IBM Built the Cold War’s Most Powerful Code Breaker for the NSA
Workers install Harvest (IBM 7950) at the NSA's headquarters. The two consoles configured settings on both Stretch, the system's general-purpose mainframe, and Harvest's streaming coprocessor, designed for high-speed analysis of intercepts, ciphers, and codes. At the height of the Cold War, one very specialized computer was so secret that the…
bubmagAugust 25, 2026