As the first unified computer family based on a single architecture, IBM’s mainframe ushered in the modern era of enterprise IT.
IN MANY WAYS, the modern computing era began in 1961 at the New Englander Motor Hotel in Greenwich, Conn., where a group of top IBM engineers met in secret to decide how to build the company’s next-generation computer.
A new design was sorely needed. IBM’s various lines of entirely separate systems 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, senior curator for the Computer History Museum.
The Greenwich meeting spawned a task force that spent three years designing a computer that changed the course of tech history: the System/360, which IBM unveiled 50 years ago this month, on April 7,1964.
The mainframe system became a huge success which was a good thing for IBM. The company’s president at the time,
Tom Watson Jr., killed off other IBM com-puter lines and put the company’s full weight behind the System/360.
Before the System/360, manufacturers built each new computer model from scratch. Software designed to run on one machine didn’t work on others. Each computer’s operating system also had to be built from scratch.
Led by chief architect Gene Amdahl and project leader Fred Brooks, the System/360 team built a unified family of computers, creating a common architecture that could be shared by both low-end machines and the priciest high-speed models.
“In designing a system with both upward and downward compatibility for both scientific and business customers, IBM was attempting to use a single architecture to meet the needs of an unprecedentedly large segment of its customers,” according to a 1987 case study of the System/360 published by the Association for Computing Machinery.
While that seems like the obvious approach today, back then it was a new concept — and it had profound consequences for the tech industry.
Because IBM was able to use a single operating system for all of its computers, engineers could concentrate on developing new applications instead of machine-specific software. On the hardware side, no longer would components, such as processors and memory, need to be designed for each machine.
IBM has maintained backward compatibility for its System/360 offerings ever since. Software for early System/360 computers can still run, sometimes with only slight modifications, on IBM mainframes today. Pat Toole Sr., one of the original System/360 engineers and later an IBM division president, observed that there were no commercial enterprise software companies at the time. IBM supplied a few standard programs for banks, but customers also wrote their own — a big undertaking.
Nonetheless, companies saw the value of System/360 and other mainframes. “They not only allowed businesses to operate faster and gain competitive advantage but allowed them to have a lot more flexibility in their products and services,” said Greg
Beedy, senior principal product manager at CA, who has worked with mainframes for 45 years.
Spicer noted that organizations continue to use mainframes for core operations, if for no other reason than that the cost of migrating software to other platforms would dwarf any savings they might enjoy from less expensive hardware.
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