IBM 7090

[5][6] In 1961, the IBM 7094 famously employed a speech synthesis program to sing "Daisy Bell", becoming something of a cultural icon.

Although the 709 was a superior machine to its predecessor, the 704, it was being built and sold at the time that transistor circuitry was supplanting vacuum tube circuits.

In April 1964, the first 7094 II was installed, which had almost twice as much general speed as the 7094 due to a faster clock cycle, dual memory banks and improved overlap of instruction execution, an early instance of pipelined design.

They have a 36-bit architecture based on the 7090, but with some instructions omitted or optional, and simplified input/output that allows the use of more modern, higher performance peripherals from the IBM 1400 series.

Aerospace developed the Direct Couple operating system, an extension to IBSYS, which was shared with other IBM customers.

[13] The 7090 used the Standard Modular System (SMS) cards using current-mode logic[14] some using diffused junction drift transistors.

The 7090 series features a data channel architecture for input and output, a forerunner of modern direct memory access I/O.

These are used with tape (and later, disk) storage as well as card units and printers, and offered high performance for the time.

Output would be written onto tape and transferred to the 1401 for printing or card punching using its much faster peripherals, notably the IBM 1403 line printer.

IBSYS is a "heavy duty" production operating system with numerous subsystem and language support options, among them FORTRAN, COBOL, SORT/MERGE, the MAP assembler, and others.

FMS also incorporated a considerably enhanced derivative of the FORTRAN compiler originally written for the 704 by Backus and his team.