On this day in 1960 IBM announced their plans for their Stretch supercomputer, the IBM 7030. In an upbeat release the company stated that the Stretch would be the world’s fastest and most powerful computer of the time, outperforming the IBM 704 by 60 to 100 times. The actual performance of the IBM 7030 ended up disappointing, at only about 30 times that of the IBM 704. This caused considerable embarrassment for IBM and a significant price cut of the Stretch from $13.5 million to $7.78 million.
Though the IBM 7030 was not considered a success, it spawned technologies which were incorporated in many, more successful machines.
The IBM 7030 maintenance console – image taken from Wikipedia