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

nxobject•about 2 hours ago

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/

MeteorMarc•about 1 hour ago

Decrypt later, I suppose.

ablation•about 2 hours ago

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.

zkmon•about 2 hours ago

What happened to IBM?

BenoitP•about 2 hours ago

They had vertical integration and made bank. Then each layer got more complex as computing became mainstream, and IBM got out-competed on everyone of them by specialized companies. And then they sold them off. The only layer that remains is the most strategic: the customer relationship.

IBM is now just a consultancy.

noir_lord•about 1 hour ago

I think that's a little simplistic/reductive.

In some areas IBM still holds if not a technological advantage at least the first among equals position, they just aren't areas that are flashy or generally known outside of folks like us - Mainframes and related technologies for example, the IBM Z series is still a huge player there.

They are also a consultancy though.

chinathrow•about 1 hour ago

They still produce the mainframe hardware ranges though.

anonymous_sorry•36 minutes ago

> IBM is now just a consultancy.

Except that they own Red Hat

smolder•about 2 hours ago

They became NSC, no such company.

Nursie•about 2 hours ago

Sometime in the 90s they decided that becoming a services and consultancy provider was more important than being involved in large-scale commodity hardware or really anything else.

Over three decades they've exited commodity hardware (x-series and thinkpads), retreated from a lot of software stuff and generally gone as hard as they can for large-scale business contracts. They seem to keep a decent amount of cutting-edge hardware research going, Power is still broadly competitive with x86 AFAICT, but the volumes have got to be pretty low these days and I half suspect that some of it is just a "Hey look at us we're still here" play rather than actually feeding into products, because services are the profit-centre.

They're still huge and have a lot of money, and they own Redhat. But IMHO it's in a long, slow decline, and it has stepped back from the public eye and most public-facing markets.

Context - I've worked for them in a few places. Obvs my opinons are my own, especially as I've been 'out' for over a decade at this point.

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

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