The Stretch story begins with IBM engineer Stephen W. Dunwell, who had come to notoriety within IBM during World War II, when he helped develop a top-secret computer that could decode intercepted enemy radio messages. In 1954, he coauthored a series of memos about a conjectural computer system dubbed “Datatron” that would “assure IBM a pre-eminent position in the field of electronic data processing” by “making substantial advances on all fronts.” The proposed high-performance computer would take advantage of the new transistor technology.
At the time, IBM was falling behind in scientific computers. A proposal to vault the company to the forefront of high-performance machines caught the attention of both Gene Amdahl, who would later oversee the development of the IBM System/360 computer, and John Backus, who went on to create Fortran, the first widely used, high-level programming language. Project leaders first approached Livermore Radiation Lab in hopes of securing government funding. Ultimately, the IBM team couldn’t create a working model quickly enough, but that initial push opened the door to a subsequent contract with Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory for what became known as Project Stretch, headed by Dunwell.
Dunwell’s team set an ambitious goal to build a computer that was 100 times faster than the IBM 704, the company’s top-of-the-line scientific computer at the time. In the process, Project Stretch initiated research and development efforts into transistors, circuits, memories and power supplies, some of which were later spun off as separate R&D units.
After more than four years, Stretch debuted with the ability to perform more than 30 billion multiplications during a 24-hour period, setting a new standard for high-powered machines that would come to be known as supercomputers. Its use of solid-state transistors made Stretch inherently more reliable than computers that used vacuum tubes, which took up a lot of room and were prone to burning out. But what made Stretch a true breakthrough was its tremendous processing speed, thanks to its ability to calculate different problems in parallel. Stretch could run as many as nine programs simultaneously.