IBM 704 Scientific Computer

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100 pointswlj4 comments

I've always loved hearing about our heritage as an industry. This article reminded me of when I made a pilgrimage to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and saw a replica (working!) Babbage Engine amongst a bunch of ancient and obsoleted hardware. It's fascinating to see the progress we've made in only a few decades!

Can that rate of progress be sustained or is this a 'path dependence' sort of thing where niches get filled early on? I have no idea but would appreciate views

I'd imagine it would be sustained. Every year more and more money is poured into technology R&D as it becomes increasingly important. This helps match the difficulty of further development. Far in the future this may be an issue, but I doubt it will be an issue within the next decade.

PDF facsimiles of some original manuals are here: http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/704/

In addition to the manual for the computer itself, describing the assembly language and so forth, these include documentation for the earliest versions of Fortran.

Bitsavers has a lot of neat stuff on all sorts of old computers, including other old IBM systems, the B5500, (recently mentioned here) and a whole lot of old DEC equipment.

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