The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 The IBM 709 was an early computer system introduced by IBM in August, 1958. It was an improved version of the IBM 704 and the second member of the IBM 700/7000 series of scientific computers. The IBM 709 added overlapped input/output, indirect addressing, and three "convert" instructions . The 709 had 32,768 words of 36-bit memory and vacuum tube mainframe computers Mainframes are powerful computers used mainly by large organizations for critical applications, typically bulk data processing such as census, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and financial transaction processing and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The 7090 was the third member of the IBM 700/7000 series The IBM 700/7000 series was a series of large scale computer systems made by IBM through the 1950s and early 1960s. The series included several different, incompatible processor architectures. The 700s used vacuum tube logic and were made obsolete by the introduction of the transistorized 7000s. The 7000s, in turn, were eventually replaced by scientific computers. The first 7090 installation was in November 1959. In 1960, a typical system sold for $2,900,000 or could be rented for $63,500 a month.
The 7090 used a 36-bit word length, with an address-space of 32K (32,768) words. It operated with a basic memory cycle of 2.18 μs, using the IBM 7302 Core Storage core memory Magnetic core memory is an early form of random access computer memory. It uses small magnetic rings, the cores, through which wires are threaded to store information via the polarity of the magnetic field they contain. Such memory is often just called core memory, or, informally, core technology from the IBM 7030 The IBM 7030, also known as Stretch, was IBM's first transistorized supercomputer. The first one was delivered to Los Alamos in 1961 (Stretch) project.
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IBM 7094 and IBM 7040/7044
An upgraded version, the IBM 7094, was first installed in September 1962. It had seven index registers, instead of three on the earlier machines. The 7094 console had a distinctive box on top that displayed lights for the four new index registers. photos The 7094 introduced double-precision floating point and additional instructions, but was largely backward compatible In the context of telecommunications and computing a device or technology is said to be backwards or downwards compatible if it can work with input generated by an older device. If products designed for the new standard can receive, read, view or play older standards or formats, then the product is said to be backwards-compatible; examples of such with the 7090. Minor changes in instruction formats, particularly the way the additional index registers were addressed, sometimes caused problems.
In 1963, IBM introduced lower cost machines with a similar architecture, but fewer instructions and simplified I/O, called the IBM 7040 and 7044. In April 1964, the first 7094 II was installed, which had almost twice as much general speed as the 7090 due to a faster clock cycle and introduction of overlapped instruction execution.
Instruction and data formats
The basic instruction format was a 3-bit prefix, 15-bit decrement, 3-bit tag, and 15-bit address. The prefix field specified the class of instruction. The decrement field often contained an immediate operand to modify the results of the operation, or was used to further define the instruction type. The three bits of the tag specified three index registers (seven in the 7094), the contents of which were subtracted from the address to produce an effective address. The address field contained either an address or an immediate operand.
- Fixed point numbers were stored in binary sign/magnitude format.
- Single precision floating point In computing, floating point describes a system for representing numbers that would be too large or too small to be represented as integers. Numbers are in general represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16. The typical number that can be numbers had a magnitude sign, an 8-bit excess-128 exponent and a 27 bit magnitude
- Double precision floating point numbers, introduced on the 7094, had a magnitude sign, an 8-bit excess-128 exponent, and a 54 bit magnitude. The double precision number was stored in memory in an even-odd pair of consecutive words; the sign and exponent in the 2nd word were ignored when the number was used as an operand.
- Alphanumeric characters were 6-bit BCD In computing and electronic systems, binary-coded decimal (sometimes called natural binary-coded decimal, NBCD) or, in its most common modern implementation, packed decimal, is an encoding for decimal numbers in which each digit is represented by its own binary sequence. Its main virtue is that it allows easy conversion to decimal digits for, packed six to a word.
Octal The octal numeral system, or oct for short, is the base-8 number system, and uses the digits 0 to 7. Numerals can be made from binary numerals by grouping consecutive binary digits into groups of three . For example, the binary representation for decimal 74 is 1001010, which can be grouped into (00)1 001 010 — so the octal representation is 112 notation was used in documentation and programming.
