【文章标题】：Harvest (IBM 7950): Supercomputer for cryptanalysis at the NSA in the Cold War 【文章标题】：Harvest (IBM 7950)：冷战时期美国国家安全局密码分析超级计算机
【文章正文】： 【文章正文】：
IBM Built the Cold War’s Most Powerful Code Breaker for the NSA IBM为美国国家安全局打造了冷战时期最强大的密码破译机
It ran its jobs 200 times as fast as any other computer on Earth 其运算速度是当时地球上任何其他计算机的200倍
At the height of the Cold War, one very specialized computer was so secret that the world didn’t know it existed. It ran its jobs up to 200 times as fast as any other computer of its time. It was the U.S. National Security Agency’s main cryptographic processor in operation from the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 through the Vietnam War and on past the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The machine stopped running only when its moving parts finally gave out. 在冷战高峰期，一台极其专业的计算机机密到世人根本不知其存在。它的运算速度高达同时代任何其他计算机的200倍。作为美国国家安全局的主要密码处理器，它从1962年古巴导弹危机时期开始投入运行，历经越南战争，一直服役到1975年《赫尔辛基协议》签署之后。直到其机械运动部件最终彻底报废，这台机器才停止运转。
The Harvest computer mattered because of what it was as well as when it ran. For 14 years, it was the engine processing the NSA’s most sensitive intercepts at a time when signals intelligence was as close to a strategic weapon as anything short of a warhead. Harvest计算机之所以重要，不仅在于其运行时代，更在于其自身特质。在长达14年的时间里，它一直是处理国家安全局最敏感拦截信息的引擎，而那个时代的信号情报几乎是仅次于核弹头的战略武器。
Designed and built by IBM for the NSA, Harvest was one of the first machines designed to apply operations to enormous datasets rushing past, a precursor to the computers today that manage continuous video streams and security systems in real time. It was also one of the first machines built as an add-on—a specialized helper intended to do one job exceptionally well, bolted onto a general computer. Harvest’s modular design is like a 1960s version of today’s graphics chips that CPUs use to run intensive video-game and AI processing loads. Harvest由IBM为美国国家安全局设计并制造，是最早一批专为处理海量流数据而设计的机器之一，堪称当今实时管理连续视频流和安全系统的计算机的先驱。它也是最早作为附加组件构建的机器之一——作为一个专用辅助模块，旨在极其出色地完成单一任务，并加装在通用计算机上。Harvest的模块化设计就像是20世纪60年代版本的现代图形芯片，如今CPU正是利用这些芯片来运行高负载的视频游戏和AI处理任务。
All that raw processing power meant that Harvest also needed nonstop rivers of data to run on. And that led to another pioneering achievement: the world’s first automated tape library that could robotically fetch any one of hundreds of large cassettes of magnetic tape from the machine’s racks. 如此强大的原始处理能力意味着Harvest还需要源源不断的数据流来维持运转。这促成了另一项开创性成就：世界上第一个自动化磁带库，能够通过机械臂从机器机架上的数百个大磁带盒中自动抓取任意一盘。
Given Harvest’s unprecedented processing and storage capacity, the machine’s designers naturally needed to rethink how their system handled information. So IBM wrote a customized programming language called Alpha to let code breakers rigorously describe cryptographic problems, just as scientists at the time were using the emerging language Fortran to describe equations and data-processing algorithms. 鉴于Harvest拥有前所未有的处理和存储能力，其设计者自然需要重新思考系统处理信息的方式。因此，IBM编写了一种名为Alpha的定制编程语言，让密码破译人员能够严谨地描述密码问题，就像当时的科学家使用新兴的Fortran语言来描述方程和数据处理算法一样。
In Fort Meade, Md., an NSA data center hosted one of the world’s fastest computers of its time—although not often discussed, because of its sensitive, high-security code breaking and cipher hunting work. National Cryptologic Museum 在马里兰州米德堡，美国国家安全局的一个数据中心托管了当时世界上最快的计算机之一——尽管由于其涉及敏感、高安全级别的密码破译和密码搜寻工作而鲜被提及。国家密码博物馆
