The very first text editor 3671

re:

i.e. the industry service that was collecting customer erep data and doing monthly published summaries ... across wide variety of customers, processors (non-clones and clones) as well as various other devices (everything you would expect to find in erep reports in a mainframe shop).

for a little crypto drift from the early to mid-80s ...

one of the monster custom hardware projects was the data aggregator ... which was a full bandwidth T3 trunk encrypter (frequently called the data aggrevator). there are stories that it was visited by MIB and told they were going to jail if they turned it on (there were some number of subsequent exchanges, and the aggrevators were finally turned on anyway) ... past posts mentioning MIB being interested in the data aggrevator.

it was mandated that all the internal network links (leaving a facility) had to be encrypted

the internal network was larger than the arpanet-internet from just about the beginning until sometime the summer of '85 and supposedly at one point, over half of all the link encryptors in the world were installed on the internal network (some folklore was that whole companies were put into business with orders for equipment for the internal network).

i was doing a project i called HSDT ... high speed data transport

... with some number of T1 and higher speed backbone trunks ... and I thot I was paying an exorbitant amount of money to a certain company (whose name started with a "C") for T1 link encryptors. My idea was to be able to do a board that could be built for less than $100, handle in the 16mbit-24mbit-sec range ... and have some other features. The people in the crypto product group initially claimed it severely compromised DES. Took three months to win the argument (instead of being weaker than standard DES, it was actually stronger than standard DES).

shortly after winning the argument, i was told that we could produce as many boards as we wanted to ... it was just that there would only be a single customer for all boards (and it wasn't going to be me).

some of this was light weight stuff compared to trying to get network connections in other parts of the world (purely between internal installations in different countries) and the links had to have mandated link encryptors (crossing national boundaries).

and a recent post that mentions encryption from the late 70s

in the early 80s, 3081 was taking about 1cpu second to do DES crypto on 150kbytes (i.e. about half of a full-duplex T1 ... aka you could saturate both processors of a 3081 just doing encryption-decryption for a full-duplex T1 link).

... i.e. following email only refers to dedicating a single 3081 processor to DES encryption-decryption of half-duplex T1

To: lovex A) 3081 can't be expected to implement software DES of a 1.5megabit data stream (i.e. 150kbytes of data per second) ... using current software unless you are willing to dedicate one of the processors solely to DES'ing the data, i.e. DES must be performed outboard of the 3081 CPU (there are DES chips available which will handle 3megabits).