Short answers, pulled from the story.
The IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine was IBM's first commercial scientific computer and its first series production mainframe, announced to the public on the 21st of May 1952. It was designed by Jerrier Haddad and Nathaniel Rochester and was based on the IAS machine at Princeton.
Nineteen IBM 701 systems were installed. Customers included aircraft manufacturers such as Lockheed, Douglas, Boeing, and North American Aviation, along with the National Security Agency, the U.S. Navy, General Electric, General Motors, the Rand Corporation, and national laboratories including Lawrence Livermore and Los Alamos.
Arthur Samuel demonstrated a checkers-playing program on the IBM 701 on the 24th of February 1956, in a live television broadcast. The program is considered a milestone in artificial intelligence history. A later version of the program, running on an IBM 7094, defeated self-proclaimed checkers master Robert Nealey in 1962.
On the 7th of January 1954, IBM researchers and scholars from Georgetown University used the IBM 701 to run an experimental program that translated Russian sentences into English. It was one of the first public demonstrations of machine translation.
In early 1954, the Joint Chiefs of Staff ordered a head-to-head comparison of the IBM 701 and Remington Rand's UNIVAC 1103 for a Joint Numerical Weather Prediction project. The two machines were found to have comparable computational speed, with a slight advantage to the IBM 701, but the 701 won the input/output comparison unanimously due to its significantly faster peripherals.
Speedcode, developed by John Backus in 1953, was the first high-level programming language created for an IBM computer. It was built specifically for the IBM 701 to enable computation with floating-point numbers, a capability the machine lacked at the hardware instruction level.