This video about the IBM 7030 Stretch was really informative to me.
I have to admit I knew nothing about this machine nor the time period and its computers.
The IBM Strech was really a precursor in many regards. It introduced a pipeline, a kind of "superscalar architecture" with several ALU/AGU and even helped to generalize the usage of 8-bit bytes inside IBM.
If not as powerful as first hoped, it still managed to hold the crown of the fastest computer in the world from 1961 to 1964.
https://youtu.be/BL6zR3WLVLY