A 1983 review of this remarkable system for the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) attributes no fewer than eight "firsts" to SIGSALY. They are as follows:
1) The first realization of enciphered telephony
2) The first quantized speech transmission
3) The first transmission of speech by Pulse Code Modulation (PCM)
4) The first use of companded PCM
5) The first examples of multilevel Frequency Shift Keying (FSK)
6) The first useful realization of speech bandwidth compression
7) The first use of FSK - FDM (Frequency Shift Keying-Frequency Division Multiplex) as a viable transmission method over a fading medium
8) The first use of a multilevel "eye pattern" to adjust the sampling intervals (a new, and important, instrumentation technique)
From https://www.jproc.ca/crypto/sigsaly1.html
I think that the relevant patents remained classified until 1975.
A great example of a one-time pad!
There is an illustration for the encryption process in Appendix B here: https://www.nsa.gov/portals/75/documents/about/cryptologic-h...
Also, worth reading about is Turing's Delilah speech encryption system: https://spectrum.ieee.org/alan-turings-delilah
* US president
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