NONSTOP Crypto Query

[Tim May]

At 6:48 PM -0500 1/19/01, Harmon Seaver wrote:
>Ken Brown wrote:
>
>>  > Certainly
>>  > they aren't running Tandem stuff on planes and vehicles -- this is heavy
>>  > iron --
>>
>>  They certainly used to run IBM 370 (a lot  heavier than Tandems both in
>>  mass & power consumption!) in the air, probably to manage AWACS tape
>>  filestore (I vaguely think they may even have used UCC1). That is unless
>>  the US  & German airforce people I sometimes met on operating system
>>  training courses back in the early 1980s  were *very* good at pulling
>>  the wool over fellow-student's eyes.
>
>        Bizarre -- but then I suppose 20 years ago the 370 was fairly small
>compared to other computers.

Twenty years ago was when the "3081"/Sierra version of the 370 
architecture was out. Not a small machine compared to others. The 
3081 had those fancy thermoconduction modules with plungers 
contacting the ceramics and all. Not small at all.

I have no idea which 370 was put on a plane, but I expect more than 
one generation rode on planes.

>At any rate, I was thinking in today's terms,
>and one would hope our glorious leaders would have a bit more on the
>technical ball than to think they needed to drag mainframes around in planes,

It's fairly "tired" to deprecate "glorious leaders" by claiming that 
dragging mainframes around in planes is ipso fact a dumb idea. 
Reasons are left for you to figure out.


>eh? But then, probably they don't. So maybe John's "nonstop" is referring to
>some weird intel op use of Tandems. Who knows?
>       Come to think, my computer operator for the Tandem spent 20 years in
>the AirForce, and he seems to think the Tandem is hot stuff. Of course, he
>can't even set up his own PC, but what would you expect?  8-).


More of the same deprecation.

I was the one here who tossed out the idea, in response to John 
Young's request, that maybe a classified TEMPEST document on 
"NONSTOP" had something to do with the Tandem NonStop line.

Clearly not, based on his later transcribings of the partially-elided 
FOIAed document.


--Tim May


-- 
Timothy C. May         tcmay at got.net        Corralitos, California
Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon
Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go
Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns