— Ch. 1 · Genesis And Development —
IBM 701.
~4 min read · Ch. 1 of 6
The IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine arrived on the public stage on the 21st of May 1952. Before this announcement, engineers called it the Defense Calculator during its creation phase. Jerrier Haddad and Nathaniel Rochester led the design team that built the system. Their work relied heavily on the IAS machine located at Princeton University. This earlier model provided the foundational logic for the new commercial product. The patent US3197624A was filed in 1954 and granted later in 1965. Richard K Richards and Harold D Ross also appear as inventors on that document. Thomas Watson Jr visited twenty potential customers before production began. He expected to secure orders for five machines from those meetings. Instead, he returned with eighteen orders waiting for delivery.
Market Reception And Sales
Aviation Week reported rental charges of about fifteen thousand dollars per month in May 1953. American Aviation noted a second shift increased costs to twenty thousand dollars monthly. These figures represented a significant investment for any organization in the early 1950s. Nineteen systems were installed across various sectors including government and industry. Eight units went directly to aircraft companies like Lockheed and Douglas. The first unit landed at IBM headquarters in New York City. A committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff compared the 701 against Remington Rand's UNIVAC 1103 in early 1954. Trials showed comparable speed but gave the IBM machine an edge in input and output operations. Watson Jr described this market acceptance during the 1953 stockholders meeting. The commercial strategy focused on high-end scientific computation rather than general business tasks. This approach distinguished it from the lower-cost IBM 650 model.