IBM 704

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The IBM 704 was IBM's first commercially successful vacuum tube scientific mainframe. It was announced in May, 1954 and the first machine showed up in 1956 with a $2M price tag and weighing over 30,000 lbs, the IBM 704 was not a casual purchase. But 123 customers decided that its advanced capabilities were worth the heavy investment.

The major advances over its predecessor, the IBM 701, included core memory, instead of the Williams tubes previously used for main memory in the 701 and support for floating point in hardware (supposedly the first mass-produced machine to do so).

The instruction set of the 704 was not compatible with the 701 and the later IBM 709, IBM 7090, and IBM 7094 did use an upwardly-compatible instruction set, so the 704 founded a major family.

FORTRAN was produced for, and first implemented on, this computer. LISP was also first done on the 704.

Bellow sample of Fortran program from the IBM Manual for the 704: