IBM 704

The IBM 704, introduced by IBM in 1954, was the first mass-produced computer with floating-point arithmetic hardware. The IBM 704 Manual of operation states:

The type 704 Electronic Data-Processing Machine is a large-scale, high-speed electronic calculator controlled by an internally stored program of the single address type.

The 704 at that time was thus regarded as "pretty much the only computer that could handle complex math." The 704 was a significant improvement over the earlier IBM 701 in terms of architecture and implementation. Like the 701, the 704 used vacuum tube logic circuitry. Changes from the 701 included the use of core memory instead of Williams tubes and the addition of three index registers. To support these new features, the instructions were expanded to use the full 36-bit word. The new instruction set, which was not compatible with the 701, became the base for the "scientific architecture" subclass of the IBM 700/7000 series computers.

The 704 could execute up to 12,000 floating-point additions per second. IBM sold 140 type 704 systems between 1955 and 1960.

The programming languages FORTRAN and LISP were first developed for the 704.

MUSIC, the first computer music program, was developed on the IBM 704 by Max Mathews.

In 1962 physicist John Larry Kelly, Jr created one of the most famous moments in the history of Bell Labs by using an IBM 704 computer to synthesize speech. Kelly's voice recorder synthesizer vocoder recreated the song Daisy Bell, with musical accompaniment from Max Mathews. Arthur C. Clarke was coincidentally visiting friend and colleague John Pierce at the Bell Labs Murray Hill facility at the time of this speech synthesis demonstration, and Clarke was so impressed that six years later he used it in the climactic scene of his novel and screenplay for 2001: A Space Odyssey, where the HAL 9000 computer sings the same song.

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