💻 Technology Aug 25, 2026 · Peter Capek

IBM Built the Cold War’s Most Powerful Code Breaker for the NSA

IEEE Spectrum
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IBM Built the Cold War’s Most Powerful Code Breaker for the NSA
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At the height of the Cold War, one very specialized computer was so secret that the world didn’t know it existed. It ran its jobs up to 200 times as fast as any other computer of its time. It was the U.S. National Security Agency’s main cryptographic processor in operation from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 through the Vietnam War and on past the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The machine stopped running only when its moving parts finally gave out.The Harvest computer mattered because of

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