IBM 7030 Stretch

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IBM 7030 control panel, exhibited in the Musée des arts et métiers , Paris
IBM 7030 control panel, exhibited in the Musée des arts et métiers , Paris

The IBM 7030 , also called Stretch , is a supercomputer of the 700/7000 series from IBM . It was delivered to Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961 .

The original price offer of 13.5 million US dollars could not be kept for delivery because the projected performance was not achieved. The computer was then shipped for $ 7.78 million to those customers who had already placed an order and taken off the market. Although the 7030 was considerably slower than expected, it was still the fastest computer in the world from 1961 to 1964 .

The machine was designed with a word length of 64 bits . 16,384 words could be addressed in each memory bank; in the maximum configuration, 262,144 words (2 megabytes) were available.

The computer is difficult to compare with today's computer architecture , since binary and decimal fixed point numbers of variable length from 1 to 64 bits, even across word boundaries, could be processed, and the alphanumeric visual display was also variable in "bytes" from 1 to 8 bits wide . The width of the command words was switchable between 32 bits and 64 bits.

Since he regularly performed the calculations in 64-bit, he is the first representative of a 64-bit architecture . The smallest addressing unit of the IBM 7030 is not a machine word, but a single bit. I.e. a 24-bit address consists of an 18-bit block for addressing a word in main memory and a 6-bit block for addressing a bit in the word. This addressing scheme has not been accepted in later computer architectures due to practical disadvantages.

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