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