guards was: PDP1 3527

Eugene Miya

As damn well they should. If the place is important enough to justify military clbutt security, it needs to be real, not a charade.

At the time I was horrified to hear that they did not praise the guard for actually following orders and trying to keep the place secure, but used the incident as an excuse to defang the security.

The security was a nuisance, of course. We had sold the contractor a communications subsystem. When it needed debugging, they asked us to send a hardware and a software engineer. As it happened, the two best qualified were myself (who had done the firmware and the device driver) and a hardware guy who was truly a magician. But I am Danish and he was Canadian - it took them 3 weeks to prep the building and the computers so two foreign nationals could be escorted into the computer room. They built a chain-link fencing cage around the VAX, with a blue blink in the ceiling that had to be on when we were in the room, and a klaxon that sounded when we were being escorted to and from the cage. I was not allowed to actually touch the keyboard, but had to dictate the debugger commands to one of the contractor's engineers. You get the picture. It was very slow work.

But the contractor's project manager was a VERY impressive guy. And a real mensch. On the week-ends he took me up to see some very pretty places in the Rockies.

I have known some other people that worked a lifetime for that company, and they had an impressive long-term view of staff development. One of them said that after he joined, they moved him around the company (and around the country) for a year, working for a week in each department. Paid off big time 10 years later, working in cross-departmental projects. At the end of the year, they asked him where he thought he would be most useful to the company, and that's where they put him.

Lars