> They had most of this stuff in the 1980s, and even earlier really. Not on your little 8-bit microcomputer that cost $299 that might have had as a kid

Those are the systems we are talking about though.

> but they certainly did exist on large time-sharing systems used in universities and industry and government. And those systems had only a tiny fraction of the memory that a typical x86-64 laptop has now.

Actually this systems didn’t. In the early 80s most protocols were still ASCII based. Even remote shell connections weren’t encrypted. Remember that SSH wasn’t released until 1995. Likewise for SSL.

Time sharing systems were notoriously bad for sandboxing users too. Smart pointers, while available since the 60s, weren’t popularised in C++ until the 90s. Memory overflow bugs were rife (and still are) in C-based languages.

If you were using Fortran or ALGOL, then it was a different story. But by the time the 80s came around, mainframe OSs weren’t being written in FORTRAN / ALGOL any longer. Software running on top of it might, but you’re still at the mercy of all that insecure C code running beneath it.

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shakna 3 hours ago | parent [-]

> Actually this systems didn’t. In the early 80s most protocols were still ASCII based.

DES was standardised in '77. In use, before that. SSL was not the first time the world adopted encrypted protocols.

The NSA wouldn't have weakened the standard, it was something nobody used.

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hnlmorg 3 hours ago | parent [-]

DES wasn’t common place though (or at least not on the mainframes I worked on). But maybe than says more about the places I worked early on in my career?

Also DES is trivial to crack because it has a short key length.

Longer keys require more compute power and thus the system requirements to handle encryption increase as the hardware to decrypt becomes more powerful.

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shakna 2 hours ago | parent [-]

The box size at IBM was larger before standardisation. DES is trivial to break, because of NSA involvement in weakening all the corners. [0]

> In the development of the DES, NSA convinced IBM that a reduced key size was sufficient;

Minitel used DES, and other security layers, and was in use for credit cards, hospitals, and a bunch of other places. The "French web" very nearly succeeded, and did have these things in '85. It wasn't just mainframes - France gave away Minitel terminals to the average household.

[0] https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/...

	▲	hnlmorg an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Yeah I’d written about minitel in a tech journal several years back. It’s a fascinating piece of technology but safely never got to see one in real life. I worked for one payroll mainframe in the 80s that didn’t have DES. So it wasn’t quite as ubiquitous as you might think. But it does still sound like it was vastly more widespread than I realised too.