The engineering design of the stretch computer

Abstract

The Stretch Computer project was started in order to achieve two orders of magnitude of improvement in performance over the then existing 704. Although this computer, like the 704, is aimed at scientific problems such as reactor design, hydrodynamics problems, partial differential equations etc., its instruction set and organization are such that it can handle with ease data-processing problems normally associated with commercial applications, such as processing of alphanumeric fields, sorting, and decimal arithmetic.