From the Vault: STRETCH, 1961
In the early 60s, IBM ran this ad for STRETCH, the world’s most powerful computer, created for the Alamos Scientific Lab. Unheard of at the time, it could make about six million additions in a matter of seconds. Compare that to IBM’s latest supercomputer, Sequoia, which can make twenty quadrillion calculations per second. So how will we define ‘fast’ in the future?