Forget that Utah Data Center - this is were it actually happened: the #NSA's Tordella Supercomputer Building (TSCB), built in 1996 just outside Fort Meade, Maryland:
The Tordella Supercomputer Building is somewhat hidden in the woods, north of the well-known #NSA-headquarters buildings:
Before 1996, the NSA's supercomputers were in the basement of the large flat OPS-1 building, which is from 1957 and was clearly not suited anymore:
In 2017, the #NSA opened its High Performance Computing Center-2 (HPCC2), which is named after cryptanalist Dorothy Blum (1924-1980) and is more than 4 times as big as the Tordella Supercomputer Building from 1996:
And here's were the NSA's old and the new supercomputer buildings are located:
It seems that already in 1997, Discovery Channel was allowed to film inside the NSA's Tordella Supercomputer Building, which had been finished just a year earlier:
The 1997 documentary also gives some great views of how unspectacular it looked inside the NSA, here for example the NSOC watch center:
The phones which the NSA used in those days were:
- a common Comdial ExecuTech office phone which connected to the NSA's internal National Secure Telephone System (NSTS) mainresource.com/ComdialExecute…
- an STU III secure telephone made by AT&T: cryptomuseum.com/crypto/att/110…
More about the telephone and computer equipment in the office of former NSA director Alexander can be found here: electrospaces.net/2014/02/nsa-di…
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