In many ways, the modern computer era began in the New Englander Motor Hotel in Greenwich, Connecticut.
It was there in 1961 that a task force of top IBM engineers met in secret to figure out how to build the next-generation IBM computer.
A new design was sorely needed. IBM already sold a number of successful though entirely separate computer lines, but they were becoming increasingly difficult to maintain and update.
“IBM in a sense was collapsing under the weight of having to support these multiple incompatible product lines,” said Dag Spicer, chief content officer for the Computer History Museum, which maintains a digital archive on the creation and success of the System/360.
Fifty years ago today (7 April), IBM announced the computer that the task force had designed: the System/360.
The system eventually became a huge success for the company – and a good thing too. IBM’s president at the time, Tom Watson, Jr., killed off other IBM computer lines and put the company’s full force behind the System/360. IBM’s revenue swelled to $8.3 billion by 1971, up from $3.6 billion in 1965. Through the 1970s, more than 70% of mainframes sold were IBM’s. By 1982, more than half of IBM’s revenue came from descendants of the System/360.
But its impact can be measured by more than just the success it brought to IBM.
“IBM was where everyone wanted to work,” said Margaret McCoey, an assistant professor of computer science at La Salle University in Philadelphia, who also debugged operating system code for Sperry/Univac System/360 clones in the late 1970s.
The System/360 ushered in a whole new way of thinking about designing and building computer systems, a perspective that seems so fundamental to us today that we may not realize it was rather radical 50 years ago.
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