NONSTOP Crypto Query

[Bill Stewart]

At 12:19 AM 1/20/01 -0500, Tim May wrote:
>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.

I don't know about mainframes, but it wouldn't surprise me,
though the cooling and power systems are a bit large.
I do know that there was a PBX on Looking Glass back in the 60s -
a friend of mine did telecom for SAC Offutt, and says that
one of the people on the plane once noticed that there were
two lines busy on the PBX, but nobody on the phone.
They tracked it down, and found that some guy in the barracks
had a 16-button Autovon phone, and had dialed the magic number
on the ground-based PBX to get forwarded up to the bird,
dialed across the PBX and back down, then dialed out on AUTOVON.
Needless to say, unlike barracks phones which couldn't call much of
anybody off-base without asking the operator to set up the call,
the PBX on Looking Glass was allowed to call anybody in the world
that it wants to, at any priority it needs, so the guy was doing
a reasonably high-priority call to his buddies in Guam.

(AUTOVON was the old DoD AUTOmatic VOice Network, which had
a 5-level priority system to make sure that important calls get through.
To some extent, the priority system was also used to allocate
expensive resources, e.g. voice calls across the Pacific 
were more likely to succeed at Priority level than Routine,
and probably wouldn't get knocked down before you finished.
The extra four Touch-Tone buttons were used to signal the
priority level, and specific phones and locations were limited
in the level of priority they could dial.  Alternatively,
if you only had a regular phone, such as most phones on base PBXs,
you could place a priority call by asking the operator to connect you.
As a friend of mine said "We were authorized to make Flash-level calls,
but only if we actually *saw* a nuclear explosion..."   That's level
4 out of 5.)

				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart at pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639