IBM 1401: The Mainframe

“I was called the chief architect of the 1401. But as a matter of fact, that was a made-up title. It wasn't official. It implies there were lots of other non-chief architects floating around. But there weren't any.”

“It may be difficult for people who have had no experience with plugboards to appreciate the problems we had with them. Not only were they bulky, but they were expensive, error-prone and difficult to wire and store. The customer had to have a wired control panel available for every application they needed to run, plus several empty spares for odd jobs, plus a very large inventory of various length plug wires. It wasn’t just the cost to the machine to have a plugboard (although it was considerable), it was also the cost to the customer to carry the expense of many plugboards.”

“If you have a stored program, you put the control, not in the plugboard, but back into memory where it can be treated just like data; to be manipulated. It can be executed at high speed.”

“We weren't interested in building an accounting machine. We wanted to take people to a whole new world...We have an image here of a fairly simple control panel; they looked like a bunch of spaghetti, but this is how you controlled the machine in those days.”

“You see I was trying to work down at the very low end of the cost spectrum at that time, trying to save every penny, nickel and dime. Motivations are quite different. When you are working on a large system [you are] trying to get every ounce of performance, and you're not really trying to save money, the motivations are quite different. When you are working down at the low end you are not terribly concerned about performance but you are concerned about cost.”

“Well Shel Jacobs was a great proponent of the system, and he insisted that they were going to sell, I don't know, four or five thousand units but local gurus who made predictions like this officially thought that we were going to sell, I don't know, two hundred, two hundred fifty or something. Shel said ‘No, No, a whole lot more than that!’ Well, Watson heard about this—Tom Watson Jr.—and as we got nearer and nearer to the announcement, he began to get worried about the discrepancy in the numbers. So one day he showed up at my office and sat down and said ‘Now, tell me about this program.’ And so I did, and then he said ‘Do you really think we are going to sell thousands of these things?’ and I says ‘Oh yeah, no doubt about it.’ Then he says ‘Well, OK’ and he accepted my word, and we had our program.”

“My earliest memory of Fran’s sharp mind and broad range of knowledge: I was working on a circuit diagram at my drawing board. Next to me, an engineer was working on a large mechanical design at his drawing board. Fran was walking along the aisle behind our drawing boards. He glanced down briefly at my diagram as he passed, and then did the same as he was passing the mechanical drawing. With a one-second look at the drawing from his upside-down vantage point, he immediately spotted an error which he pointed out to the designer.”

“There was not a very good grasp or visualization of the potential impact of computers certainly as we know them today until the 1401 program came along.”