On the NSA’s Supercomputer from the 1960s
Really interesting story about Harvest, a specialized code breaking computer built in the 1960s by IBM for the NSA.
Entries Tagged "history of computing"
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Adm. Grace Hopper’s 1982 NSA Lecture Has Been Published
The “long lost lecture” by Adm. Grace Hopper has been published by the NSA. (Note that there are two parts.)
It’s a wonderful talk: funny, engaging, wise, prescient. Remember that talk was given in 1982, less than a year before the ARPANET switched to TCP/IP and the internet went operational. She was a remarkable person.
Listening to it, and thinking about the audience of NSA engineers, I wonder how much of what she’s talking about as the future of computing—miniaturization, parallelization—was being done in the present and in secret.
Spaf on the Morris Worm
Gene Spafford wrote an essay reflecting on the Morris Worm of 1988—thirty-five years ago. His lessons from then are still applicable today.
The Story of Colossus
Nice video of a talk by Chris Shore on the history of Colossus.
ILOVEYOU Virus
It’s the twentieth anniversary of the ILOVEYOU virus, and here are three interesting articles about it and its effects on software design.
Cracking the Passwords of Early Internet Pioneers
Lots of them weren’t very good:
BSD co-inventor Dennis Ritchie, for instance, used “dmac” (his middle name was MacAlistair); Stephen R. Bourne, creator of the Bourne shell command line interpreter, chose “bourne”; Eric Schmidt, an early developer of Unix software and now the executive chairman of Google parent company Alphabet, relied on “wendy!!!” (the name of his wife); and Stuart Feldman, author of Unix automation tool make and the first Fortran compiler, used “axolotl” (the name of a Mexican salamander).
Weakest of all was the password for Unix contributor Brian W. Kernighan: “/.,/.,” representing a three-character string repeated twice using adjacent keys on a QWERTY keyboard. (None of the passwords included the quotation marks.)
I don’t remember any of my early passwords, but they probably weren’t much better.
The Women of Bletchley Park
Really good article about the women who worked at Bletchley Park during World War II, breaking German Enigma-encrypted messages.
EDITED TO ADD (7/13): There’s also a book: The Debs of Blechley Park and Other Stories, by Michael Smith.
Hacking in the Movies
New Atlas has a great three-part feature on the history of hacking as portrayed in films, including video clips. The 1980s. The 1990s. The 2000s.
25th Anniversary of the Landmark Unix Security Book
Gene Spafford writes about the history of Practical Unix Security.
A 1962 Speculative Essay on Computers and Intelligence
From the CIA archives: Orrin Clotworthy, “Some Far-out Thoughts on Computers,” Studies in Intelligence v. 6 (1962).
EDITED TO ADD (4/12): A transcript of the original, scanned article.
Sidebar photo of Bruce Schneier by Joe MacInnis.