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Arthur T Knackerbracket [soylentnews.org] writes:

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Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story [tomshardware.com]:

The guide price is $40,000 - $60,000; you will need a large spare room.

A transformative transistorized milestone in the history of computing could be yours, as an IBM [tomshardware.com] 7090 Mainframe computer system has gone up for auction at Christie’s [christies.com]. Before the arrival of the IBM 7090, commercially available computers relied on valves rather than transistors, and this machine is said to have delivered a remarkable speed, efficiency, and reliability boost compared to its predecessor due to embracing the newest solid-state technology.

This auction lot is an extensive collection of IBM tech gear, cutting edge in 1959, and you would need a sizeable spare room or garage to house it all. Christie’s says the hardware on auction is from the Paul G. Allen (Microsoft [tomshardware.com] co-founder) Collection, and he acquired it in 2017 from a ‘Weapons Research Establishment’ in South Australia. The mainframe is currently in Seattle, and the guide price is $40,000 - $60,000, with 19 days left of the auction period. Purchasing an IBM 7070 new, back in the 1950s, was a much bigger investment, at $813,000.

Despite the move away from vacuum tube technology, the IBM 7070 was still a hulking beast. Capable of processing about 229,000 instructions per second, the machine used approximately 14,000 Standard Modular System cards. These cards housed about 30,000 alloy-junction germanium transistors and 22,000 germanium diodes. Due to this bulk, an IBM 7070 system weighs over 23,000 pounds (10,430kg).

The mainframe system being sold by Christie’s includes many functional equipment and peripherals for the IBM 7070 user. According to the listing, the lucky auction winner will also end up owning:

The lot also includes a trolley of instruction manuals, many archival boxes of punched cards, three boxes of archival folders of user manuals, and twelve boxes of printouts.

What you would do with a hulking mainframe system like this in 2024 is harder to fathom. We mentioned that the IBM 7070 up for auction was used in some weapons research role. They were also positioned as useful for research fields spanning aerospace engineering, weather forecasting, and nuclear sciences.

However, in 2024, the smartphone in your pocket or a humble Raspberry Pi will comprehensively outgun this type of machine in terms of processing power. Thus, it is probably destined to be bought up by a museum, educational institution, or exhibition space. It might also be a good purchase for TV/Movie studios for some historical or retro-science scenes.

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