Forgotten 50 year old computer remembered by IBM

The machine, which failed commercially in its day, was created 50 years ago this week, and was remembered in a retrospective at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, featuring three of the system’s pioneers: Fred Brooks, Fran Allen and Harwood Kolsky. IBM senior vice president of development and manufacturing Rod Adkins says the Stretch computer was IBM’s audacious 50s-era gamble to create a monster computer, 100 times faster than the then IBM supercomputer called the 704. However, when introduced, it was only 30 to 40 times faster than other systems. And less than 10 were built. However, the story didn’t end there. Stretch was packed with technology breakthroughs so innovative, he says, that they would not die. He cites computing aspects we take for granted today, because they’re so pervasive, such as multi-programming, pipelining, memory protection, memory interleaving and the eight-bit byte – establishing a standard size for the unit of data representing a single character. “These innovations help form the foundation of modern computing. Following the demise of Stretch, they found a home in IBM’s next big project – the super successful System/360 mainframe – and from there entered the wider world of mainstream computing,” says Adkins.