The IBM 7094 the fourth member of the most popular family of IBM's large second-generation transistorized mainframe computers and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications". The first 7094 installation was in September1962. In April1964, the first 7094 II was installed, which had almost twice as much general speed as the earlier IBM 7090 due to a faster clock cycle and introduction of overlapped instruction execution.
NASA used 7094s to control the Mercury and Gemini space flights. The US Air Force retired its last 7094s in service from the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System ("BMEWS") in the 1980s after almost 30 years of use.
The US Navy continued to use a 7094 at Pacific Missile Test Center, Point Mugu, California through much of the 1980s, although a "retirement" ceremony was held in July 1982. Not all of the applications had been ported to its successor, a dual-processor CDC Cyber 175.
MIT got an IBM 7090, replacing the 709, in the spring of 1962, when I was a freshman, and had upgraded the 7090 to a 7094 by 1963.
One use IBM made of it was yacht handicapping: the president of IBM raced big yachts on Long Island Sound, and these boats were assigned handicap points by a complicated formula.
The 7094 was a fine machine, but by the time it was over ten years old, it had become expensive to maintain, hard to find expert programmers for, and had been deserted by most users in favor of faster and more modern machines.
The IBM 7090 was a second-generation transistorized version of the earlier IBM 709 vacuum tube mainframe computers and was designed for "large-scale scientific and technological applications".
The 7094 introduced double-precision floating point and additional instructions, but was largely backward compatible with the 7090.
In April 1964, the first 7094 II was installed, which had almost twice as much general speed as the 7090 due to a faster clock cycle and introduction of overlapped instruction execution.
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