Sitting on the plane on the way back from IT Forum having attended a few sessions on security, I was reflecting on the changed priorities when looking at security for PC systems. Nowadays the main concern is protecting the systems from ‘virtual attack’ - viruses, Trojans, hacking etc. followed by physical security
Back in the dim and distant past when setting up one of the first PC based computer clusters at Birmingham University our main concern was physical security. A concern over systems being stolen was first in our thoughts, so a case hardened steel chain was run the length of the benches and the systems were padlocked to it – this was before the days of off the shelf security devices remember.

The machines were diskless workstations so for a few years we had little concern about the newly emerging phenomenon of viruses and the internet was a gleam in a few people’s eyes.
But… we had reckoned without the security risk known as ‘the uninitiated’. At that time the labs were largely unused during the summer vacation so they all got a ‘spring clean’, floors were polished and so were bench work surfaces. That summer the cleaners had discovered a wonderful new silicone based spray polish which, when sprayed from a great height over the bench tops, gave them a superb shine.

The first indication of trouble that we had was when we started the first lab of the new academic year and there were complaints about the keyboards being ‘stuck’. Yep, they were actually glued to the bench tops by the polish – and when finally removed by BFI (brute force and ignorance) the potential damage was plain to see. There on the bench top was a lovely rectangular unpolished space - they hadn’t moved the keyboards when applying the polish…

So, over the next few weeks the polish crept into the innards of the keyboards and insulated the contacts on the keys. These days we would have cursed a little and then bought in a batch of new keyboards – but this was the mid-eighties – replacement keyboards were, if I remember correctly, about £120 + VAT each. Plan B was needed as we could not afford to replace 32 keyboards at that price. Talk is cheap and so was technician labour (I was the technician…). We convinced Zenith to send us a shipment of keyboards that had failed electronically and been returned. We then proceeded to unsolder the key-switches (yes, discrete switches) on all the failed keyboards, put them in an ultrasonic bath (the benefit of having an Acoustic and Sonar Research Group in-house) to clean them, test and then replace any that failed to respond with the ones from the ones supplied by Zenith. Was it worth it, well yes, if nothing else it taught a valuable lesson – anyone going into a computer lab for any reason had to have a total ‘hands-off’ approach or be instructed in what they could and couldn’t do – and that applies today, it’s just a lot more complicated these days – the price of power, flexibility and freedom…

And just for info, in case anyone was wondering, the PCs we installed in that lab were:
Zenith Z-151 systems, CPU 8088, 320K ram, mono ‘green’ screens – see here (one more example of how marvellous the WWW is…) http://www.atarimagazines.com/creative/v11n9/50_Zenith_Z151_choice_of_U.php
– the servers, 4 of them, were similar systems but had massive 10Mb Winchester hard drives… giving each student a massive 200K of online storage, and the network itself was a 3Com Etherseries v1.0 based on 10Base2 thin ethernet.