One Stupid Keystroke Exposed Sysadmin To Inappropriate Information He Could Not Unsee

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates your escapes from dangerous tech support requests.

This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Tom" who told a tale of his early 1980s experience as the de facto tech support guy for what he's pretty sure was the first Air Force squadron to adopt PCs.

"These were dual floppy disk computers (possible Tandy 1000s?) running either Windows 1.0 or CP/M," he told On Call.

Files written under one OS could not be read when using the other. The supplier of the PCs therefore provided an application called "FORMATS" that translated files into a usable format for whichever OS users decided to employ.

FORMATS was a foolish name for that utility, because the command FORMAT erases disks.

"That extra 'S' caused lots of trouble when people forgot to add it," Tom told On Call, because more than a few users tried to convert a file but ended up wiping a floppy disk.

The squadron did have data recovery tools, but they required command line skills that few possessed.

Tom was therefore often called upon to recover data.

One such call came from a member of the squadron's legal team.

"An officer had tried to change the files from CP/M to DOS format and when the first disk didn't work, figured that he just needed to try again on several different disks."

All those disks were now blank, and Tom was left alone to perform his data recovery duties.

• DIMM techies weren't allowed to leave the building until proven to not be pilferers
• Techie cleaned up criminally bad tech support that was probably also an actual crime
• I was told to make backups, not test them. Why does that make you look so worried?
• User said he did nothing that explained his dead PC – does a new motherboard count?

By now Tom was very familiar with the data recovery tools, but he still checked each job had worked by opening a couple of random files just to make sure he'd accomplished each data retrieval mission.

When he did so after this job, he was shocked.

"They were all records of court martial proceedings," he told On Call, and even though privacy rules were less fierce in those days, he found it bizarre he'd been allowed to access them.

Worse still, one of the files mentioned a chap in the squadron that Tom knew quite well.

"That was not something exactly well known in the unit," Tom told On Call.

"I quickly closed the files and let the staff know the officer's files were all back. Talk about Too Much Information!"

Has a tech support job led you to inappropriate information? If so, what did you do? It's utterly appropriate to send On Call an email by clicking here so we can share your dangerous data on a future Friday. ®