25 Aug
2011
25 Aug
'11
10:21 p.m.
On Thu, 25 Aug 2011, Eric Smith wrote:
There's a sad story about the fate of the
one-of-a-kind HARVEST system (7950)
that IBM built for the NSA. Harvest coupled a 7030 with a 7951 stream
coprocessor, special two-hole-per-core high-speed core memory (7952), a 7955
"Tractor" robotic tape system, and a 7959 high-speed exchange (I/O channel
controller). When the NSA decommissioned it in 1976, they wanted to give it
to IBM for their historical collection. However, being government property,
it had to be put up for auction. IBM's historian bid $20,050 for it, more
than a year's worth of his budget, and won it. Unfortunately not too many
years later someone else at IBM decided that they didn't want to store it any
longer.
nsa did declassify some information about harvest earlier this year,
http://cryptome.org/0004/nsa-50k-docs.pdf .
But I don't think those are available in any electronic form, so someone
would probably have to pay for hardcopies.
--
Jacob Dahl Pind | telefisk.org | fidonet 2:230/38.8