The story of Harvest, pieced together from declassified documents and contemporary manuals and technical overviews, provides a new and unexpected vista on the history of computing. It also offers a case study in how national security needs, especially during the Cold War, pushed computer technology beyond the far reaches of what unclassified, civilian computing could achieve. Harvest’s distinctive history reveals a visionary algorithmic, coding, memory, and hardware architecture occasionally decades ahead of its time. But this machine was also built only once, for one singular purpose, and then ultimately quietly retired. Harvest的故事由解密文件、同时代的手册和技术概述拼凑而成，为计算机历史提供了一个全新且出人意料的视角。它也为国家安全需求（尤其是在冷战期间）如何推动计算机技术超越非机密民用计算所能达到的极限提供了一个案例研究。Harvest独特的历史揭示了一种极具前瞻性的算法、编码、内存和硬件架构，有时甚至领先时代数十年。但这台机器也仅制造过一次，只为一个单一目的而生，最终悄然退役。
The Heart of NSA’s Secret Machine 国家安全局机密机器的核心
IBM’s landmark 1960 transistorized mainframe, the IBM 7030, better known as Stretch, provided the front end for Harvest (which was officially known as the IBM 7950). IBM delivered Stretch to eight or nine customers, mostly scientific research labs, from 1961 through ’63. Designed and prototyped throughout the second half of the 1950s, Stretch introduced the now standard notion of an 8-bit byte. For its first three years of operation, Stretch was the non-classified world’s fastest computer, although it failed to meet IBM’s aggressive goal of running 100 times as fast as Stretch’s predecessor, the IBM 704. While IBM engineers in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., were designing and building Stretch, the company was also quietly discussing a new system that would be built for NSA. IBM具有里程碑意义的1960年晶体管大型机IBM 7030（更广为人知的名字是Stretch）为Harvest（官方名称为IBM 7950）提供了前端。1961年至1963年间，IBM向八九个客户交付了Stretch，这些客户主要是科学研究实验室。Stretch在20世纪50年代下半叶完成设计和原型制作，引入了如今已成为标准的8位字节概念。在投入运行的头三年里，Stretch是非机密领域世界上最快的计算机，尽管它未能实现IBM设定的激进目标，即运行速度达到其前身IBM 704的100倍。当纽约州波基普西的IBM工程师设计和制造Stretch时，公司也在悄然讨论为国家安全局构建一个新系统。
At the time, NSA’s existing cryptanalytic computers—large, batch-processing machines that required human operators to manually stage each tape run—were struggling to keep pace with the sheer volume of intercepted message traffic coming in from around the globe. What the agency needed was a machine that could process an unbroken river of incoming data, automatically, around the clock. That requirement alone profoundly shaped Harvest’s design. 当时，国家安全局现有的密码分析计算机——需要人工操作员手动准备每次磁带运行的大型批处理机器——正难以跟上海量全球拦截信息的处理需求。该局需要的是一台能够全天候自动处理源源不断输入数据的机器。仅这一需求就深刻塑造了Harvest的设计。
IBM’s Harvest system, custom-built for the NSA for code breaking, paired the IBM 7030 Stretch mainframe with a bespoke data-stream processor. Stretch handled ordinary computing and input/output, including the Tractor automated tape library. Both units shared two kinds of memory: a large main bank and a smaller, faster bank. When Stretch switched to streaming mode, Harvest drew two streams of data, P and Q, from memory, processed them in parallel, and returned the results as a third stream, called R. Chris Philpot IBM为国家安全局定制的密码破译系统Harvest，将IBM 7030 Stretch大型机与定制的数据流处理器结合在一起。Stretch负责常规计算和输入/输出，包括Tractor自动化磁带库。两个单元共享两种内存：一个大型主存储体和一个更小、更快的存储体。当Stretch切换到流模式时，Harvest从内存中提取两股数据流P和Q，进行并行处理，并将结果作为第三股数据流R返回。克里斯·菲尔波特
After two failed proposals to NSA, in 1958 IBM finally landed the contract: a Stretch-based machine, augmented by a custom coprocessor, with a revolutionary tape-based storage syst 在向国家安全局提交两次失败的提案后，IBM终于在1958年拿下了合同：一台基于Stretch的机器，配备定制协处理器，并采用革命性的基于磁带的存储系统