IBM 7074 and then some: "Systems we love" conference

[Eric Smith]

On Wed, Jan 25, 2017 at 8:07 PM, Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> wrote:

> "Transactions of Society of Actuaries"
> 1959, Volume 11, Number 31
>

That's certainly more convincing, but it still seems to be a bit of a
mystery.

The four authors of IBM's Early Computers were all engineers and
engineering managers intimately involved with the development of the
computers in that time frame, were researchers at IBM when the book was
written, and based much of the book on material from IBM archives.  I could
imagine them getting a date wrong, but it seems pretty surprising that they
would specifically claim that the 7070 was announced far before the 7090
but shipped six months after, if that wasn't true.

IBM generally didn't consider a data processing system to have "shipped"
until it passed the field acceptance criteria, e.g., assembled on-site and
passed diagnostics. Perhaps the 7070 didn't pass acceptance testing until
April 1960?