This article was such a pleasant surprise! I loved talking at Systems We Love and I love talking about legacy architecture in general. Bryan and the Joyent team were very accommodating and understanding. The White House is an amazing place to work (even now), but it's not a system that understands conference talks very well. Wish we could have a video, but it was a heavy lift just getting the bureaucracy okay with the idea that I was going to talk about information that was already public, without naming agencies or projects and without going into detail beyond what was in a user manual and that this was not a security risk.
Hi Marianne! I'm with The New Stack (not the writer of this article), and was wondering about the video myself. Interesting to see you address that there's definitely no public facing version, as it seems a lot of the commenters here would love to see it. I can only imagine the bureaucrat complexity involved.
Oh yeah, when I talked to the agency that owns the 7074 (more on this in a second) they were like "You can't do this because we will get hacked"
"How are you going to get hacked if I talk about your mainframe? It's not connected to the public internet, is it?"
"No. Well... we don't know... but ... hackers! Hackers are really smart Marianne."
Part of the compromise was that I promised I would only use information that was already available publicly through government reports and news articles. I went back through my talk and documented where each fact was already published somewhere else until they were comfortable with it. So the ambiguity on whether the 7074 was the actual machine or an emulator was deliberate... there were certain things I could not find a public comment on and therefore agreed to avoid making direct statements about.
This all seems super annoying, but it makes sense when you realize how heavily scrutinized public servants are. In the end they are only trying to protect me, my organization and Obama's legacy. Three things that are really important to me. So I can't exactly blame them for it. I was happy to be able to find a middle ground where they felt comfortable, the organizers weren't too badly inconvenienced and I got to give the talk I wanted to.
