Hey Guys, welcome once again. I can say for a fact that the nervousness is still now and the silence in my head has gotten louder. I’m always looking forward to reaching out to you. I got a lot of feedback on the introductory post and I was overwhelmed and this has given me more reason to push further so I say a big “Thank You” to everyone that reached out to me. Today, I’ll be talking about the Evolution of Computers from a Security standpoint; the purpose of this is to give you an idea of what led to the need of the services you’re about to start offering.
QUICK EXERCISE
Without reading further, picture this scenario; You finally made it to the interview stage of your dream job, the one that required you to burn the midnight oil to get certified and now you’ve aced all the technical questions but the interviewer needs something more, something basic, something that requires common sense, so he smiles and asks you this final question, though seem straightforward but it’s something you like most people never paid enough attention to “What is Security?” Leave your genuine answers in the comment below.
What is Security?
I find Seymour Bosworth, M.S., CDP, (president of S. Bosworth & Associates, a management consulting firm specializing in computing applications for banking, commerce, and industry) holistic. He defined Security as the state of being free from danger and not exposed to damage from accidents or attack, or it can be defined as the process for achieving that desirable state. To put this in perspective for you, the most secure devices (servers, computers, smartphone) is one that’s completely off as it is not exposed to any form of cyberattack in this form. The only threat to this device is physical damage and that can be dealt with accordingly.
Evolution of Computers
Personal computers, servers, firewalls and other systems as we know them today evolved from mighty enormous machines such as punched-card systems and mainframes that cost hundreds of thousands to devices that we can easily carry around today such as PDAs and personal computers and even though they still cost a fortune, its great value for money when the ability of these devices is taken into account. Over the next couple of paragraphs, we will be talking about the the progress we’ve made on computers from a security point of view.
Punched-Card Systems
This evolved in the 1950s as the need to get accounting & reporting tasks done soared and this electromechanical devices were used to execute this tasks and the machine operator controlled the entire process which made the punched-card an extremely vulnerable device as it was a standalone device, there were only a handful of reported exploitation. This was largely due to the security measure (Physical examination by supervisors) used to discourage such events. Watch the video posted below to get a better understanding of this device.
Large-Scale Computers
Even though the punched-cards were widely adopted, research was been conducted by academic institutions working to revolutionize the entire IT field with the large computers called Mainframe Computers. The first widely accepted computer was the Universal Automatic Computer (UNIVAC) in 1951. This computer consisted of 5200 vacuum tubes, weighed approximately 13,166 kg and its power consumption was about 125 kilowatts which would power more than an entire house today.
Consequently, the primary security concerns were physical protection of the scarce and expensive hardware, and measures to increase their reliability. Another reason why security for these computers weren’t dire was because only a few experts were able to manipulate computers and were very few computers in use, and they were owned by businesses and institutions that guarded these devices closely.
Medium-Sized Computers
Still in the 1950’s, medium-sized computers were created and even though it was still way bigger than the average desktop computers today, they were much smaller than the mainframe computers and due to technological advancement at the time, a change in storage system was made as disk storage system came about in contrast to the usual magnetic tape which was also used in some medium sized computers. These new devices had very simple Operating System and could only perform a task at a time.
IBM introduced Random Access Method of Accounting and Control (RAMAC)in 1956 which introduced a different storage mechanism that’s still used today in HDD drives even though the Solid State Drive is also sending that into extinction gradually. This system was about the size of a car and had a large storage space of 5 Megabytes and sold for about $10,000/Mb– This would be about the same size of a mid-quality song on your smartphone today.
There were still no online users or passwords and ID, one form of security used to protect this systems was the use of physical controls and post signs on doors to deter intruders.
Small-Scale Computers
This introduced the use of authentication mechanisms which was the User ID and Password as this smaller devices, although not standalone devices as it had to feed its data to and from the main computer, more like a server-client architecture except that this computers only had a screen made of Cathode Ray Tube to display information from the main computer and a keyboard to feed information back to it. Although this used IDs and Passwords, physical security was still implemented as the idea of networks didn’t exist.
Break in Process
You may not be able to relate to this older devices as they were around way before I was born, in just want you to see this from a security perspective so you can understand how we protected data from intruders in the past and the development we have made so far into how we protect them today. It’s about to get interesting from here onwards.
To Be Continued…
