Friday, April 08, 2016

Happy Birthday Mainframe!

Fifty Two Years Ago This Week

On April 7, 1964, IBM announced "a new generation of electronic computing equipment" called the IBM System/360... or as it, and subsequent generations of the machine have become known, the mainframe!


If you'd like to take a walk down memory lane you can read the original press release on the IBM web site.

The System/360, unquestionably, was one of the most significant products in the history of computing. The general, sound concepts of the System/360 are still the at the foundation of modern mainframe. Sure, a lot has changed, but those changes were made to a solid, fundamentally sound base.

Code that ran on the System/360 can still be run on the latest and greatest modern IBM mainframe, the z13. What other platform can say that? I mean, when my desktop was recently force upgraded from Windows 7 to WIndows 10 some of my software stopped running!

So let's take a moment and salute the mainframe on its 52nd birthday... and wish it many more years of productive use.

Happy birthday, mainframe!

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