Architecture
The equipment added to the Stretch computer consisted of the following special peripherals:
- IBM 7951 - Stream coprocessor
- IBM 7952 - High performance core storage
- IBM 7955 - Magnetic tape system also known as Tractor
- IBM 7959 - High speed I/O exchange
With the stream processing unit, Harvest was able to process 3 million characters a second.
The Tractor tape system which was part of the Harvest system was unique for its time. It included six tape drives which handled 1.75-inch-wide (44 mm) tape in cartridges, along with a library mechanism which could fetch a cartridge from a library, mount it on a drive, and restore it in the library. The transfer rates and library mechanism were balanced in performance such that the system could read two streams of data from tape, and write a third, for the entire capacity of the library, without any time wasted for tape handling.
Read more about this topic: IBM 7950 Harvest
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