IBM 704 Scientific Computer

I've always loved hearing about our heritage as an industry. This article reminded me of when I made a pilgrimage to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View and saw a replica (working!) Babbage Engine amongst a bunch of ancient and obsoleted hardware. It's fascinating to see the progress we've made in only a few decades!

PDF facsimiles of some original manuals are here: <a href="http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/ibm/704/" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;bitsavers.trailing-edge.com&#x2F;pdf&#x2F;ibm&#x2F;704&#x2F;</a><p>In addition to the manual for the computer itself, describing the assembly language and so forth, these include documentation for the earliest versions of Fortran.<p>Bitsavers has a lot of neat stuff on all sorts of old computers, including other old IBM systems, the B5500, (recently mentioned here) and a whole lot of old DEC equipment.