Sun-3's had an empty socket for DES chips (AmZ8068 Data Ciphering Processor (DCP) from AMD) that were never widely used outside of NSA, for export control reasons.

Ironically enough, John Gilmore build the EFF "Deep Crack" DES cracker in Sun 4/470 chassis. I coined the name as homage to Deep Blue and Deep Thought, and to signify that there was a deep crack in the US export control policies, which the project was meant to point out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EFF_DES_cracker

https://cryptome.org/jya/des-cracker.htm

https://web.archive.org/web/20040223021545/http://www.eff.or...

https://rescue.sunhelp.narkive.com/ErZgSQER/sun-des-chips

>"Bug Id: 1107024 Synopsis: man page for des(1) contains humorous but inflamatory text in RESTRICTIONS. Description: The man page for des(1) contains the following text in section RESTRICTIONS

>Software encryption is disabled for programs shipped outside of the U.S. The program will still be able to encrypt files if one can obtain an encryption chip, legally or otherwise.

>While this is intended to be funny, the concern is that the State or Defence departments may interpret this as an endorsement (or encouragement) by Sun for users to illegally "obtain an encryption chip". [...]

>"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
    <snip>
    @(#)version.c 2.8 85/02/19 Copyright (c) 1985 by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
    Rev R
    <snip>
    , DES chip
    Love your country, but never trust its government.
    <snip>

>I doubt the line "Love your country, but never trust its government." is intended to be spit out on the console. It appears someone at Sun added a subliminal protest against the government to the Sun-2 BootROM code...!

The actual story behind the string "Love your country, but never trust its government." in the Sun boot ROMs is that John Gilmore (who wrote the original Sun boot ROMs -- the first ones long before Mitch Bradley's FORTH Open Boot ROMs aka OpenFirmware) put that in there as an easter egg, such that if you typed it at the boot loader prompt, it would echo it back to you instead of printing an error message. That was done so that there was a way to prove if a competitor had copied Sun's boot ROMs, and it was actually used in court to win a copyright infringement case.