IBM's announcement of the 704 on January 14, 1954, marked a major leap in computing power, giving scientists and engineers hardware capable of floating-point calculations without cumbersome software workarounds. The machine became the platform for FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, fundamentally changing how humans instructed computers to solve problems.
Before the IBM 704, computers handled floating-point numbers, numbers with decimal points that could represent very large or very small quantities, through slow, clumsy software routines. The 704 built floating-point arithmetic directly into its hardware, a design decision that dramatically sped up scientific and engineering calculations and set a template followed by nearly every computer since.
Designed under the direction of Gene Amdahl, who would later found his own computer company challenging IBM's dominance, the 704 also introduced index registers and improved memory architecture using magnetic core memory rather than the vacuum-tube delay lines of earlier machines. It could perform roughly 40,000 instructions per second, blazing fast for its era.
Perhaps its most lasting legacy was serving as the machine on which John Backus and his IBM team developed and ran FORTRAN, first released in 1957. FORTRAN allowed scientists to write mathematical formulas nearly as they would on paper rather than in tedious machine code, democratizing programming and remaining in active scientific use, in updated forms, to this day.
Key people: Gene Amdahl, John Backus