Re: Rander box and other stuff

[George A. Gleason <gg@well.sf.ca.us>]

Eric (Hollander; my last post was to Eric Hughes)-

Your "small laptop with (goodies)" was EXACTLY what we were trying to go for
in 1983/84.  This was the "Cryptex CS-3" project.  Remember that there was
no such thing as a laptop at the time.  What I was proposing was a
self-contained portable encryption terminal.  It would have measured about a
foot wide by 10" long by about 2-3" thick, had an LCD for about six to eight
lines of text at a time, two 3-1/2" FDDs, a pair of sockets for "Codepacks"
(hardware key storage devices which would have been tamper-resistant and
password protected), a good quality keyboard, a modem with modular jack and
optional acoustic couplers (for payphones: low-tech anonymity)... the
Tempest feature would have been achieved by putting 100dB of white noise on
the metal housing, which would have been imperfect but decent enough.  There
was no plan for a hard drive; the operating software would have been a
simple line editor and the crypto routines, all burned into ROM and part of
the main processor board.  No plans for thermite linings at the time either,
though we did have a password routine with a duress option, which would have
erased anything on the FDDs or the Codepacks.  

My first intended market for this thing was the political dissident
community, where communication has always suffered to a small but noticeable
degree by the "we can't talk on the phone" factor.  It never got going
because the market was too small.  Now it would seem the time has definitely
come... though whatever ultimately arises out of the cypherpunk scene will
be many many times more sophisticated and versatile.  

-gg