[Cryptography] LUKS on ATA versus on SSD

[Kent Borg]

On 1/3/26 11:01 PM, Peter Gutmann via cryptography wrote:
> Probably time to post a link to Lawrence Wilkinson's heroic resuscitation of
> an IBM 360 model 30, which included designing his own 6802-based channel
> peripheral by reverse-engineering things from the circuit diagrams and
> microcode:
>
> https://www.ljw.me.uk/ibm360/Saga/
>
> The console of that machine has been preserved:
>
> https://www.cs.auckland.ac.nz/historydisplays/FourthFloor/MainFrameComputers/System360Model30.php

So the polished up console still exists, but the working machine he 
resurrected is long gone?

Hmmm.

I'm sad that it is gone, but it also sounds like it was a hellish 
collection of engineering: Impressive it was once worth designing, 
building, debugging, powering, and /servicing/…and also a good riddance. 
Reading microcode from tarnishing silver ink off of punch cards held in 
place by compressed air‽‽ The 6802 he used to emulate missing IO 
hardware is itself now a museum piece that must be decades out of 
production. (Or is it? I think a version of 555s is still in production.)

Clearly early automatic computing was so valuable that it was /worth/ 
such expensive Rube Goldberg contraptions. But look at that machine and 
extrapolate forward…and the whole thing was clearly not scalable, 
obviously there was only a limited future for the industry. But we 
didn't extrapolate that technology, thank God.

And now I look at LLMs, again rather Rube Goldberg on the inside, 
impressive in what they can do, and when one extrapolates forward, also 
not scalable. But apparently even more compelling than the then-new 
ability to run a few expensive, slow COBOL programs, as we are full 
speed ahead scaling up this new technology anyway.

Weird being so old as to see such dynamic range.

-kb

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