2026-09-15 17:27 UTC
via Schneier on Security, great story in IEEE Spectrum about IBM's purpose-built code breaking supercomputer from the 1960s, designed for NSA https://spectrum.ieee.org/cold-war-codebreaker-nsa-ibm
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@darkuncle@infosec.exchange 2026-09-15 17:45
"Harvest was one of the first machines designed to apply operations to enormous [streaming] datasets ... one of the first machines built as an add-on—a specialized helper intended to do one job exceptionally well, bolted on to a general computer [a cryptographic coprocessor in today's parlance] ... [and it used] the world's first automated tape library that could robotically fetch any one of hundreds of cassettes of magnetic tape" and it had a customer programming language (Alpha), designed specifically for cryptanalysis.