It was announced by
IBM in December 1961, but did not ship until April 1963. A later member of the
IBM 700/7000 series of scientific computers, it was a scaled-down version of the
IBM 7090. It was not fully compatible with the 7090. Some 7090 features, including index registers, character instructions and
floating-point arithmetic, were extra-cost options. It also featured a different input/output architecture, based on the
IBM 1414 data synchronizer, allowing more modern IBM peripherals to be used. A model designed to be compatible with the 7040 with more performance was announced as the
7044 at the same time. Peter Fagg headed the development of the 7040 under executive
Bob O. Evans. One of the first in Canada was at the
University of Waterloo, bought by professor
J. Wesley Graham. A team of students was frustrated with the slow performance of the
Fortran compiler. In the summer of 1965 they wrote the
WATFOR compiler for their 7040, which became popular with many newly formed computer science departments. IBM also offered the 7040 (or 7044) as an input-output processor attached to a 7090, in a configuration known as the 7090/7040 Direct Coupled System (DCS). Each computer was slightly modified to be able to interrupt the other. IBM used similar numbers for a model of its eServer pSeries 690
RS/6000 architecture much later. The 7040-681, for example, was withdrawn in 2005. In 1978,
Jean-Pierre Luminet used an IBM 7040 to create the first simulation of a black hole. ==See also==