Input/Output
IBM 7090 operator's console at the NASA Ames Research Center NASA's Ames Research Center , located at Moffett Field, California, was founded on December 20, 1939 as the second National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) laboratory, and became part of NASA in 1958, as part of the turnover from NACA. The center was named after Joseph Sweetman Ames, a founding member and longtime chairman (1919–1939) in 1961, with two banks of IBM 729 magnetic tape drives. The man on the right is touching the card reader.The 7090 series featured a data channel architecture for input and output, a forerunner of modern direct memory access Direct memory access is a feature of modern computers and microprocessors that allows certain hardware subsystems within the computer to access system memory for reading and/or writing independently of the central processing unit. Many hardware systems use DMA including disk drive controllers, graphics cards, network cards and sound cards. DMA is I/O. Up to 8 data channels could be attached, with up to 10 IBM 729 The IBM 729 Magnetic Tape Unit was IBM's iconic tape mass storage system from the late 1950s through the mid 1960s. Part of the IBM 7 track family of tape units, it was used on late 700, most 7000 and many 1400 series computers. Like its predecessor, the IBM 727 and many successors, the 729 used 1/2 inch magnetic tape up to 2400 feet (730 m) long tape drives attached to each channel. The data channels had their own, very limited, set of operations called commands. These were used with tape (and later, disk) storage as well as card units and printers, and offered high performance for the time. Printing and punch card A punched card is a piece of stiff paper that contains digital information represented by the presence or absence of holes in predefined positions. Now almost an obsolete recording medium, punched cards were widely used throughout the 19th century for controlling textile looms and in the late 19th and early 20th century for operating fairground I/O, however, employed modified unit record equipment Before the advent of electronic computers, data processing was performed using electromechanical devices called unit record equipment, electric accounting machines or tabulating machines. Unit record machines were as ubiquitous in industry and government in the first half of the twentieth century as computers became in the second half. They and was slow. It became common to use a less expensive IBM 1401 computer to read cards onto magnetic tape Magnetic tape is a medium for magnetic recording, made of a thin magnetizable coating on a long, narrow strip of plastic. Most audio, video and computer data storage is this type. It was developed in Germany, based on magnetic wire recording. Devices that record and play back audio and video using magnetic tape are tape recorders and video tape for transfer to the 7090/94. Output would be spooled In computer science, spooling refers to a process of transferring data by placing it in a temporary working area where another program may access it for processing at a later point in time. The term "spool" is an acronym of "Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On Line "[citation needed]. The normal English verb "spool" onto tape and transferred to the 1401 for printing or card punching using its much faster peripherals, notably the IBM 1403 line printer. Later IBM introduced the 7094/7044 Direct Coupled System, using data channel to data channel communication, with the 7094 primarily performing computations and the 7044 performing I/O operations.
Software
The 7090 and 7094 machines were quite successful for their time, and had a wide variety of software provided for them by IBM. In addition, there was a very active user community within the user organization, SHARE.
IBSYS was a "heavy duty" production operating system with numerous subsystem and language support options, among them FORTRAN Fortran is a general-purpose,[note 2] procedural,[note 3] imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing. Originally developed by IBM at their campus in south San Jose, California in the 1950s for scientific and engineering applications, Fortran came to dominate this area of programming, COBOL COBOL is one of the oldest programming languages. Its name is an acronym for COmmon Business-Oriented Language, defining its primary domain in business, finance, and administrative systems for companies and governments, SORT/MERGE, the MAP assembler, and others.
FMS, the Fortran Monitor System, was a more lightweight but still very effective system optimized for batch FORTRAN and assembler programming. The assembler provided, FAP, (FORTRAN Assembly Program), was somewhat less complete than MAP, but provided excellent capabilities for the era. FMS also incorporated a considerably enhanced derivative of the FORTRAN compiler originally written for the 704 by Backus and his team.
Notable applications
Dual 7090's at NASA during Project Mercury Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth. The Mercury-Atlas 6 flight on February 20, 1962, was the first Mercury flight to achieve this goal. Early planning and research was carried out by the National Advisory Committee.- The Compatible Time-Sharing System The Compatible Time-Sharing System, or the CTSS, was one of the first time-sharing operating systems; it was developed at MIT's Computation Center. CTSS was first demonstrated in 1961, and was operated at MIT until 1973. During part of this time, MIT's Project MAC had a second copy of CTSS, but the system did not spread beyond two sites . CTSS was (CTSS), one of the first time-sharing Time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking. Its introduction in the 1960s, and emergence as the prominent model of computing in the 1970s, represents a major technological shift in the history of computing operating systems, was developed at MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology is a private research university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts. MIT has five schools and one college, containing a total of 32 academic departments, with a strong emphasis on scientific and technological research. MIT is one of two private land-grant universities[b] and is also a sea-grant and space-'s Project MAC using a 7094 with an extra bank of memory, among other modifications.
