An Electro-mechanical Display Element from 1969

Fran Blanche found one of these things in a room somewhere at U-Penn. She explains how it works at 16 minutes.


You could use these ideas to create a display which could only decode a message if two parties brought their cypher-text together at the same place and the same time. So maybe when the NSA saw this thing they took it off the market? Sounds possible. According to Roger Schell the US Government once banned the sale of hardware random number generators, forcing some security equipment vendors to supply dice with their hardware.

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