At Bell Labs in 1962, John L. Kelly recreated the song “Bicycle Built for Two,” also know as Daisy Bell, using an IBM 704 computer. This might have been the first demonstration of digitally synthesized speech. (MP3)

Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do.
I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.
It won’t be a stylish marriage.
I can’t afford a carriage.
But you’ll look sweet,
upon the seat,
of a bicycle built for two.

Listening to an MP3 of the event, the wonder of that accomplishment still comes through.

Arthur C. Clarke happened to witness that event and would go on to use the song for HAL9000’s death scene in 2001.

IBM is said to have sold only 123 model 704 computers between 1955 and 1960, though the machines were extremely expensive and often rented. A single computer might have cost as much as $24 million — in 1957 dollars.

FORTRAN and LISP, the foundations of most all modern computing languages, were first developed on these machines (FORTRAN was started on the IBM 701 but first compiled on the 704). The 704 was the first commercially available computer to feature floating point arithmetic, and magnetic core memory (initially containing 4k of 36-bit words, which I think works out to about 18 bytes of memory. An installed machine was said to have come with its own human field engineer. Here’s a scanned copy of the IBM 704 Manual of Operation.

First glimmer via Wikipedia by way of Defective Yeti.