Longing for the good ol' days

I sometimes long for the good ol' days of the mainframe. There was something about that big iron - the smell of the computer room, the hum of air conditioners, the feeling of computing being a special endeavor and somehow magnificent.

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Since those days, the only place I have had that same feeling has been in hosting facilities where the sheer scale and the charge in the air gets me all amped up.

But the thing that was really great about those machines was their operating systems, in particular the way applications were partitioned and ran as if each owned the whole machine. And when a program crashed, the rest of the machine was unaffected.

Ah, yes, those were the days when programmers were men and management was pretty much in the dark about what went on the computer room. When technicians were brave and operators boldly ran jobs that no operator had run before. Thus was the Empire of the Mainframe forged.

Be that as it may . . . it seems as if the idea of applications running in protected operating environments is undergoing something of a renaissance. This is not surprising, as the more we build applications on PCs that are huge, frighteningly complex and full of bugs, the more we discover that we need a framework for ensuring integrity and authenticity of data and software.

The previous attempt to define such a system came from the Trusted Computing Platform Alliance, a group of about 180 companies established by IBM with Compaq, Hewlett-Packard, Intel and Microsoft. Its goal (see "Trusted Computing Platform Alliance,") was to develop an industry specification "[providing] a ubiquitous and standardized means to address trustworthiness of computing platforms [and] improving the authenticity, integrity, and privacy of Internet-based communications and commerce."

Version 1.0 of the TPCA specification was released in January 2001 and Version 1.1b was released this February. In April, the first TPCA products appeared: the IBM Thinkpad T30 notebook series, of which some models will use an Atmel processor compliant with the TPCA Version 1.1 specifications. What these systems will mean in real IT environments isn't clear, but with IBM calling the feature the "TCPA-compliant IBM Embedded Security Subsystem 2.0," it doesn't exactly sound like a rallying call for a standard.

Now you may have noticed that I used the phrase "previous attempt" above. This is because Microsoft has, in its usual "all-your-base-are-belong-to-us" style, recently started talking about its future trusted computing platform called Palladium, which is expected to ship in 2004 with the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn.

In a recent Network World story, Martin Reynolds, a Gartner analyst, said, "Hardware will have to be modified and it will have to be done right, it will have to be perfect." And therein lies a potentially enormous gotcha in the idea - that "perfect" (or even "near perfect") software and hardware can be built. The other potentially enormous gotcha is far more dramatic: Under the Palladium architecture, who controls the trusted environment?

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, let me offer you Exhibit A - Microsoft Passport. Intended to be a single sign-on system that would manage and selectively express your identity online to Web sites and services, Passport has been found to have security holes big enough to drive a bus through, and its "benefits" are largely based on making it easier to buy stuff. Not exactly the profile of a strategic IT solution.

My guess is that unless Microsoft manages to pull some kind of systems engineering rabbit out of its virtual hat, Palladium will be buggy and hard to administer, and do more to secure the Microsoft stranglehold over OEMs and users than solve the problems of secure, reliable computing.

Boy, those old mainframe days sure were good.

Reminiscences to backspin@gibbs.com.

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