Invisible wrote:
> John VanSickle wrote:
> 
>> The one we used in the Air Force merely ground everything off of one 
>> side of the CD, down through the data layer.  The shaved off stuff was 
>> reduced to a fine grit in order to preclude reconstruction.
> 
> Ooo... powdered data. Shiny...
> 
> I dare say the Air Force has much more interesting stuff to dispose of 
> than I do. ;-) I'm a litle surprised to hear that they use anything as 
> modern as a CD though...

Actually the desktop systems they buy for administration purposes are 
generally the same stuff you can buy at any office supply store, and the 
other administrative IT is generally at the same level.

The general rule is that if the military goes commercial off-the-shelf 
(COTS) for something, it gets fairly recent technology at a fairly 
decent price.

For some things, no commercial vendor makes it.  For these items, the 
military has to contract out the manufacturing process, and generally 
the design as well.  Proprietary designs abound.  Quantities are limited 
(only items that are ubiquitous and in heavy use get more than a few 
thousand made), so margins are high.  The design process takes so long 
that the equipment, when finally fielded, can be a decade behind the 
commercial world.

When I first entered the service (in 1984), a certain piece of 
cryptographic equipment, which used vacuum tubes to generate its timing 
signals, and magnetic core logic to generate the right ones and zeros, 
was then nearing the end of its service life (I saw it in use until 
1988).  It took up an entire equipment rack (six feet tall, nineteen 
inches wide).  All it did was encrypt/decrypt digital data at a rate 
measurable in kilohertz at the very fastest, but in the 1950's when it 
first saw service, it was considered more than adequate.

Regards,
John

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