Has anything ever been written up about the chips that the was (is) NSA fabbing?
Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
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Re: Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
#22Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not much is left of the great IBM, but their Z architecture is still superior when it comes to reliability at scale. In fact, "what happened to IBM?", they were in the news recently: https://wccftech.com/ibm-worlds-first-dual-architecture-proc... Creating the world's first dual instruction set CPU.
> Creating the world's first dual instruction set CPU. World's first? What about the VIA C3 (or earlier NEC V20)? I'm sure there are more / earlier ones. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternate_Instruction_Set
There was also the semi-mythical PowerPC 615 that was meant to have both PowerPC and x86 instruction sets. W
Re: Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
#23One 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?
Re: Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
#24sometimes I wish I was born a few decades earlier. it would have been fun to work on things like this when they were new
Re: Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
#25That 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.
What's clickbaity about it? Breaking codes and using that to process intercepts (or other encrypted text) is the definition of cryptanalysis.
Re: Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
#26Wow... so many blinkenlights! Love it.
"IBM's Fred Brooks Jr. (..)"
Yes, that guy from "The Mythical Man-Month" fame.
Re: Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War
#27Every time I read an article like this, I get depressed about all the hours of my life I've spent waiting for computers. I'm 64 now, and I've been using computers since I was 14. (Batch mode, using punched cards on an IBM 370 was the first computer I programmed, while I was in high school.)