Happy 55th birthday - IBM System/360

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Talk about feeling old(er) - my first experience with programming was on a System/360 Model 40. Submit a stack of punch cards and come back the next day to see the results.

There is a nice bit of history over at Ken Shirriff's blog:

Iconic consoles of the IBM System/360 mainframes, 55 years old
The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. Designing the System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-the-company" project for IBM, costing over $5 billion. Although the project ran into severe problems, especially with the software, it was a huge success, one of the top three business accomplishments of all time. System/360 set the direction of the computer industry for decades and popularized features such as the byte, 32-bit words, microcode, and standardized interfaces. The S/360 architecture was so successful that it is still supported by IBM's latest z/Architecture mainframes, 55 years later.

Prior to the System/360, IBM (like most computer manufacturers) produced multiple computers with entirely incompatible architectures. The System/360, on the other hand, was a complete line of computers sharing a single architecture. The fastest model in the original lineup was 50 times as powerful as the slowest, but they could all run the same software. The general-purpose System/360 handled business and scientific applications and its name symbolized "360 degrees to cover the entire circle of possible uses."

Much more at the site - a lot of wonderful photos. A trip down memory lane.

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This page contains a single entry by DaveH published on April 9, 2019 1:34 PM.

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