TRS-80 With A Keccak Sponge Cake

The subject of this paper, an improbable implementation of a recently standardized cryptographic hash function on a thirty-five-yearold microcomputer, may strike some as unusual and recreative at best. In the tedious discipline of the process, however, lessons were learned in implementation trade-offs for basic cryptographic primitives which may prove interesting in the current context of securing (small to nano) machine to machine communications. More importantly, that such insights might stem out of revisiting how earlier computing platforms relate to the code written on them to cast a distant light on modern connections of code to material, historical and contextual factors certainly illuminates the joys of retrocomputing.