I consulted to IBM in Poughkeepsie when they were secretively porting Linux. The one thing I found most difficult was getting them to understand buffer overflow

I consulted to IBM in Poughkeepsie when they were secretively porting Linux. The one thing I found most difficult was getting them to understand buffer overflows. Every time I mentioned it, one of the mainframers would say "But with the mainframe, when a buffer overflows, we just kill and start a new process." It took some quick thinking and a bit of dumb luck that the Linux distro they were basing the prototypes off of had a known buffer overflow that I was able to demonstrate to much amazement of the group that gave me what I needed to run getmvs (even though I had zero idea what to do from there...). Yup, buffers don't mean quite the same thing they were used to. Format string exploits in general were quite entertaining to them as well.