- NASA The National Aeronautics and Space Administration is an Executive Branch agency of the United States government, responsible for the nation's civilian space program and aeronautics and aerospace research. Since February 2006 NASA's self-described mission statement is to "pioneer the future in space exploration, scientific discovery and used 7090s, and, later, 7094s to control the Mercury Project Mercury was the first human spaceflight program of the United States. It ran from 1959 through 1963 with the goal of putting a human in orbit around the Earth. The Mercury-Atlas 6 flight on February 20, 1962, was the first Mercury flight to achieve this goal. Early planning and research was carried out by the National Advisory Committee and Gemini Project Gemini was the second human spaceflight program of NASA, the civilian space agency of the United States government. Project Gemini operated between Projects Mercury and Apollo, with 10 manned flights occurring in 1965 and 1966. Its objective was to develop techniques for advanced space travel, notably those necessary for Project Apollo, space flights. During the early Apollo Program The Apollo program was an American spaceflight endeavor that landed the first humans on Earth's Moon. Conceived during the presidency of Dwight D. Eisenhower and conducted by NASA, Apollo began in earnest after President John F. Kennedy's May 25, 1961 special address to a joint session of Congress declaring a national goal of "landing a man, a 7094 was kept operational to run flight planning software that had not yet been ported to mission control's newer System/360 The IBM System/360 was a mainframe computer system family first announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, and sold between 1964 and 1978. It was the first family of computers designed to cover the complete range of applications, from small to large, both commercial and scientific. The design made a clear distinction between architecture and computers.
- The US Air Force retired its last 7094s in service from the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System ("BMEWS") in the 1980s after almost 30 years of use.
- The US Navy continued to use a 7094 at Pacific Missile Test Center, Point Mugu, California California's geography ranges from the Pacific coast to the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the east, to Mojave desert areas in the southeast and the Redwood–Douglas fir forests of the northwest. The center of the state is dominated by the Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural areas in the world. California is the most through much of the 1980s, although a "retirement" ceremony was held in July 1982. Not all of the applications had been ported to its successor, a dual-processor CDC Cyber The CDC Cyber range of mainframe-class supercomputers were the primary products of Control Data Corporation during the 1970s and 1980s. In their day, they were the computer architecture of choice for scientific and mathematically intensive computing. Applications include modeling fluid flow, material science stress analysis, electrochemical 175.
- A pair of 7090s in Briarcliff Manor, NY, were the basis for the original version of the SABRE Sabre is a computer reservations system/global distribution system used by airlines, railways, hotels, travel agents and other travel companies. Sabre GDS is a unit of Sabre Holdings' Sabre Travel Network division. Current North American hosted carriers include Alaska Airlines, American Airlines, WestJet, Cape Air, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian airlines reservation system introduced by American Airlines in 1962.
- In 1961 Alexander Hurwitz used a 7090 to discover two Mersenne primes A Mersenne prime is a Mersenne number that is prime. It is known that if 2p − 1 is prime then p is prime so it makes no difference which Mersenne number definition is used. As of October 2009[ref], only 47 Mersenne primes are known; the largest known prime number is a Mersenne prime. In modern times, the largest known prime has almost always, with 1281 and 1332 digits - the largest prime numbers known at the time.
- In 1961, the 7094 became the first computer to sing, singing the song Daisy Bell. Vocals were programmed by John Kelly John Larry Kelly, Jr. , was a scientist who worked at Bell Labs. He is best known for formulating the Kelly criterion, an algorithm for maximally investing money and Carol Lockbaum and the accompaniment was programmed by Max Mathews. This performance was the inspiration for a similar scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey 2001: A Space Odyssey is a 1968 science fiction film directed by Stanley Kubrick released by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and written by Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke. The film deals with thematic elements of human evolution, technology, artificial intelligence, and extraterrestrial life, and is notable for its scientific realism, pioneering special effects,.
