Betting on System/360
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Change was certainly at work when
Watson Jr. made one of IBM's biggest bets: setting its engineers on a course to
build the System/360 mainframe. That system was a risk because it would
cannibalize IBM's existing product and require greater investment from
customers, while also costing $5 billion to build-$34 billion in today's
dollars.
Watson Jr. later called the
System/360, which launched in 1964, "the riskiest decision I ever made." But it
paid off handsomely, enabling IBM
to dominate that space for the next two decades.
Jeff Frey, an IBM Fellow and
director of System z architecture and design,
said the System/360 "set the stage for
large system computing." The System/360 also saw "the introduction of virtual
memory and massive virtualization and brings us to where we are today," he
added.
Moreover, the System/360
introduced OS/360, the mainframe operating system that evolved into the z/OS
(the operating system for the new system z mainframes) and "has evolved over
time more than any single piece of software in history," Frey claimed.
Delivering software for the System/360 led to other software advances, such as
transaction processing monitors and databases: IMS and relational databases, he
said.
In the late 1980s, IBM had to
decide whether to continue using bipolar technology to build its processors for
the mainframe or to move to CMOS. The company placed another big bet and moved
to CMOS, which led to IBM restructuring its software. That enabled the company
to deliver Parallel Sysplex, which, in turn, allowed a cluster of IBM
mainframes to act together as a single system image with z/OS.
Like IBM, the
mainframe keeps reinventing itself. Last year, IBM introduced the zEnterprise
System, which can manage a virtual collection of heterogeneous hardware as if
it were one system, Frey said.
Hardware has
always been the foundation of IBM, pointed out Rod Adkins, senior vice
president of IBM's Systems and Technology Group, adding that it will continue
to be a critical building block as the company evolves-particularly for the
cloud, Big Data and analytics.
