50 Years ago: IBM 1401

I never programmed the IBM 1401, although I used mainframes that used a 1401 to do their input and output spooling. An article by John Murrell in the San Jose Mercury News notes that today is the 50th anniversary of the 1401. Among its characteristics, the 1401:

• Occupied a large, air-conditioned room,
• Weighed two to four tons (depending on configuration),
• Had a CPU clock speed of .000087 GHz (87 kilohertz),
• Had up to .000016 GB of RAM (1.4K-16K characters)
• Rented for $45,000/month (in today's dollars),
• Sold for $3,400,000.
• As IBM put it, "Speed: In one minute, the 1401 Processing Unit can perform 193,300 additions (eight-digit numbers) or 25,000 multiplications (six-digit numbers by four-digit numbers)."

We've come a long way in 50 years.

By the mid-1960s, half the computers in the world were members of the IBM 1400 series.