Stretch-ing Is Great Exercise— It Gets You in Shape to Win

IBM's Project Stretch (1955-1961) lost the company some $35 million big 1960 dollars. Yet the project, a bold adventure into transistorized computers, drove into existence new technologies in circuits, packaging, memory, and I/O upon which IBM built its successful second-generation computer product lines. The architectural, instruction-pipelining, arithmetic, and software innovations were crucial for IBM's third-generation System/360 product family and even for its later RISC innovation.