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nxobject 2 days 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:
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.)
RetroTechie 21 hours ago [-]
Wow... so many blinkenlights! Love it.
"IBM's Fred Brooks Jr. (..)"
Yes, that guy from "The Mythical Man-Month" fame.
Kvarnek 2 days ago [-]
Cold War era computing is fascinating. The scale they achieved with 1960s technology is impressive.
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
tiahura 2 days ago [-]
Has anything ever been written up about the chips that the was (is) NSA fabbing?
xhkkffbf 2 days ago [-]
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?
zkmon 2 days ago [-]
What happened to IBM?
BenoitP 2 days 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.
INTPenis 2 days ago [-]
Not much is left of the great IBM, but their Z architecture is still superior when it comes to reliability at scale.
There was also the semi-mythical PowerPC 615 that was meant to have both PowerPC and x86 instruction sets. W
INTPenis 2 days ago [-]
That's not the same thing, it's more like a hidden feature than the ISA of an entirely different CPU.
noir_lord 2 days 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 2 days ago [-]
They still produce the mainframe hardware ranges though.
anonymous_sorry 2 days ago [-]
> IBM is now just a consultancy.
Except that they own Red Hat
Nursie 2 days 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.
2 days ago [-]
smolder 2 days ago [-]
They became NSC, no such company.
TacticalCoder 2 days ago [-]
They royally screwed up by signing an exclusive deal with the back-then no-name Microsoft company. IBM created the 3 trillion behemoth that Microsoft is while killing themselves in the process.
It's really sad but also infuriating: had IBM not fucked up and not signed Microsoft, that mediocre company that Microsoft is would have gone nowhere and we wouldn't have to suffer their turds since decades.
P.S: in their dying breath (and I know IBM still exists), they did commit one billion dollar to Linux early on (which back then was a big deal). When we see the tens of billions of devices that now run Linux, IBM at least partially participated in Linux taking over the world. So there's that.
ablation 2 days 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.
mcswell 2 days ago [-]
What's clickbaity about it? Breaking codes and using that to process intercepts (or other encrypted text) is the definition of cryptanalysis.
PS – Primary sources for the IBM 7950/HARVEST on Bitsavers, excellent as always:
https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/7950/
"IBM's Fred Brooks Jr. (..)"
Yes, that guy from "The Mythical Man-Month" fame.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semi-Automatic_Ground_Environment
IBM is now just a consultancy.
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.
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
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.
Except that they own Red Hat
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.
It's really sad but also infuriating: had IBM not fucked up and not signed Microsoft, that mediocre company that Microsoft is would have gone nowhere and we wouldn't have to suffer their turds since decades.
P.S: in their dying breath (and I know IBM still exists), they did commit one billion dollar to Linux early on (which back then was a big deal). When we see the tens of billions of devices that now run Linux, IBM at least partially participated in Linux taking over the world. So there's that.