The Secret Cold War IBM Supercomputer Built for One Job
Secret Cold War IBM Supercomputer Was Built for One Job
During the Cold War, the NSA operated a top-secret IBM supercomputer called Harvest, which ran 200 times faster than any contemporary machine. Designed with a streaming coprocessor and the world's first automated tape library, it processed intercepted communications for 14 years, from the Cuban Missile Crisis through the Vietnam War. The machine's custom programming language, Alpha, and its modular architecture foreshadowed modern GPUs and real-time data processing.
Everything we were doing at that time was on the cutting edge. There was no question about it.
- 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:
- 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.