
Why did old PCs have key locks? (2017) [video] - hsnewman
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y0zZqHOZq7M
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ryanmcbride
I remember back when I was a kid and I thought putting a lot of necessary
stuff in my computer was cool, I had a thing attached in one of the front bays
of my computer that had a key start, a cigarette lighter, and a slide out cup
holder. It was really dumb but I thought I was so cool.

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hawaiian
Periodically I daydream about building an absolute monstrosity of a computer
with a LiteScribe DVD burner, combo floppy disk reader, iomega zip drive
reader, TV/cable tuner, and other older forgotten-about technology. The
motherboard will have a LPT parallel port and a serial port of course. I would
call it The Tower, keep it in a spare room.

Whenever I would need to access any information out of old media without fear
of damaging anything, I'd pop it into The Tower then SSH into it from a rather
useless but comfy Macbook 12".

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sk5t
You're going to want Zip, Jaz, and Bernoulli drives of course! Maybe some
external SCSI enclosures. And now I'm trying to recall why Ethernet
transceivers were necessary...

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Kadin
> And now I'm trying to recall why Ethernet transceivers were necessary

I think the idea was to decouple the card that went inside the computer from
the physical media. You could use the same card for 10BASE5 or 10BASE2 or even
10BASE-T based on the building wiring.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_Unit_Interface](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachment_Unit_Interface)

~~~
Godel_unicode
Modern datacenter switches are still this way, see SFP+/QSFP.

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eropple
Not just for that, though it's important--as I understand it, the electronics
needed to feed data at high rates over RJ-45 are actually surprisingly
difficult. Going much over 10Gbit (currently expensive) over RJ-45 is going to
be prohibitive.

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dingaling
I was an 'MIS assistant' back in the 90s and RAM / video card theft was a real
issue. A stick of RAM was a month's salary or more and easy to conceal. There
were clever RAM swaps where someone took a 4MB stick from the work computer
and substituted it for a 1MB from home.

Locked cases basically eliminated that loss.

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jlg23
That does not speak for your users... Even when one was too lazy or inept to
just pick those locks, a collection of just a few different keys was usually
enough to open any of the typical tubular locks.

Source: Did this a lot when I was young and stupid, not to steal but to annoy
teachers... As soon as I was not young enough to walk free (but still just as
stupid), I got caught and had to help with maintenance of the computer cabinet
for the rest of my school career ;)

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atoav
A lock is increasing the effort someone has to take to steal. Even if the lock
is utterly useless from a real security perspective, psychologically it
presents a small hurdle to people who are not hardened criminals, but
opportunistic thieves.

In many cases that small hurdle is already enough to make a significant impact
on the outcome.

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hvidgaard
As they say, a lock is not there to keep the thief out, but to keep honest
people honest.

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jtlienwis
The pdp-8 panel designers needed a way to secure the front plastic bezel to
the front of the machine. They added a power key lock switch on the left and
panel key lock switch on the right. They were there mostly to hold the front
panel together, but the idea was copied by their competitors (Data General
etc) and soon became a minicomputer standard.

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leshokunin
I don’t miss the key locks. I do miss the Turbo key.

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altmind
But it was not a Turbo key! It was a "degrade the performance for legacy
software" key.

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leshokunin
Right! You want me to believe it wasn't a magical key that 2x'ed my CPU speed?
Next thing you're gonna tell me the 640Kb limit wasn't a clever design to
teach everyone about memory management and making custom autoexec files!

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samplatt
I really miss custom autoexec and config.sys files.

I understood computers back then. Windows is almost a black box to me, now.

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adrianN
You might enjoy running OpenBSD.

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samplatt
I liked it because it was simple :P

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Theodores
It is a shame computers don't have a key of some sorts today. Imagine a small
sim-sized key that had a vital circuit on it and was removable. Going for
lunch? Leave the laptop, take the physical key.

If you could use the key to also make it bypassable by your phone's Bluetooth
the key need not be carried around. Anyone stealing it would never be able to
get in. If the only way to get to the bios was with the private key on the
physical key then it could be rendered useless to a thief.

If this physical key locked the screen of a laptop to a keyboard that would
make a very effective 'key lock'. It is a shame the keylock did not take this
evolutionary path.

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zxczxc111
We already gain most of the advantages you list by having full disk
encryption. I agree it would be a lot more practical to essentially hotplug
the TPM module, but isn't the decryption key stored in RAM after start up
anyway?

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SAI_Peregrinus
My current desktop case (Antec P180 from 2006) has a front cover and a tubular
lock that holds the cover shut for transport. Not particularly useful, but
tubular locks are at least fun to pick.

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agumonkey
My first desktop had a key lock for power on. Surprisingly I think that's the
first thing I ever hacked so that locked or not I could boot the thing.

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ncmncm
When I was at Mentor Graphics in the late 80s, somebody took all but 1M of the
RAM out of all the managers' Macs. Nobody noticed for months.

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dusted
LGR is a hero :)

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DerekL
Title has a typo: should be “PCs”, not “PCS”.

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dang
Fixed now. Thanks!

