Key information:

• In 1960, Don Knuth's paper on integer programming model for IBM 650 (paper link: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.114... with 51 variables and 43 constraints.
• Knuth used Ralph Gomory's technique (reference: https://www.jstor.org/stable/... without modern communication tools.
• Thirty-five years later, Dimitris Alevras found the optimum value of 22996 using CPLEX on a SPARCstation 5 with 32,200 branch-and-bound nodes.
• The author translated the problem into Python code and provided an MPS file (https://github.com/natebrix/k...
• Open source solver SCIP found the optimal solution in 0.2 seconds and Gurobi in less than 0.1 seconds.

Important details:

• Knuth ran Gomory's algorithm on an IBM 650 with less than 10K of memory.
• No CPU time was reported in Knuth's writeup, but the solution time was assumed to be minutes or likely hours.
• The author showed images (screenshots and a generated image) related to the problem and its solutions.