When I was invited to find my way into a 3000, I went for the operator. My 
first guess was "OPERATOR", which was wrong. My second guess was right, 
because they made it easy, and unlikely to ever be changed.

Unfortunately for all involved, the 3000 operators I've worked with seemed 
to merit being treated like second-class citizens. The mainframe operators 
at least understood what they did know how to do, and the tools that they 
used, more or less. They still were innovative scripters or sys admins. But 
when I did novel things with temp files, that they had to ask me to explain, 
they followed my explanation well enough not to tell me I couldn't do it 
that way. I've had 3000 support staff, some operators, some not, complain 
that some CI scripting was too complicated to support, which is kind of sad.

But the assumption of the lowest common denominator, instead of insisting 
that operators rise to at least the best common denominator, makes operators 
a good bet for relative ease of penetration and a more than adequate level 
of access. And I can't see why crackers would not take much the same 
approach as lions use with their prey. Go for the weak and slow moving.

Greg Stigers 

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