PC World magazine named Stretch one of the biggest project management failures in IT history.

[10] In spite of Stretch's failure to meet its own performance goals, it served as the basis for many of the design features of the successful IBM System/360, which was announced in 1964 and first shipped in 1965.

In early 1955, Dr. Edward Teller of the University of California Radiation Laboratory wanted a new scientific computing system for three-dimensional hydrodynamic calculations.

Proposals were requested from IBM and UNIVAC for this new system, to be called Livermore Automatic Reaction Calculator or LARC.

According to IBM executive Cuthbert Hurd, such a system would cost roughly $2.5 million and would run at one to two MIPS.

At IBM, a small team at Poughkeepsie including John Griffith and Gene Amdahl worked on the design proposal.

[12] In September 1955, fearing that Los Alamos National Laboratory might also order a LARC, IBM submitted a preliminary proposal for a high-performance binary computer based on the improved version of the design that Livermore had rejected, which they received with interest.

Multiprogramming, memory protection, generalized interrupts, the eight-bit byte for I/O[a] were all concepts later incorporated in the IBM System/360 line of computers as well as most later central processing units (CPU).

[13] By 1966, he had received an apology and been made an IBM Fellow, a high honor that carried with it resources and authority to pursue one's desired research.

[15]: 54  It uses high-speed NPN and PNP germanium drift transistors, with cut-off frequency over 100 MHz, and using ~50 mW each.