Thank you for that bit of trivia. This looks like a fun rabbit home to spend some time going down:

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...

https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/news-features/decla...

http://web.mit.edu/STS.035/www/PDFs/flamm.pdf

I'm off to figure out what instructions were removed from Atlas II when AFSA granted approval for it to be sold commercially. (I feel like I've read about this before and they were to-do with bit population but I can't rightly recall...)

NSA: "General Canine then forcibly expressed his exasperation by exploding: 'Build me a thousand megacycle machine! I'll get the money!'" Finally, a cite for that line.

Some good came out of that, but there was a long detour into cryogenic computing. They found a way to make gigahertz components, cryotrons. The trouble was, they couldn't make them small, or cheap, or integrated. So it was a dead end. What's come out of NSA over the years indicates that a full cyrotron computer was never built, but some "analytic tools", probably key-testers of some sort, were made. (The WWII Bombe and Colossus machines were key-testers, like Bitcoin miners, not general purpose computers.)

This is too cool. Thank you so much for that rabbit hole! I had no idea there was ever such a development program. Some simple searches on "cryotron computing" are returning some really promising-looking articles.

Don't forget https://www.amazon.com/Cryotron-Files-Computer-Scientist-Mic...

The rabbit hole is deeper. That's a really compelling-lookin book. I'm going to get my hands on it. Thanks for the recommendation.

Not the DoD buy side. The UNIVAC sell side. After the war, Groves became a VP at Remington Rand / Sperry Rand / Sperry Univac.