IBM 704

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An IBM 704 (right), with IBM 727 tape drives (left)

The IBM 704 of the 700/7000 series was the first made in small numbers mainframe , the floating-point arithmetic dominated. IBM presented the computer that Gene Amdahl helped to develop to the public in April 1954.

The IBM 704 was not compatible with its predecessor, the IBM 701 , also known as the Defense Calculator , built in 1953 , the majority of which was produced by the US Department of Defense and the military aircraft industry. The computer had an improved computer architecture , three additional index registers and core memory instead of Williams tubes . The new instruction set became the basis of the IBM 700/7000 mainframe series.

According to the manufacturer, who sold 123 systems by 1960, the IBM 704 could execute up to 40,000 commands per second. The programming languages Fortran and LISP were the first to be developed for this computer. The naming of the most primitive Lisp commands for handling lists (car, cdr) go back to the naming of the registers of the IBM 704. The letters in the word car refers to the English description " c ontents of the a ddress part of r egister" (content of the register address part) and in cdr on the English description " c ontents of the d ecrement part of r (egister" Content of the register decrement part).

In 1961, the IBM 704 was the first computer at Bell Labs that could play a song using speech synthesis. It was Harry Dacre's Daisy Bell . The idea was later adopted in Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey .

literature

  • Charles J. Bashe, Lyle R. Johnson, John H. Palmer, Emerson W. Pugh, IBM's Early Computers (MIT Press, Cambridge, 1986) ISBN 0-262-02225-7

Web links

Commons : IBM 704  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Early LISP History , Herbert Stoyan, 1994