Help Identifying RAM Chips

From: William Donzelli <william_at_ans.net>
Date: Fri Nov 7 06:42:13 1997

> The MMC had the disk completely wiped and
> even the timing tracks were gone.

Standard demilling.

> That's the point. The crypto and contermeasures stuff it was not the
> parts but the general designs that had to be hid.

No, it was the parts as well. Digital signal processors have been used in
countermeasure receivers (or the front ends of the jammers) for years. I
have never seen the digital innards of Cold War jammers, but the radio and
radar parts that I have seen have been amazing - very small oil cooled
tubes capable of very high outputs over a great frequency range. For some
reason, the tubes have been declassified for some time. And yes, the tubes
were advanced beyond what an engineer could purchase from RCA or Eimac at
the time.

> Generally the loss is that we didn't get to see how Purple or Enigma
> worked.

Stuff about Purple is finally being declassified. As for Enigma, one could
just look up the German patent to get the general idea (they really are
simple machines in concept).

> The radar display system was linked to the Sage system.

There has been some debate if the SAGE system was actually the first real
computer network.

William Donzelli
william_at_ans.net
Received on Fri Nov 07 1997 - 06:42:13 GMT