Development
In April 1958, the final design for the NSA-customized version of IBM's Stretch computer had been approved, and the machine was installed in February 1962. The design engineer was James H. Pomerene, and it was built by IBM in Poughkeepsie, New York. Its electronics (fabricated of the same kind of discrete transistors used for Stretch) were physically about twice as big as the Stretch to which it was attached. Harvest added a small number of instructions to Stretch, and could not operate independently.
An NSA-conducted evaluation found that Harvest was more powerful than the best commercially available machine by a factor of 50 to 200, depending on the task.
Read more about this topic: IBM 7950 Harvest
Famous quotes containing the word development:
“Creativity seems to emerge from multiple experiences, coupled with a well-supported development of personal resources, including a sense of freedom to venture beyond the known.”
—Loris Malaguzzi (20th century)
“For the child whose impulsiveness is indulged, who retains his primitive-discharge mechanisms, is not only an ill-behaved child but a child whose intellectual development is slowed down. No matter how well he is endowed intellectually, if direct action and immediate gratification are the guiding principles of his behavior, there will be less incentive to develop the higher mental processes, to reason, to employ the imagination creatively. . . .”
—Selma H. Fraiberg (20th century)
“Such condition of suspended judgment indeed, in its more genial development and under felicitous culture, is but the expectation, the receptivity, of the faithful scholar, determined not to foreclose what is still a question—the “philosophic temper,” in short, for which a survival of query will be still the salt of truth, even in the most absolutely ascertained knowledge.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)