American Cryptology during the Cold War - The Black Vault

the IBM Selective Sequence Calculator, and MIT to see its Differential Analyzer. He
attended a lecture series at the National Bureau of Standards (NBS) which concentrated
on Univac products (Univac had been formed in 1946 by Mauchly and Eckert), Raytheon
computers, and the Ace Computer (one of the earliest British entries into the commercial
computer field). Snyder suggested that ASA team up with NBS, which already had some
expertise in the field, and he proposed that ASA form a committee to guide the effort. 13
ASA decided to go ahead with development of a general-purpose analytic computer
called ABNER. Working through NBS, ASA arranged for subcontracts on mercury delay
memory anq for magnetic tape drives from Technitrol and Raytheon, respectively. Snyder
contended that ABNER I, which was released for use in 1952, was the first machine that
placed primary emphasis on nonarithmetic operations. Although it played a role in the
development of later computers for cryptologic applications, one expert in in the field
called Abner "barely functionaL" This was an appellation that could have applied to many
ofthe early experiments in machine-age cryptology.14
The early cryptologic computers were troglodytic. They were physically programmed
in binary instructions input via paper tape. They used octal numbers and words twentyfour
bits long. There was no "computer language" as such. Memories were tiny by today's
standards - the drum memory for ATLAS, for instance, held only 16,000 words. There being
no more advanced technology available, vacuum tubes were used for relays, despite the
obvious disadvantages this created in terms of heat buildup and tube replacement. Early
computers were usually "down" more often than they were "up." When they were "up,"
though, they provided answers faster than anything imaginable.15
Vacuum tubes were on the way out, to be replaced by transistors, developed at Bell
Labs in the 1940s by future Nobel prizewinner William Shockley and others. NSA
scientists were among the first to apply the new transistor technology to computers, and in
the mid-1950s it developed an in-house computer called SOLO, the world's first computer to
be entirely transistorized. SOLO was subsequently marketed commercially by the
contractor, Philco, as the Transac S-1000. 16
Other innovations were on the way. In the mid-1950s NSA began making the
transition from centralized computer operations to remote job access systems. The first
remotejob access computer, ROGUE (for Remotely Operated General Use Equipment), used
hardware called Alwac HIE developed by a small firm called Logistics Research,
Incorporated. ROGUE had three remote terminalsconnected to a small central processor. 17
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