Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[NightskyeB4Dawn]

April 7, 1964: IBM announced the System/360, a line of computers that took over the computer industry. The big idea was that all the systems were compatible and supported all applications (a 360° range from business to scientific). Designing the System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-the-company" project for IBM, costing over $5 billion. Although the project ran into severe problems, especially with the software, it was a huge success, one of the top three business accomplishments of all time. System/360 set the direction of the computer industry for decades and popularized features such as the byte, 32-bit words, microcode, and standardized interfaces. The S/360 architecture was so successful that it is still supported by IBM's latest z/Architecture mainframes.

The IBM System/360 Model 50 was a powerful mainframe computer in 1964. It rented for $150,000 a month (current $), weighed 3 tons, and used 7600 watts. Now an iPhone has about 10 million times more processing power and 10,000 times more memory.


In the 1960s, mainframe used core memory for storage; 128 kilobytes filled a large cabinet and weighed 610 pounds. Core memory consisted of tiny ferrite cores on a wire grid. By 1970, IBM produced 20 billion cores a year.

World Inventory of remaining IBM System/360 & 370 CPU's.

Oh my goodness! Talking about raising memories. This were I started!