Question: Can someone make a Data Flow Diagram to analyze and pinpoint why this project failed using just this information: IBM's Stretch project In 1956, a
Can someone make a Data Flow Diagram to analyze and pinpoint why this project failed using just this information:
IBM's Stretch project
In 1956, a group of computer scientists at IBM set out to build the world's fastest supercomputer. Five years later, they produced the IBM 7030 -- a.k.a. Stretch -- the company's first transistorized supercomputer, and delivered the first unit to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1961. Capable of handling a half-million instructions per second, Stretch was the fastest computer in the world and would remain so through 1964.
Nevertheless, the 7030 was considered a failure. IBM's original bid to Los Alamos was to develop a computer 100 times faster than the system it was meant to replace, and the Stretch came in only 30 to 40 times faster. Because it failed to meet its goal, IBM had to drop Stretch's price to $7.8 million from the planned $13.5 million, which meant the system was priced below cost. The company stopped offering the 7030 for sale, and only nine were ever built.
That wasn't the end of the story, however. "A lot of what went into that effort was later helpful to the rest of the industry," said Turing Award winner and Stretch team member Fran Allen at a recent event marking the project's 50th anniversary. Stretch introduced pipelining, memory protection, memory interleaving and other technologies that have shaped the development of computers as we know them.
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