The IBM 700 Series

“The corporation took a kind of bet. We created the machine that carried us into the electronics business. ... More than 115 of the people who worked on the project are still with IBM. Some others now work for our competitors. But in those days, they were an absolutely unbeatable team. They were the nucleus of all the teams that have created the computers we’ve developed since. So, in a very real way, they helped me build a business reputation which was more to their credit than my own. It’s made my life fruitful and happy and I’m grateful to all of them.”

“I think the thing that is most important about the 701 is that it got IBM into the computer business. And I think we all realized at that point in time that this was a new business—and its potential was fantastic.”

“What IBM’s astonishing 701 actually did, in executing the Russian-English translation, was to create within itself a working model of another ‘brain’ specially designed to handle logic instead of mathematics. Thus, the ‘brain’ has crowned its previous reputation for superlative versatility with an even more lofty laurel. And, in so doing it has produced its own ‘brain’ child.

James Birkenstock told Tom Watson in 1950: “I think we can put together all this stuff we have—tubes, tapes and tape drives—and make a machine that would be useful in building aircraft, designing jet engines and the like—projects calling for many repetitive operations."

“Pencil hadn’t hit paper, January 1st, 1951. And December 30th or 31st, 1952, the first production machine went from Poughkeepsie down to our then corporate headquarters, world headquarters, at 590. So that’s something under two years to design the machine, build an engineering model, shake down all the trouble, new technology—brand new technology—get it tested, fix it up and so forth, get the manufacturing line started, and get the first machine off the manufacturing line.”