GoKawiilIBM's Harvest Ran the NSA's Cold War Code-Breaking for 14 Years
IBM built a top-secret cryptographic computer called Harvest for the National Security Agency, which operated from the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 until the mid-1970s. The machine processed data up to 200 times faster than other computers of its era and included the first automated tape library, robotically retrieving magnetic tape cassettes on demand. IBM also created a custom programming language, Alpha, so analysts could describe cryptographic problems the way Fortran was used for scientific computation.