- A 7090/1401 installation is featured in the motion picture Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb is a 1964 black comedy film directed by Stanley Kubrick, starring Peter Sellers and George C. Scott, and featuring Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens and Tracy Reed. Loosely based on Peter George's Cold War thriller novel Red Alert, a.k.a. Two Hours to Doom, Dr, with the 1403 printer playing a pivotal role in the plot (it is the hiding place for a transistor radio; which, when found and turned on by one of the three characters played by Peter Sellers Richard Henry Sellers, OBE , commonly known as Peter Sellers, was a British comedian and actor best known for his roles in Dr. Strangelove, as Chief Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther film series, as Clare Quilty in the original 1962 screen version of Lolita, and as the man-child, Chance the gardener, in his penultimate film, Being There in the film, reveals that the nuclear attack ordered by the deranged Air Force base commander is phony, and must be stopped at all costs).
- The composer Iannis Xenakis Iannis Xenakis (May 29, 1922 – February 4, 2001) was a Greek composer, music theorist and architect. He is commonly recognized as one of the most important post-war avant-garde composers. Xenakis pioneered the use of mathematical models such as applications of set theory, varied use of stochastic processes, game theory, etc., in music, and was wrote his piece "Atrées" using an IBM 7090 at Place Vendôme Place Vendôme is a square in the 1st arrondissement of Paris and is located to the north of the Tuileries Gardens and east of the Église de la Madeleine. It is the starting point of the Rue de la Paix. Its regular architecture by Jules Hardouin-Mansart and pedimented screens canted across the corners give the rectangular Place Vendôme the, Paris.
- Three 7090 systems were imported into and installed in Japan in 1963, one each at Mitsubishi Nuclear Power Co. (whose DP division later merged with Mitsubishi Research Institute, Inc.), IBM Japan's data center A data center is a facility used to house computer systems and associated components, such as telecommunications and storage systems. It generally includes redundant or backup power supplies, redundant data communications connections, environmental controls (e.g., air conditioning, fire suppression) and security devices in Tokyo Tokyo , officially Tokyo Metropolis (東京都, Tōkyō-to?), is one of the 47 prefectures of Japan. It is located on the eastern side of the main island Honshū and includes the Izu Islands and Ogasawara Islands. Tokyo Metropolis was formed in 1943 from the merger of the former Tokyo Prefecture (Tokyo-fu) and the city of Tokyo. Tokyo is the, and Toshiba Toshiba Corporation (TYO: 6502) is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation, headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. The company's main business is in infrastructure, consumer products, electronic devices and components in Kawasaki Kawasaki is a city located in Kanagawa, Japan, between Tokyo and Yokohama. It is the 9th most populated city in Japan and one of the main cities forming the Greater Tokyo Area and Keihin Industrial Area. They were mainly used for scientific computing.
See also
- IBM 704 The IBM 704, the first mass-produced computer with floating point arithmetic hardware, was introduced by IBM in April, 1954. The 704 was significantly improved over the IBM 701 in terms of architecture as well as implementation, and was not compatible with its predecessor
- IBM 7040
- IBM 716 line printer
- IBM 729 The IBM 729 Magnetic Tape Unit was IBM's iconic tape mass storage system from the late 1950s through the mid 1960s. Part of the IBM 7 track family of tape units, it was used on late 700, most 7000 and many 1400 series computers. Like its predecessor, the IBM 727 and many successors, the 729 used 1/2 inch magnetic tape up to 2400 feet (730 m) long tape drive
- Early IBM disk storage
- SHARE and IBSYS operating systems
- University of Michigan Executive System
- 9PAC
The IBM 7094 was used during the Apollo missions including Apollo 11 the moon landing. Goddard Space Flight center operated 3 7094s. The IBM 360/75s were also used for Apollo.
References
- Reference Manual, IBM 7090 Data Processing System, 1961, IBM A22-6528-3
External links
- IBM Archives - 7090
- IBM 7090 Data Processing System from BRL61 Report
- IBM 7090/94 Architecture page
- IBM 7090 Music From Mathematics recorded in 1960 by Bell Labs, using the "Digital to Sound Transducer" to realize several traditional and original compositions; this album contains the original Daisy (Bicycle Built for Two).
- IBM 7094 singing Daisy (mp3)
- Bob Supnik's SimH project – Includes a simulator for the 7090/7094 in a user-modifiable package
- Dave Pitts' IBM 7090 support – Includes a simulator, cross assembler and linker
Categories: IBM transistorized computers | IBM 700/7000 series | 1959 introductions
