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  • Hacker News
  • What happened to IBM?
    by zkmon
  • 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
    by spogbiper
  • Cold War era computing is fascinating. The scale they achieved with 1960s technology is impressive.
    by Kvarnek
  • Wow... so many blinkenlights! Love it.

    "IBM's Fred Brooks Jr. (..)"

    Yes, that guy from "The Mythical Man-Month" fame.

    by RetroTechie
  • Has anything ever been written up about the chips that the was (is) NSA fabbing?
    by tiahura
  • Every 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.)
    by anonymousiam
  • 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?
    by xhkkffbf
  • 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/

    by nxobject

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