I picked up an old issue of Byte magazine (before it sold out to
McGraw-Hill) from January 1979, and I'd like to quote from an article,
entitled "History of Computers: The IBM 704":
The IBM 704, announced in 1956, was almost the last vacuum tube
computer. It was rendered obsolete by the 709 in 1959, which became the
7090 in less than a year. The addition of the zero suffix to the model
number denoted the replacement of vacuum tubes by transistors and the
start of the second comptuer generation. The 704 was very definitely a
first generation machine in the tradition of the giant brains of the
1940s and 1950s. The central processing unit occupied a hige L-shaped
cabinet of about 120 cubic feet. There was not enough room in the
cabinet for the 32k 36-bit words of core storage that occupied its own
box - another 100 cubic feet at least. Today [1979] the computing power
cotained in those two steel, glass, and dark grey enamel cabinets can be
equaled by a desktop machine; in fact the latter would easily outstrip
the 704's 12 us instruction cycle. Nevertheless, the 704 was the
ultimate computer of its time.
... On the other hand, support for the hardware was much in evidence.
A customer engineer spent eight hours a day on the premises, including
an hour long daily preventive maintenance session before the normal
first shift began. The session included bringing up power, which took
15 minutes, and running diagnostics with voltages 20 percent above and
below normal in an effort to find weak vacuum tubes. The effort was
usually successful.
... The 704's input and output (I/O) units consisted of a card reader,
card punch, line printer, ten magnetic tape units, two magnetic drum
units (each composed of four 2k-word drums) and a cathode ray tube ...
What intrigued me was the following question: What (in MegaTraveller
terms) is the Model 704? You might want to think about the answer
before reading on. Another interesting question to think about is: Can
the Virus take over a Model 704 (and make it sentient, etc...)?
Finally, you might want to compare a Model 704 to a computer you are
familiar with: do you have the equivalent handy today?
^L
A quick examination of the MegaTraveller Referee's manual shows that
computer technology begins at TL-5, and (ignoring /fib) goes like this:
TL-5 : Model-0, -0/bis, -1
TL-6 : Model-1/bis
TL-7 : Model-2
TL-8 : Model-2/bis
TL-9 : Model-3
TL-A : Model-4 (and so on up)
Quickly flipping back to the TL descriptions, we find that TL-5 is the
rough equivalent to c.1930, TL-6 is about c.1950, TL-7 is c.1970, and
TL-8 is c.1990.
A naive application of this rough description would place the IBM 704 in
the late 1950's, or firmly TL-6 (making it a Model-1/bis or
thereabouts). Instead, I would argue that (since it is a vacuum-tube
machine) the IBM 704 should be classified as a Model-1. The Model-0 and
- -0/bis would then be earlier and smaller vacuum-tube machines (all
first-generation computers, though, and of the same general technology
level).
To continue this line of thought, the Model-1/bis should be about the
largest and fastest computer produced with discrete-transistor
technology (presumably sometime in the mid to late 1960's), while the
Model-2 is probably the equivalent of an early supercomputer (early
1980's: perhaps a Cray-1), and a Model-2/bis should be represented with
the most powerful supercomputers on the drawing boards today.
So, the IBM 704 can run a respectable commercial starship. Can the
virus take one over? I (personally) should think not: after all, the
Model 704 is a very limited machine: a floppy-based, 128k-RAM IBM PC is
more than the equal of the 704.
Comments, anyone?
[email removed]
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Science-Fiction Adventure
in the Far Future