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He might have been that times IT Administrator? We've come a long way over these past 30 years, but think about it for a second, if you're an IT Administrator today handling all the office machines, you probably have the power to click 1 button to turn them all off? (Depending on the setup of course..) There's obviously more access rights involved today.

Doesn't answer "who" put the button in there, I'm just thinking out-loud! :)

The issue wasn't whether he allowed to press it; it was just way too easy to press accidentally.

Even if I have the authority to press the big red button, I'd like it to be behind glass and far from the light switch.

> if you're an IT Administrator today handling all the office machines, you probably have the power to click 1 button to turn them all off?

To err is human. To push the error to thousands of instances online at once - that's devops.

It could very well have been a minicomputer system where he was on the operator console and the other "computers" were terminals.

crontab -e crontab -r

crontab -ri