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@cstross @bsdphk Computers were a mistake. That ANYONE thought, intentionally or accidentally, that the ability to run this much code inside of a document deserves to be shunned back to the Stone Ages. This is why infosec is an impossible game to win. For every one person fighting the good fight, there are a hundred shitty programmers writing vulnerabilities like this and a thousand scammers waiting to use them.

@jgeorge @cstross

One of the events in computing that I have yet to see credibly researched and documented is what I call "The deluge":

How much did "The IT industry" grow during the 1990'ies in terms of persons, and what skills did they come in with ?

My guess is a factor of more than 1000, (ie: 100000+%) and that none of those people (-epsilon) had any professional IT experience, and knew nothing about the skill&craft of IT.

(Add the "Make Money Fast" incentive and...)

@bsdphk @jgeorge You can almost certainly chart it by graphing cumulative sales of personal computers, minus machines retired as broken/obsolete, which lags by a time period … and it was undergoing exponential growth throughout this period, so the retired cohort lagged new installs by a huge distance.

Computer use in business implies support personnel numbers (IIRC in the 90s it was 1 PC tech support per 40 installed base).

Since 2007 include smartphones/tablets as well. Different ratio, OFC.