This was TRANSLTR, the single most expensive piece of computing equipment in the world—a machine the NSA swore did not exist.
This was TRANSLTR, the single most expensive piece of computing equipment in the world—a machine the NSA swore did not exist.
Like an iceberg, the machine hid 90 percent of its mass and power deep beneath the surface. Its secret was locked in a ceramic silo that went six stories straight down—a rocketlike hull surrounded by a winding maze of catwalks, cables, and hissing exhaust from the freon cooling system. The power generators at the bottom droned in a perpetual low-frequency hum that gave the acoustics in Crypto a dead, ghostlike quality.
