IBM’s Harvest: the NSA’s Cold War streaming code-breaker
IBM built a custom streaming coprocessor, Harvest (IBM 7950), paired with a Stretch mainframe and an automated tape library called Tractor to process intercepted data for the NSA from 1962 until its retirement in 1976. Harvest ran specialized streaming algorithms and a bespoke language, Alpha, achieving orders-of-magnitude text-processing throughput and pioneering pipelined and robotic storage techniques.