IP: a wake up after many many years

[David Farber <dave@farber.net>]

While I was at Bell Labs in the late 50's and early 60's , we had the 
opportunity to hear the details of the IBM Stretch computer and especially 
the two addons -- the streaming unit and the harvest storage unit.{ 
http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/ibm/stretch/ }. The streaming 
unit was a tour de force of high speed technology with interesting hardware 
that did statistical processing on streams of bytes. It was "clear" that 
one , maybe the only, use was in code breaking but at that time information 
about it's applications were not easy to come by (an understatement). As a 
side , George Mealy claimed to have done the token breakout of a fortran 
program on the streaming unit.

Anyway recently I was reading the book -- Battle of Wits by Stephen 
Budiansky [ available at Amizon and fun to read]  and suddenly all became 
very clear.

I wish I had known all this when I was playing at writing toy code for the 
steaming unit.

History is fun.

Dave

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