Historic IBM 7090 Mainframe Computer Up for Auction at Christie's

TapTechNews August 24th news, a historic IBM 7090 mainframe computer system has been put up for auction at Christie's and is currently located in Seattle with a guide price of $40,000 to $60,000 (about 285,000 to 428,000 RMB currently), and there are still 19 days left in the auction period.

This equipment is a collection of IBM's technological equipment and a transformative milestone in the history of modern computing. TapTechNews note: Before the IBM 7090 appeared, commercial computers relied on vacuum tubes rather than transistors.

It is introduced that the IBM 7090 was born in 1959. It uses about 14,000 standard modular system cards and can process approximately 229,000 instructions per second. It was a pioneer in that era and set a new benchmark for computing speed. It can be said to have influenced the entire 1960s, and complex tasks in fields such as aerospace engineering, weather forecasting, and nuclear research all require the use of such large equipment.

This modular system card has approximately 30,000 alloy junction germanium transistors and 22,000 germanium diodes. Due to its large size, a set of systems weighs more than 23,000 pounds (TapTechNews note: about 10,432.62 kilograms), and buyers also need a fairly large site to accommodate these devices.

Christie's said that its hardware comes from the collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Gardner Allen, who purchased this computer from the Weapons Research Institute in South Australia in 2017.

It is worth mentioning that the large computer had a price of $813,000 in the 1950s (about 5.798 million RMB currently).

This large computer includes many functional devices and peripheral devices. According to the auction list, the buyer will be able to obtain:

1x IBM 7151 console control unit with IBM 7155 switch (console) attached to the side

1x IBM 711 card reader

2x IBM 7617 data channel console

1x IBM 7608 power converter

13x IBM 729 tape units

1x IBM 1401 mainframe computer

1x IBM 7302 core storage

1x IBM 7606 multiplexer

1x IBM 7108 instruction processing unit

1x IBM 7109 arithmetic sequence unit

1x IBM 7607I data channel

1x IBM 7607II data channel

1x IBM 7618 power control

1x IBM 1403 printer

1x IBM 1402 card reader

1x IBM 716 printer

The batch of auction items also includes a trolley with instruction manuals, many file boxes with punched cards, three boxes with file folders with user manuals, and twelve boxes of printouts.