Since I brought it up, the IBM 704 was historically pretty interesting. Wikipedia says:
'Designed by John Backus and Gene Amdahl, it was the first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic...The 704 at that time was thus regarded as "pretty much the only computer that could handle complex math".'
'Landmarks
The programming languages FORTRAN[6] and LISP[7] were first developed for the 704, as was the SAP assembler—Symbolic Assembly Program, later distributed by SHARE as SHARE Assembly Program.
'MUSIC, the first computer music program, was developed on the IBM 704 by Max Mathews.
'In 1962, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr. created one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs by using an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song Daisy Bell, with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Arthur C. Clarke was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of this speech synthesis demonstration, and Clarke was so impressed that six years later he used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey,[8] where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song.[9] '
...and more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704
DougMerritt (log😅 = 💧log😄) /
npub1cq…aus7x
2025-04-29 19:26:39
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npub1cqpvfl54huyxkvdgff08u69qkj60tzhwgd3jxwfq8qs83qxzwzdq7aus7xPublished at
2025-04-29 19:26:39Event JSON
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"content": "Since I brought it up, the IBM 704 was historically pretty interesting. Wikipedia says:\n\n'Designed by John Backus and Gene Amdahl, it was the first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic...The 704 at that time was thus regarded as \"pretty much the only computer that could handle complex math\".'\n\n'Landmarks\nThe programming languages FORTRAN[6] and LISP[7] were first developed for the 704, as was the SAP assembler—Symbolic Assembly Program, later distributed by SHARE as SHARE Assembly Program.\n\n'MUSIC, the first computer music program, was developed on the IBM 704 by Max Mathews.\n\n'In 1962, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr. created one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs by using an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song Daisy Bell, with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Arthur C. Clarke was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of this speech synthesis demonstration, and Clarke was so impressed that six years later he used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey,[8] where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song.[9] '\n\n...and more.\n\nhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_704",
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