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Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cold-war-codebreaker-nsa-ibm
27•jnord•3h ago

Comments

zkmon•1h ago
What happened to IBM?
smolder•41m ago
They became NSC, no such company.
Nursie•31m 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.

BenoitP•26m 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.

ablation•1h 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.
nxobject•57m 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:

https://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/7950/

Apple introduces M6 and M5 Ultra

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-m6-and-m5-ultra-for-a-big-leap-in-perform...
1110•interpol_p•19h ago•1061 comments

Stalking the Wily Hacker: 40 years later – Cliff Stoll [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=656058JxTM0
67•zoenolan•4d ago•19 comments

FDA authorizes first wearable device that monitors ketone and blood sugar levels

https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-authorizes-first-wearable-device-continuo...
373•sunnynagra•13h ago•185 comments

Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War

https://spectrum.ieee.org/cold-war-codebreaker-nsa-ibm
28•jnord•3h ago•6 comments

Queryable Executables

https://fzakaria.com/2026/08/24/actually-queryable-executables
150•rguiscard•7h ago•28 comments

OpenAI Jalapeño: Better than Nvidia Blackwell

https://newsletter.semianalysis.com/p/openai-jalapeno-better-than-nvidia
459•bmulholland•18h ago•293 comments

New Mac Studio with M5 Max and M5 Ultra

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-introduces-new-mac-studio-with-m5-max-and-m5-ultra/
762•interpol_p•19h ago•501 comments

Black hole singularity is a surface not a point

https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.21590
232•raattgift•15h ago•172 comments

Maiao: Gerrit-style code review workflow for GitHub, GitLab, Gitea, others

https://github.com/runetes/maiao
74•zdw•9h ago•41 comments

New Mac mini, featuring M6 and M5 Pro

https://www.apple.com/newsroom/2026/08/apple-unveils-a-more-powerful-mac-mini-featuring-the-all-n...
487•runako•18h ago•299 comments

When str.lower() is a security vulnerability in Python

https://sethmlarson.dev/when-str-lower-is-a-security-vulnerability
112•rbanffy•11h ago•46 comments

Agentic Context Management: Memory and Cost as Architecture Problems

https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.21503
47•gdad•5h ago•15 comments

More than half of adults in U.S. say they lack basic statistical understanding

https://www.psu.edu/news/research/story/more-half-adults-us-say-they-lack-basic-statistical-under...
73•giuliomagnifico•2h ago•101 comments

C2PA Cameras Do Not Survive Contact with Reality

https://www.da.vidbuchanan.co.uk/blog/android-c2pa.html
143•Retr0id•12h ago•81 comments

Nitter and XCancel receive cease and desist notices

https://github.com/zedeus/nitter/issues/1442
875•Banditoz•15h ago•718 comments

Building a backyard office, the build and cost breakdown

https://www.imkylelambert.com/articles/building-a-backyard-office-the-build-and-cost-breakdown
334•surprisetalk•17h ago•211 comments

Disrupting a new covert influence campaign from Russia

https://openai.com/index/disrupting-malicious-uses-of-ai-influence-campaign-russia/
9•sam_lowry_•40m ago•1 comments

Tooltips need a delay, and then they need to skip it

https://blog.master.dev/tooltips-need-a-delay-and-then-they-need-to-skip-it/
168•ibobev•15h ago•44 comments

Run OpenBSD on DigitalOcean for $4/month

https://nil.wallyjones.com/run-openbsd-on-digitalocean-for-4month/
160•speckx•14h ago•72 comments

Bomb fishing is wreaking havoc on Indonesia's coral reefs

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/bomb-fishing-coral-reefs
308•speckx•17h ago•160 comments

Don't Wordle

https://dontwordle.com/
346•Hbruz0•20h ago•121 comments

Show HN: TeXbrain, a LaTeX editor that runs pdfTeX in the browser via WASM

https://github.com/swimmingbrain/texbrain
89•swimmingbrain•10h ago•19 comments

Show HN: I made a Raspberry with Qwen my local car AI

https://github.com/ThinkOffApp/CarWatch
132•petruspennanen•16h ago•37 comments

Show HN: LatticeDB – Like SQLite but for graph databases

https://github.com/jeffhajewski/latticedb
149•smiths1999•15h ago•38 comments

Dolly Parton has died

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/aug/25/dolly-parton-country-singer-dead
1432•helsinkiandrew•14h ago•217 comments

How credit card rewards became a $9.2B wealth transfer

https://www.library.hbs.edu/working-knowledge/how-credit-card-rewards-became-multibillion-dollar-...
165•conbrian•20h ago•302 comments

My Friend Aaron

https://rorz.io/writing/my-friend-aaron
541•sarreph•15h ago•147 comments

A brief history of federal lift ticket regulation

https://zakpodmore.substack.com/p/a-brief-history-of-federal-lift-ticket
61•CGMthrowaway•12h ago•11 comments

Firefox 157 will include JPEG XL by default on all platforms

https://groups.google.com/a/mozilla.org/g/dev-platform/c/3YMV4MS34KA?pli=1
361•yboris•14h ago•92 comments

I miss the old Claude Code

https://alexkras.com/focus-is-the-main-feature-why-i-miss-the-old-claude-code/
13•akras14•1h ago•0 comments