IBM 7030 Stretch

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_7030_Stretch

by slater • 7 years ago

59 24 7 years ago

en.wikipedia.org

olliej2• 7 years ago

Oh neat, it was 64bit!

I wonder if anyone has made an emulator for it yet?

shakna• 7 years ago

There's some tools and documentation gathered at [0] which would help, but last I heard they hadn't managed to get a hold of the 7030, but the 7090 shares a few hardware characteristics.

Apparently it isn't an easy system to emulate.

[0] http://members.optushome.com.au/intaemul/INDEX.HTM

forinti• 7 years ago

It seems wasteful to me since it only had 2MB of RAM. It does say that instructions could be 32 or 64 bits long, but I would guess having 16 or 32 bit instructions would let you pack more instructions into memory.

olliej2• 7 years ago

Well 2mbit of ram was (at the time) a huge amount of ram.

But I suspect it was so much “we want to address petabytes of ram” but rather “we are doing numerics that require 64 bits of accuracy”

jacquesm3• 7 years ago

That's not 'only' that's absolutely mind warping huge for the time when it was made. The physical dimensions of that memory were such that you could see the individual bits as tiny little ferrite cores.

rusteh1• 7 years ago

  Weight: 70,000 pounds (35 short tons; 32 t)
  Power: 100 kW[1] @ 110 V

Incredible!

agumonkey• 7 years ago

Consider an esp32 is probably faster in low power mode

Nr7• 7 years ago

"PC World magazine named Stretch one of the biggest project management failures in IT history." It would be interesting to know more about this. The Wikipedia article doesn't really go into any detail and neither does the source article.

For example, there's a comment about having to lower the clock speeds but it doesn't say why this decision had to be made.

TheOtherHobbes• 7 years ago

The germanium transistors used in Stretch simply weren't fast enough to meet the paper spec. The architecture couldn't do much to work around this.

Cray at CDC used the newer and faster silicon transistors in the 6600. So did IBM's later System/360.

In fact Cray funded the development of the fast silicon transistors at Fairchild with a $500k contract.

https://www.computerhistory.org/siliconengine/silicon-transi...

IBM made the classic corporate mistake - sales over-promised and then told engineering to build something that couldn't be built. So Stretch became an involuntary R&D project instead of a commercial product.

Taniwha• 7 years ago

Famously the first (only?) computer that was repaired with an oil change:

"Of course, Stretch came originally with an oil-cooled core memory system.

Jack Worlton of the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) recalls a problem experienced during the acceptance test phase, when there was a transient memory error in the cores. The engineers worked for days to remedy the error but were unable to figure out what was going wrong. They finally hit upon the problem. As Worlton explains it, there was a piece of solder loose in the oil bath, and because the oil was constantly in circulation the solder would move and attach itself onto a core and cause an error. Then it would move and lodge onto a different core and cause an error there.

It was the only error I know of that was corrected in a machine by giving it an oil change, Worlton quips."

from : http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/acl/literature/reports/p...

notacoward3• 7 years ago

My wife's parents met while working on system software for Stretch. From the stories they've told it sounds like it was quite a beast even by the standards of its day. IIRC, the I/O processor was incapable of running independently, so programmers had to add special instructions in the middle of their own code to give it cycles. Ick.

jacquesm3• 7 years ago

That's a cooperative synchronous bus, something quite common at the time. It's a bit like a 'yield' instruction in a cooperative multitasking environment.

notacoward3• 7 years ago

It's a bit more than that. There's usually quite a bit of flexibility in when to yield, and the consequences might not be that bad. These instructions had to be issued in a very timely way, lest the whole system would come crashing down. Was it unique in that regard? Perhaps not, though "common" is a bit misleading when the computing landscape at the time was so small and fragmented. The difference is that other architectures might have shared one or two misfeatures with Stretch out of unfortunate necessity, but the Stretch designers seemed determined to collect the entire set and then expand on it. I'd guess that, like some projects I've been on, it was a case of one powerful or well connected group of people pushing as much complexity as possible onto another. So it's probably related to the "project management failure" sub-thread.

oofoe• 7 years ago

STRETCH also makes an appearance in one of the classic Alfred Bester (the writer, not the telepath) short stories: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Something_Up_There_Likes_Me

Well worth a read if you can find it -- the Wikipedia summary is rather spoiler-y and doesn't capture the charm of the story. Mr. Bester worked in broadcast television at the time he wrote it and there is some amusing commentary about ad trends of the day.

crispyambulance• 7 years ago

Speaking of bad-ass computers, the 7030 was surpassed in speed in 1964 by the CDC-6600, designed by Seymour Cray.

It had incredibly cool-looking DUAL circular displays and a minimalist console keyboard built into the table...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CDC_6600#/media/File:CDC_6600....

jacquesm3• 7 years ago

Control Data, or it will control you. Beautiful machine, impressive plumbing in the right hand side cabinet as well.

watersb• 7 years ago

Friend of mine was sysop on the CDC-6600 at University of Texas in Austin.

He has some good stories. Says he learned how to create operating systems by hours of watching the data flow on those tubes.

ncmncm3• 7 years ago

I programmed one of those in Wirth Pascal, as a freshman at Oregon State University in 1979. Then they retired it, installing a Honeywell running Multics. Then, they replaced that with a Vax 750. It was a step down in awesomeness each time.

The most popular parts of the 6600, as souvenirs, were the smoked-glass cabinet doors.

equalunique• 7 years ago

The creation of this machine is referenced in a book that's often cited here - The Mythical Man-Month - just finished reading it today. It's quite insightful for a book that's draws upon experiences from software projects as far back as the 1950s.

cptnapalm• 7 years ago

The next chapter from where I am in IBM's Early Computers is on the Strech project meaning that I could be wealth of information if I read faster.

russellbeattie• 7 years ago

I was just reading "A History of Pi" which mentions this computer and its successor:

"π was computed to 250,000 decimal places on an IBM 7030 at the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique in Paris in February 1966, and a year later, in February 1967, a CDC 6600 was programmed by J. Gilloud and J. Filliatre, at the same institution, to yield 500,000 decimal places. The program was again based on Störmer’s formula (2) and the Shanks-Wrench method for checking the digits; the running time was 28 hours and 10 minutes (of which 1 hour and 35 minutes were used for conversion), and an additional 16 hours and 35 minutes were needed for the check. These quarter- and half-million digit values of π were published in reports of the Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique in Paris."

ncmncm3• 7 years ago

Stretch and the 6600 both had popcount instructions that x86 finally got in SSSE3, only ten years ago.

This is sometimes interpreted as indicating NSA interest in the machine.

IBM 7030 Stretch

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