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System/360 Announcement (1964)

76 points| rbanffy | 4 years ago |ibm.com | reply

66 comments

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[+] ghaff|4 years ago|reply
As a matter of trivia, I learned recently that the System/360, among other things, is probably where software licensing originated. [1] For a variety of reasons, not least of which were antitrust considerations, IBM wanted to unbundle software and hardware and, at the time, it was unclear whether copyright, much less patents, would provide any IP protection for unbundled software.

For anyone unaware, the System/360 was also the subject of the often quoted Mythical Man Month by Fred Brooks.

[1] https://www.create.ac.uk/blog/2018/11/14/the-first-software-...

[+] vincent-manis|4 years ago|reply
I believe that there were a few licensed programs before IBM unbundled in 1969. There was a program that would produce flowcharts from source code, called Autoflow, released in 1965, for example. As for Bill Gates, he was 10 years old when Autoflow was released, I doubt he was thinking of selling software.
[+] epc|4 years ago|reply
IIRC, licensing was partly motivated by the formation of Amdahl in 1970, to lock in OS/MVS and the other 360/370 operating systems to IBM hardware.
[+] ngcc_hk|4 years ago|reply
Not sure it is. It is bill gate not ibm that believe more onto software license. Ibm goes with hardware cum software license.

They are more structured no doubt even then. They are very careful about this. Licensed product but they are more onto

Still because they are more onto hardware and its usage their first anti trust is about tie-in sales. Hardware with monopoly of punch card purchase (I am not joking it is my professor speciality).

Software wise they allow development. Even to this day mvs (that is many years into the future it is mvs) 3.8 is still can be run without license. And invention like vm also.

They worry about Amdahl who basically do this s/360 and hardware compatibility (plug compatible) and even now fuji…

No they no doubt has software licensing but not their focus for a long time.

That is why when found bios cannot protect them, they do mca and totally missed it is software, stupid.

The rest is history.

[+] NelsonMinar|4 years ago|reply
My partner writes System/360 assembly language for a living, an enormously complex product that's a bit like a suite of kernel modules for Linux. It's called MVS or z/OS these days but there's still a robust market for big iron.
[+] raarts|4 years ago|reply
I wrote assembly language on IBM/360 in ACP (Airline Control Program) and TPF (Transaction Processing Facility) for KLM. It was fun. A totally different world.

My manager/mentor had worked with punch cards (phased out just before I came in) and was known to only get two errors on average in the nightly compile batches.

(People could only compile once per day, and one program could be comprised of hundreds of card).

Very impressive for assembly.

[+] porlw|4 years ago|reply
I'm curious - are there any features of System/360, that we don't have in modern operating systems, that would be worth implementing?
[+] jonathaneunice|4 years ago|reply
Channelized I/O, intent-based security policies (e.g. from RACF), multi-layered error handling and recovery. It's a rich garden. However, it's not as simple as "implementing a feature," since the interesting things are all systems of activity with interlocking assumptions and expectations with all the other systems. You can't "just" pluck pieces out of context any more than you can grab a cool phrase from Mandarin or Urdu, or admire a lobster's claw and decide to graft it onto your own arm.

But for anyone interested in evolving systems/OSs, definitely study S/3x0 and Z successors, or the proprietary mainframes and minicomputers in general. In many cases we are now stumbling into reinventing techniques that mainframes or minicomputer teams built many years earlier. Best case in point probably virtual machines (VMs), in which VMware et al started in ~2003 rebuilding a technology capability that had been developed in Z systems in 1967/68.

[+] dtagames|4 years ago|reply
The new "Z on demand" features they offer over the internet remind me a lot of how it easy it was to provision virtual S/360 (S/390 at the time) hardware and software with VM/CMS when I worked there in the 90's.

It's taken since then to get that on the PC.

[+] ghaff|4 years ago|reply
Presumably, most anything worthwhile would still be in Z/OS from whence it would have pretty naturally made its way into IBM's Unix and eventually Linux.

OS/360 was quite different from most modern operating systems--most notably it was batch and designed for very small memory sizes--but different isn't really better in this case.

[+] MichaelMoser123|4 years ago|reply
the EBCDIC encoding/character sets, however i don't know if it's worth implementing... (well, all terminal emulators have that)
[+] trasz|4 years ago|reply
I've looked at it only briefly, but... From my (mostly Unix-ish) perspective z/OS looks a bit like as if MS-DOS have been continuously developed by a few hundred people since the eighties. There are some nice things, but the overall system architecture is somewhat... nonexistant.
[+] martyvis|4 years ago|reply
When I first read "It combines microelectronic technology, which makes possible operating speeds measured in billionths of a second", I was thinking "Wow, Gigahertz clock speeds back then". But later on you realise they are talking about 200 of them billionths, so only 5MHz clock rates.
[+] twoodfin|4 years ago|reply
"Only"—in 1964! It was another 17 years before the IBM PC was released with a 4.77MHz 8088. Imagine a gap like that today: The collapse of the lag between "fastest CPU available at any price" and "the CPU in your phone" is basically the story of the computing industry to date.
[+] AnimalMuppet|4 years ago|reply
My dad worked for Univac. I remember that he had an instruction card for the 418 (Univac's lower-end system; the high end at the time was the 1108). I remember that addition took 4 microseconds, and multiplication took 6. This was arount 1970, maybe a bit after.

So don't sneer at 5MHz in 1964. It's really fast for the day.

[+] jacobsenscott|4 years ago|reply
Pretty much exactly what we pay for compute time today, if you don't count inflation. Accounting for inflation the System/360 was about 7x more. It was a good time to be IBM.
[+] tomgreen000|4 years ago|reply
most important hardware announcement ever made by a tech firm?
[+] dtagames|4 years ago|reply
It was a bet-the-company move and would have bankrupted IBM had it failed. They literally discontinued all other product lines in one swoop and consolidated the entire company's architecture around a single, compatible processor spec. That is standard today and was unheard of at the time.
[+] doctor_eval|4 years ago|reply
Certainly among them. But PC and iPhone is up there too IMO.
[+] iamhamm|4 years ago|reply
In 1964 importance
[+] shagie|4 years ago|reply
And today's news... IBM deliberately misclassified mainframe sales to enrich execs, lawsuit claims : https://www.theregister.com/2022/04/07/ibm_securities_lawsui...
[+] zozbot234|4 years ago|reply
The big news is that IBM is still selling mainframes at all, and even getting rich from it. Doesn't hyperscaler tech nowadays do pretty much everything that we used to need a mainframe for?