The rumor at the time was that they actually printed them out and went through them with a black marker. But now that I think of it, it couldn't have been true

The rumor at the time was that they actually printed them out and went through them with a black marker. But now that I think of it, it couldn't have been true. With Courier 10pt you can fit about 4KB per page. So a 1GB core dump would would 256K pages! Maybe they weren't examining anything, and it just took that long for them to sign off and allow the core dumps to be sent.