Delete comment from: Ken Shirriff's blog

ForOldHack said...

This is very thorough, and well researched.
I have the display board from a IBM 604. Since doing a BCD multiply was obscenely slow before the 604 ( repeated addition...), the 604 was designed to do the multiplications in parallel. A single tube could contain 4 digit x 1 digit multiply logic. There were 4 multiply tubes per rack, and 40 to 65 racks. It could do a matrix inversion that would take a week on a prior machine, and perform the calculations in less than an hour. It was so fast, that many of the machines saw 20+ years of use. ( 1948 to 1968 )

Jan 26, 2021, 3:07:29 AM

Posted to Examining a technology sample kit: IBM components from 1948 to 1986