50 years in the past as we speak, IBM unveiled the System/360 mainframe, a groundbreaking laptop that allowed new ranges of compatibility between techniques and helped NASA ship astronauts to the Moon.
Whereas IBM had been making its 700 and 7000 Collection mainframes for greater than a decade, the System/360 “ushered in an period of laptop compatibility—for the primary time, permitting machines throughout a product line to work with one another,” IBM says. “It was the primary product household that allowed enterprise data-processing operations to develop from the smallest machine to the most important with out the big expense of rewriting important packages… Code written for the smallest member of the household needed to be upwardly suitable with every of the household’s bigger processors. Peripherals akin to printers, communications gadgets, storage, and input-output gadgets needed to be suitable throughout the household.”
Earlier than the System/360, “companies purchased a pc, wrote packages for it, after which when it acquired too outdated or sluggish they threw it away and began once more from scratch,” IBM spokesperson Barry Heptonstall instructed the BBC.
Textual content of the unique press launch issued by IBM’s Knowledge Processing Division on April 7, 1964 is on IBM’s web site. The techniques would promote for $133,000 to $5.5 million, or may very well be rented for $2,700 to $115,000 a month. The least costly began delivery in 1965, with higher-end ones being delivered in 1966.
Regardless of the excessive worth, there was a lot pleasure. “Greater than 100,000 businessmen in 165 American cities as we speak attended conferences at which System/360 was introduced,” IBM stated on the time. Firm President Thomas J. Watson Jr. known as the System/360 IBM’s most essential product announcement ever and stated it “represents a pointy departure from ideas of the previous in designing and constructing computer systems.” The preliminary announcement did not truly name it a “mainframe,” a phrase IBM would not embrace for a few years.
IBM acquired greater than 1,000 orders within the month after the announcement and one other 1,000 over the following 4 months. The specs have been spectacular for the time. “Introduction of the 8-bit byte, over the prevalent 6-bit customary, made it simpler to deal with each enterprise data processing and scientific knowledge processing,” an IBM retrospective says. “The six fashions introduced in April of 1964 had a efficiency vary of roughly 25-to-1, with the most important mannequin being about 25 occasions extra highly effective than the smallest. The smallest mannequin may carry out 33,000 additions per second; the most important greater than 750,000 additions per second.”
Commercial
System/360 machines have been essential for NASA’s Apollo missions. “Apollo flights had a lot data to relay, that their computer systems needed to report in an digital type of shorthand,” IBM says. “Even in shorthand, nevertheless, it took a circuit able to transmitting a novel a minute to get the data to NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Heart—now the Johnson House Heart—in Houston, Texas. Receiving this monumental quantity of knowledge was a robust IBM laptop whose sole activity was to translate the shorthand into significant data for Apollo flight controllers. The IBM System/360 laptop absorbed, translated, calculated, evaluated, and relayed this data for show. It was one among 5 System/360 machines utilized by NASA for the Apollo 11 mission. The identical System/360 laptop that processed the info for the primary lunar touchdown from 240,000 miles away in Houston additionally calculated the liftoff knowledge wanted by astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin ‘Buzz’ Aldrin to rendezvous again with the command module piloted by Michael Collins for the flight again to Earth.”
System/370 began to interchange System/360 within the early Nineteen Seventies as IBM continued to dominate the computing market. Even as we speak, IBM mainframes are huge enterprise, raking in $1.1 billion in income in the newest quarter.
Trendy IBM mainframes go by the title System z, which maintains compatibility all the way in which again to System/360. “The necessity to assist purposes of various ages imposes a strict compatibility demand on mainframe {hardware} and software program, which have been upgraded many occasions for the reason that first System/360 mainframe laptop,” IBM says. “Functions should proceed to work correctly. Thus, a lot of the design work for brand new {hardware} and system software program revolves round this compatibility requirement.”
The result’s that “Applications for the unique System/360s can nonetheless run, typically with solely slight modification, on IBM mainframes as we speak,” IDG Information Service reporter Joab Jackson famous. Whereas full compatibility over many many years and system adjustments is not doable, IBM tries to provide customers at the very least a 12 months’s warning earlier than they’d have to make software program adjustments.
Listed below are some footage that can assist you have a good time System/360’s birthday: