3 Feb
2007
3 Feb
'07
9:27 a.m.
On 2/3/07, William Donzelli <wdonzelli at gmail.com> wrote:
Even some of IBM's flops turn out to be scores.
The 7030 (AKA Stretch)
and FS (Future System, the machine to be beyond S/370) both were
short/medium term financial disasters for IBM...
There is, IIRC, a picture of a Stretch in the Time-Life book
"Mathematics". I don't have my copy close at hand, but I _think_ the
one in the photo was being used for weather modelling.
The photographer set up colored spots to highlight different portions
of the machine in different colors to match up with the descriptive
text.
I remember reading this book when I was a very small kid. The
computer pictures (and descriptions of core memory, etc.) made a very
strong impression on me. The book would have been published in the
1964-1965 timeframe (before I was born), and was therefore rather
dated when I would have read it in the early 1970s, but it was still
really neat.
I guess I can trace my fascination with old machines back to that book.
Are there any working 7030s anywhere?
-ethan