In the days of punched cards and accordion-pleated paper, the computer security that was considered was one that involved sabotage or actual theft of paper (blank, lined, or printed upon). Mike Marcotty said, ``The Ferranti Atlas relied on trust.'' In 1973, Bob Metcalfe, the inventor of Ethernet, wrote the first RFC devoted to security. Many other works followed; so did encryption; so did firewalls. A friend of mine did a job for a Massachusetts company that was running Windows NT. When she sat down, the machine asked for a password. It didn't matter what was typed in: any set of characters would do. Despite the publicity, teenage hackers and crackers are not the real threat. Several months ago the NY Times stated that over 80% of breakins were internal and that breaches were more the result of disaffected employees than by crackers or hackers. Through the three decades of networking, we don't appear to have arrived at a secure situation. Perhaps it is time to ask whether we really need one.

Peter H. Salus is the author of A Quarter Century of UNIX (Addison-Wesley, 1994) and of Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and Beyond (A-W, 1995), and the Editor in Chief of The Handbook of Programming Languages (Macmillan, 1998). He conducts ``The Bookworm'' in ;login: and has been Executive Director of the USENIX Association and the Sun User Group, and Vice President of the Free Software Foundation. He is also Director of the Tcl/Tk Consortium.