IBM 704

Designed by John Backus and Gene Amdahl, it was the first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic.

Changes from the 701 include the use of magnetic-core memory instead of Williams tubes, floating-point arithmetic instructions, 15-bit addressing and the addition of three index registers.

The new instruction set, which is not compatible with the 701, became the base for the "scientific architecture" subclass of the IBM 700/7000 series computers.

In 1962, physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr. created one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs by using an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech.

Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song Daisy Bell, with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews.

Arthur C. Clarke was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of this speech synthesis demonstration, and Clarke was so impressed that six years later he used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey,[8] where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song.

)[citation needed] Edward O. Thorp, a math instructor at MIT, used the IBM 704 as a research tool to investigate the probabilities of winning while developing his blackjack gaming theory.

The IBM 704 at the MIT Computation Center was used as the official tracker for the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory Operation Moonwatch in the fall of 1957.

[12] The Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory (LASL) developed an early monitor named SLAM to enable batch processing.

The original implementation of Lisp uses the address and decrement fields to store the head and tail of a linked list respectively.

For human interaction with the computer, programs would be entered on punched cards initially rather than at the console, and human-readable output would be directed to the printer.