The Secret Cold War IBM Supercomputer Built for One Job

Secret Cold War IBM Supercomputer Was Built for One Job

During the Cold War, the NSA operated a top-secret IBM supercomputer called Harvest, which ran 200 times faster than any contemporary machine. Designed with a streaming coprocessor and the world's first automated tape library, it processed intercepted communications for 14 years, from the Cuban Missile Crisis through the Vietnam War. The machine's custom programming language, Alpha, and its modular architecture foreshadowed modern GPUs and real-time data processing.