Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War

zkmon

What happened to IBM?

ablation

That one job was to process "sensitive" intelligence intercepts and break codes, if you're not grabbed by the clickbait headline. It's a good read.

nxobject

As the article belatedly mentions, the ~40 GB automated tape library for HARVEST was the bee's knees... and possibly the inspiration for "harvest now, encrypt later". PS – Primary sources for the IBM 7950/HARVEST on Bitsavers, excellent as always: https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/7950/

Kvarnek

Cold War era computing is fascinating. The scale they achieved with 1960s technology is impressive.

tiahura

Has anything ever been written up about the chips that the was (is) NSA fabbing?

xhkkffbf

One of the big features of the Harvest was the so called POPCOUNT which was supposedly added the machine at the NSA's request. (This is the number of bits in a word that are on.) I've always wondered how this might be used. Some suggest computing the Hamming distance. Others suggest some kind of statistical test like chi-squared. But are there other more algebraic solutions that can benefit from it?

spogbiper

sometimes I wish I was born a few decades earlier. it would have been fun to work on things like this when they were new