Actual use cases of the 705:

Texaco: accounting, technical and research applications. The accounting applications are integrated crude oil, integrated gas and gasoline, wholesale marketing, payroll, supply, and distribution. The technical and research applications are producing geophysical, petroleum engineering, civil engineering, refinery simulation, crude evaluations, plant process studies, pipe stress analysis, and determination of maximum allowable operating pressures. Calculations related to crude stills, fractionation, absorption and stripping are also performed.

U. S. Army, Pentagon: military personnel accounting, civilian personnel accounting, and organizational accounting.

AT&T Long Lines Dept: circuit provision, traffic load studies, accounting for operating and construction activities, message analyses (by mid 1960), pricing and billing private line customers (by late 1960), and plant trouble results - message circuits.

National Security Agency: the system is used for data processing. [no details :-) ]

These are just a few uses from a detailed 1961 report: http://www.ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/BRL61-ibm0705.html

Same as they do now... money!

One of my mentors was a statistician who got into IT while transitioning a large state labor statistics department to computerization in the 70s. They replaced 2000 clerks and tabulating machines with 1 mainframe and a 4 year project. Ditching the building lease and tabulator maintenance paid for the project!

I can see in the 70s being able to justify it as a given that the project would succeed if implemented. But that's a full 20 years after this machine. Completely different technology and probably order of magnitude lower cost per performance unit. So the question is, what workloads were are so high value to justify the risk the project would fail and the enormous cost per compute unit.

Payroll and general ledger. It’s hard to fathom how many billions of dollars are spent on payroll.

"Engineered primarily to handle business data, the 705 could analyze millions of bits of data to determine the optimum location for a retail store; simulate the entire operation of an oil refinery; handle a huge billing operation in minutes; furnish inventory production control reports; or make up a 50,000-employee payroll with millions of deductions.":

http://www-03.ibm.com/ibm/history/exhibits/mainframe/mainfra...

One of my flatmates (roommates to you Americans) works for a payroll company.

It takes them over an hour to run the payroll for 5000 people due to terribly written SQL queries. It's like we've gone backwards.

Where and when did we go wrong?

They were already using IBM tabulating machines in the 1910s (not general purpose computers but similar enough from some perspectives) so it wasn't such a new concept

One of the picture credits says it shows Farmers Insurance's first computer. I would guess it had both accounting and actuarial applications there.

I vaguely recall reading there were only a handful of companies offering computing at a scale, and none had the breadth of IBM. So, monopoly?

An antitrust suit was filed under the Sherman Act on 17 January 1969. It went to trial on 19 May 1975. It was eventually withdrawn on 8 January 1982 (what a coincidence).