On this day in 1980 the last IBM Stretch supercomputer was decommissioned at Brigham University. The IBM 7030 known as Stretch was IBM’s first transistorized supercomputer, the most complex electronic system designed in its time and the fastest computer in the world up until 1964. Despite this title however, the Stretch did not measure up to expected speeds. It was intended to be 100 to 200 times faster than the competition, but ended up with only a fraction of those speeds. Because of this the Stretch was considered one of the biggest project management failures in history, and its price was cut down from $13.5 million to just $7.78 million.
Only eight Stretch machines were ever built, all of which went to government agencies. Though there were only very few the Stretch still made a big impact later on when many of its innovative features, such as the Standard Modular System transistor logic, multiprogramming and memory protection were used in later, more successful IBM computers like the IBM 7090 and System/360.
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