The other machine that changed the world

It's 40 years ago this month since IBM launched the System/360 mainframe, the machine that arguably laid the foundations for computing today. In IBM speak, "it sparked a revolution in computing and business". Revolution? Well yes: for a start, it was the first to provide a family of systems (in fact covering virtually all of IBM's then range); the first to address both business and number crunching; and the first with what, at the time, was seen as virtually unlimited storage and instant retrieval, thanks to 'micro-miniaturised solid state' technology. As Doug Neilson, server consultant with IBM, says: "The family offered really quite a large performance span, from small, relatively affordable to very large and expensive. Before that, all machines had to be configured and programmed for the specific purpose. It was also the first system that integrated whole business requirements – commercial data processing and numerically intensive computing. In fact, that was the concept behind the original name – 360 degrees of computing." Other firsts included emulation, providing upward and downward compatibility for programs, that still works today – although applications aren't tied to hardware in the way they were. And it established the concept of integration from the outset. Neilson again: "Before System/360, people had multiple systems in different areas and they hand carried tape or paper between them." From little acorns... Beyond that there was IMS 360, the first commercial database. "It wasn't relational; it was just hierarchical, but before that if you wanted a structure you programmed it yourself in Cobol or RPG," he says. Indeed, IBM claims the development of today's DB2 has been largely evolutionary from that point. Then there was online transaction processing: "CICS (customer information control system) and IMS enabled us to move on from batch processing, and to build the early global private network systems for the financial institutions." Those paved the way to ATM transactions and ultimately, I guess we could say, the Internet and now e-business. How elastic are the claims? Early System/360 customers even shared software programs among themselves, leading to the creation of SHARE, a mainframe users group – providing similar facilities to those now available from open source users groups active today! And there was the technology: IBM was the first to use what was then SLT, solid logic technology. "That was the grandparent of the integrated circuit," insists Neilson. "IBM had to build the machines to build the machines to make it!" Indeed, and it's worth noting just how massive an undertaking developing System/360 was. In 1964 dollars, IBM invested $750,000 on engineering, and another $4.5 billion on factories and equipment to make it – against revenue in that year of $3.2 billion! The firm also hired more than 60,000 new employees and opened five major plants! It was the largest privately financed commercial project ever witnessed. Continuing with the numbers game though, check out the performance – and the metrics that mattered then. It was able to process from 33,000 to 750,000 'additions/second'; 'core storage' was from 8,000 to 8 million 'characters' (a 60-fold improvement on the best hitherto available from IBM); and machine cycle time ranged from one millionth of a second to 200 billionths of a second. Prices were from $2,700 to $115,000 per month rental. A paragraph from the original press release: "A hierarchy of memories within System/360 makes information in core storage available at varying speeds. Small local store memories operate in as little as 200 billionths-of-a-second. Control memories operate in as little as 250 billionths-of-a-second. Powerful main memories – containing up to 524,000 characters of information – range from 2.5 millionths-of-a-second down to one millionth-of-a-second." It's a salutary thought that all the computing done by the top of the range S/360, had it run 24/7, 365 days a year for the full 40 years, could be accomplished in just six hours by today's mid range systems – which are around 1 million times more powerful. The clock speed of the Pentium PC on most of our desks and at home is 3GHz, and RAM of 2Gb and hard drive of 250Gb is commonplace. And that could cost you just £450 or from £16 a month! S/360 was used in the development of everything from the SABRE 'real-time' phone flight reservation system to NASA launches (including projects Vanguard, Mercury, Gemini and Apollo), as well as providing the central nervous system for many of the world's governments and financial institutions. One hell of a record: a machine that changed the world. From that incredible leap in mainframe technology, the computer industry went on to launch minicomputers, distributed multi-processor systems and the ubiquitous PC. IBM itself introduced the S/370 (abandoning the 360 meaning) in the early '70s, then the S/3090 in the early '90s and System/390 in the late '90s, each marking significant evolutionary steps before the birth of the 'z' (zero downtime) series mainframes four years ago, when Big Blue did its grand renaming. That was when RS 6000, IBM's Unix and Linux supercomputers, became the 'p' (performance) series, and good old AS/400 because the 'i' (integrated) series running OS/400 and Linux – both of which share the same processor technology. Seems almost incredible, doesn't it, that the server wars – which machine type (choosing mostly from Unix, NT or AS/400) was best to run your manufacturing business, and therefore what software provider should you go for – were still rampant in 2000! AS/400 to iSeries And a brief footnote to AS/400: the machine arrived around a decade after the S/360, initially as the System/32, getting its database technology from that development, along with many of the other concepts, but with everything pre-loaded and at a price point and manageability far more attractive to most business users. As Guy England, IBM iSeries business director, puts it: "The cliché at the time was 'Do you want your IT staff making the system work, or your IT staff making the system work for you?'!" There followed S/34, S/36 and S/38 in the mid '80s, followed by the flavours of AS/400 starting in 1988 – the latter two especially forming the backbone for such names as JD Edwards, Mapics, Marcom and SSA. The list goes on. And so does the development. Recalling again that just a couple of years ago, word on the street was that AS/400 (the strength of that name is testament alone) was going to die, the current iSeries – with its embodiment of open standards, multiple operating environments (including Windows and Linux), dynamic on-demand computing (building on the virtualised resources and logical partitioning) and autonomic computing assistance – seems remarkably healthy. So it only remains to say: "Happy birthday S/360 and IBM."