Saturday 22 May 2021

IBM 7030 Stretch (1961)

Introduced May 1961

Sometimes products are released that look like they are sure-fire successes at the time, but end up in the long run as being insignificant. Sometimes products are launched that look like failures, but end up changing the world in some way. The IBM 7030 Stretch is a little of one and a little of the other.

The 7030 was IBM’s first fully transistorised computer, and at launch it was the fastest computer in the world. Projected to be priced at an eye-watering $13.5 million dollars in 1961 money (about ten times that today), this was a serious computer for serious organisations – coming in at 32 metric tons and consuming 100kW of power.

Transistor technology had been developing at a rapid rate by the start of the 1960s and IBM proposed using diffusion transistors for the new design. This was a risk move for the typically risk-averse IBM, but competition with companies such as UNIVAC was heating up. The initial goals for the 7030 was impressive – a 64-bit system capable of a processing capacity of 10 MIPs. When the technical complexities of the project began to dawn, this was dropped to 4 MIPS. When the 7030 was launched, it actually shipped with 1.2 MIPS. 

IBM 7030 Stretch
IBM 7030 Stretch

The system performance was a disappointment – even though it turned out that the 7030 was the fastest computer in the world. IBM cancelled new orders and halved the price for those who had already ordered it. In IBM’s eyes, the 7030 was a failure. Just 9 units were sold – including one secret version known as “Harvest”. There were significant internal recriminations at IBM, with plenty of finger-pointing going round and people anxious to assign blame.

But the 7030 was more of a technological success than was realised, and the innovations in hardware and software found their way into other IBM products, especially the successful IBM System/360 series which found their way into corporations everywhere. And although many of the technologies in the 7030 were soon obsolete, they all provided an important stepping-stone in the development of 1960s computing.

IBM 7030 Stretch

Two key figures in the 7030 Stretch were Gene Amdahl, a legendary designer of powerful early mainframes and Frederick Brooks who went on to write the seminal software engineering tome “The Mythical Man Month”. This book attempted to learn from the mistakes in the project management of Stretch and other projects, significantly the idea that adding more people to a late software project will only make it later. Despite being in print for more than 40 years, corporations continue to make the same mistakes that IBM did in the early 1960s.

Image credits: Don DeBold via Flickr - CC BY 2.0
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