What Happened on June 21st

IBM retired its last "STRETCH" mainframe, part of the 7000 series that represented the company's first transistorized computers. At the top of the line of computers -- all of which emerged significantly faster and more dependable than vacuum tube machines -- sat the 7030, or STRETCH. Seven of the computers, which featured a 64-bit word architecture and other innovations, were sold to national laboratories and other scientific users. L. R. Johnson first used the term "architecture" in describing the STRETCH.