A Cold War IBM Machine Ran NSA Work 200 Times Faster
IEEE Spectrum revisits an IBM supercomputer built for the U.S. National Security Agency during the Cold War. The machine had one narrow assignment: codebreaking. According to the feature, it processed its jobs 200 times faster than any other computer on Earth. Peter Capek’s article, published 25 August 2026, treats the system as a striking chapter in secret computing history.
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