Today in 1952, IBM announced the IBM 701 or “The Defense Calculator.” The name “Defense Calculator” was specifically selected “to appeal to the patriotism of [IBM’s CEO Thomas] Watson, Sr. and to avoid the use of the unacceptable word, computer,” according to Emerson Pugh in Building IBM.
The 701 was IBM’s first commercially available scientific computer and the first IBM computer in which programs were stored in an internal, addressable, electronic memory. At the IBM shareholders’ meeting on April 29, 1952, Thomas Watson, Jr. said:
Our progress in electronics convinced us one year ago that we had in our company the ability to create for the Defense Department, and the defense industries, a computer of advanced design which could be of major service to our national defense effort. We began planning and building such a machine, which we believe will be the most advanced, most flexible high-speed computer in the world. It is built not for one special purpose but as a general-purpose device, and two days after it was announced on a limited confidential basis we had orders for ten.
Looks like the word “computer” was far from “unacceptable” for junior.
The first production model of the 701 was installed at IBM’s headquarters in New York in late 1952, operating “as a Technical Computing Bureau for organizations having problems involving mathematical computations.” In other words, the Computing Bureau delivered hardware and software as-a-service to those organizations in need of rapid mathematical calculations who could not afford the $11,900 monthly rental or $136,000 in today’s dollars.
On February 24, 1956, machine learning pioneer Arthur Samuel demonstrated on television his checkers-playing program running on the IBM 701.