Per Sandstrom posted the following interesting little piece on the Rescue list (slightly edited for readability):
I'm not sure how interesting this ancient DES chips business is for most people on the list, but here's a follow-up. Patient readers will be rewarded with a subversive Easter Egg from 1985.
Walter Belgers wrote:
"The Sun 3/xx and Sun 3/xxx can have a hardware DES encryption/decryption chip. For Sun 3/50 and Sun 3/60, only the chip is needed. For the Sun 3/xxx more logic ICs are needed. [...] It is highly likely that Sun never sold the DES chip as an option (but you can buy one yourself and put it in your box)."
I had a look in the SunOS 4.0 man page for des(4s) and found something interesting. Apparently the Sun-2 could also be equipped with a DES chip. It says:
CONFIG - SUN-2 SYSTEM des0 at virtual ? csr 0xee1800The DES chip that AMD produced, AmZ8068 (also known as Am9518), was validated by NIST already in 1981, so a Sun-2 implementation would make sense.
The suspicion that it was never sold seems to be confirmed by the following quote from a paper written by Peter Danzig and Steve Melvin back in 1991 ("Microsecond Resolution Timing with Sun Workstations", available at http://catarina.usc.edu/danzig/usec_tmr.ps.Z):
"The hardware of Sun 3 and 4 workstations supports a data encryption chip (DES) but the federal government pressured Sun to eliminate the DES chips from their products. For this reason the DES chip's IC socket is empty in these workstations."
Now being curious, I went to the Sun 2 Multibus Rev R ROM that Matt Fredette has posted on his Sun-2/120 emulator page (http://theory.lcs.mit.edu/~fredette/tme/sun2-120-nbsd.html):
% strings sun2-multi-rev-R.bin
[...]
@(#)version.c 2.8 85/02/19 Copyright (c) 1985 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Rev R
[...]
, DES chip
Love your country, but never trust its government.
[...]
Note the emphasized line......
