[inforoots] Origin of the IBM 1130 Name

[Peter Capek]

Although it is lots of fun to speculate, I think it's probably a mistake to
read too much into the choice of numbers for products from IBM, or, for that
matter, anyone else.  I have heard, but been unable to verify reliably, the
story that the origin of "1401" is that there was a study done to estimate
how much memory was necessary to program the planned system to perform
various functions that had been previously wired into the control panels of
various unit record machines, and that 1400 characters was found to be
sufficient in most cases.

The 701 was named after the building in Poughkeepsie where it was designed
("the old research building", on Boardman Road, sold about 10 years ago to a
parochial school), and the successor machines (702, 704, 709) had no
particular logic to their names that I've ever heard.   They were, however,
all vacuum tube machines, and the various transistorized follow-ons all had
4-digit numbers.   There is the story, too, possibly apocryphal, that the
origin of this is that the transistorized version of the 709 was called the
709T, and it was only a short leap from there to 7090.

I believe the numbers reflect the organizations that produced them to some
degree.  All the
7xx and 7xxx machines were designed in Poughkeepsie, the 1620 (and 1130 and
1800?) were done in San Jose, and the 14xx were done in Endicott, where much
of the unit record equipment was designed and built.

And just to reemphasize the lack of significance in these numbers, I'll
mention the assertion that Control Data's first serious machine, the 1604,
was alleged to have been
arrived at by adding the street number of the building where it was built,
501 (North Lexington Ave) to 1103, the number of the Univac machine on which
some of the engineers worked before leaving to form CDC.   Who knows....

                            Peter Capek
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