Fifty years were completed yesterday, from her most important announcement IBM, for the most revolutionary mainframe of history, the IBM System / 360.
The IBM System / 360 It was a system innovative for its time, with the main aim of creating a common architectural platform, ensuring the company a brighter future and making it in the market for large systems for the coming decades.
The problem that computer manufacturers had to contend with until the early 60s were variations in architecture. More to the point, most designs started from scratch and computers adopted a lot unique architectures, even in their basic ingredients.
It was also customary to build computers based on needs a single customer. At that time IBM was forced to support five different types of systems, installed in industries, services and universities. As expected, Mr volume of work, but also the cost growing exponentially, threatening to kneel it financially.
Ο Thomas Watson Jr, son of IBM's founder and successor to the company's management, took a big risk, spending several billion dollars in one new and common architecture that could solve the problem and managed by a group of leading the company's engineers, who were preparing the project for the new system from the 1961 to 1964.
The head of this group was mechanical Fred Brooks, to which is attributed the first use of the expression "computer architecture"While designing his architecture S / 360 was the Gene Amdahl.
Eventually at 7 April 1964, IBM president Thomas Watson Jr presented the family IBM System / 360, in a magnificent parallel event at 165 cities in the US where according to IBM, the announcement followed over 100.000 people.
The same day they were presented 6 models and 44 peripheral devices, including magnetic storage units, card readers, screens, printers and communication systems.
Source: e-pcmag.gr
