[Cryptography] Well defined architectures, was Secure erasure

[John Levine]

>The VAX was the second mainstream machine to be built to a carefully specified, published standard.  (The
>IBM 360 was the first, by a good long margin, though actually I'm not sure when IBM first published its
>standard.

IBM Systems Journal V3N2 and V3N3 in 1964 were special issues on the new 360
architecture.  No. 2 was narrative articles, No. 3 was a detailed spec of
the architecture in APL.  If you haven't read it, it's worth digging up and
reading.  The Principles of Operation manual was published shortly thereafter.
It's quite clear about what's defined and what's undefined.

http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/360/princOps/A22-6821-0_360PrincOps.pdf

>I'm not sure anyone has followed up on this in specifications for still-living architectures.

The 360 architecture is still alive as zSeries, and the principles of
operation has ballooned to over 1000 pages, but they're still quite
careful about what's defined and what's not and what that means.  You
can still run most program binaries for a 1965 360/30 on the latest
zSeries, which is pretty amazing.

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=isg2b9de5f05a9d57819852571c500428f9a
(needs free registration, but then you can download the PDF)

R's,
John