The IBM 704, 7090 were computers targeted at the science market, being (some of?) the first with floating point hardware. Their “business” counterparts would be the 705, 1401 and did decimal math and string processing. You could run business apps on both, but manipulating strings in them is a chore because you either pack a character as a word or you need pointers within pointers. With 36-bit words, at least, you can have a character pointer turn into an address by two bitshifts.
I don’t remember much about time sharing being a thing at that time - batch processing made sense in both kinds of applications.
I don’t remember much about time sharing being a thing at that time - batch processing made sense in both kinds of applications.