of communism is simple to say but harder to detail: poverty. It's not enough to get the Eastern Bloc to concede. The West can't leave a nuclear power like that. China isn't going to build a huge blue water navy because it has a huge poor population in its middle and West. A friend married a woman who grew up in Mao's Cultural Revolution. She refuses ever to sleep on the ground (camping) again.

Maybe for a brief decade following 1918, the Soviets were creative (art and architecture). You have to also give them credit for their plant and Sputnik, too. But Stalin (and Mao) had agriculture to deal with. That is something urbanites in the US can't fully ignore. This was a big part of why Lysenko was bad. I see a lot of peeed ag people in various State legislatures (Parity for farmers as a joke may come back).

The rich West (and East) has watch out for the ag poor.

The fronts have also changed. The people and thinking stay the same. Women in the US can now vote (even if in many case "Like their husbands").

The problem now is that we can no longer let old enemies lie, so this is why we have to help the old Soviet states (tougher: in the right way, whatever that means). Lose nukes complicate the matter.

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