26 Feb
1998
26 Feb
'98
1:52 p.m.
On Thu, 26 Feb 1998, Mike Allison wrote:
My experience with these "TEMPEST" machines
is that it's usually best to
swap out all the parts (great difficulty at times) and use the AT parts
in another box. The box is heavy and, as you stated, designed to
firewall the parts from the actual physical ports. There are good parts
on them however, disk drives, scsi connectors, video cards, mother
boards, memboards, that would work nice in another box and be easier
(read that cheaper) to mail.
[...]
Cord Coslor & Deanna Wynn wrote:
>
> p.s. these computers mentioned in a previous post also have video cards
> that support both VGA and RGB monitor graphics.
Isn't the idea of TEMPEST to shield RF so nobody can snoop your data? I
would think the monitor itself would have to be an integrated part of that
contraption (which I suppose is why GRiD laptops made popular TEMPEST
machines).
I also thought that you needed a license to use TEMPEST equipment (I
suppose based on the same logic used to support the Clipper encyption
chip: the gov't wants to be able to snoop your compute sessions). If
that's the case, you should get the whole machine instead of just the
parts :-)
-- Doug