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 which provided the foundational logic for the new commercial product.
The system contained 1071 vacuum tubes inside its processor frame. Each tube measured three inches in diameter and formed the core logic circuitry.
Lockheed Aircraft Company received a unit in Glendale, California during 1953 while the National Security Agency installed their system in Washington D.C. that same year. Convair operated a machine at Fort Worth, Texas starting in 1953 and United Aircraft placed one in East Hartford, Connecticut by late 1953.
An experimental program translated Russian into English on the 7th of January 1954. This Georgetown-IBM experiment marked an early milestone in automated language processing.