Newsletter 1: What's next?
This is the first in a series of newsletters covering this blog
I’m very glad to see that my blog has attracted multiple subscribers following my initial post on the IBM 701, introduced in 1952 and shipped in 1953.
My initial goal was to write up the related IBM 7040 and 7044 computers, the last in the IBM 700-7000 series of scientific computers.1 I’ve wanted for years to write a useful description of the IBM 7040/44, especially covering its various unusual features (such as user-mode control over memory parity, used to great effect in the WATFOR compiler for FORTRAN Ⅳ).
How best to describe the IBM 7040/44 for today’s reader? I’m starting with some extra foundational documentation for the IBM 700-7000 series.
The IBM 701 was first.
I’ll probably handle the IBM 704 computer next (with core memory, index registers, and floating-point arithmetic!), along with the IBM 709 (with data channels!).
Then, the IBM 7090 (with transistors!), 7094, and 7094 Model Ⅱ computers.
And finally, the IBM 7040/44.
I know a lot of other computers too, usually having memorized their instruction formats, opcodes, address modes, etc., in the process.
I’ve just started a quick introduction to the fascinating TX-2 computer for this blog (TX stood for Transistor, Experimental). The TX-2 was built in 1958 at M.I.T.’s Lincoln Laboratories, and I got to program it in 1973, fifteen years later.
I expect my next post or two will cover the TX-2, then I’ll return to IBM computers. After all of these, I plan to write a whole bunch more about computers and myself—and of course I can even take requests. I find all this stuff fascinating, and I hope it interests you too.
The IBM 7040 was the first computer I ever programmed, starting in 1966, and it remains my favorite (non-fictional) computer. I used an IBM 7040 for years in my early teens, and I count myself as one of a small number of IBM 7040/44 experts still alive. In the mid-1970s I found a used IBM 7044 in a surplus store, with a USD$1000 price tag; I often wish I’d bought it, even without anywhere to put it.