IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems

No new product offering has had greater impact on the computer industry
than the IBM System/360. IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems describes the creation of
this remarkable system and the developments it spawned, including its successor,
System/370. The authors tell how System/360's widely-copied architecture came into
being and how IBM failed in an effort to replace it ten years later with a bold
development effort called FS, the Future System. Along the way they detail the
development of many computer innovations still in use, among them semiconductor
memories, the cache, floppy disks, and Winchester disk files. They conclude by
looking at issues involved in managing research and development and striving for
product leadership.While numerous anecdotal and fragmentary accounts of System/360
and System/370 development exist, this is the first comprehensive account, a result
of research into IBM records, published reports, and interviews with over a hundred
participants. Covering the period from about 1960 to 1975, it highlights such
important topics as the gamble on hybrid circuits, conception and achievement of a
unified product line, memory and storage developments, software support, unique
problems at the high end of the line, monolithic integrated circuit developments,
and the trend toward terminal-oriented systems.System/360 was developed during the
transition from discrete transistors to integrated circuits at the crucial time when
the major source of IBM's revenue was changed from punched-card equipment to
electronic computer systems. As the authors point out, the key to the system's
success was compatibility among its many models. So important was this to customers
that System/370 and its successors have remained compatible with System/360. Many
companies in fact chose to develop and market their own 360-370 compatible systems.
System/360 also spawned an entire industry dedicated to making plug-compatible
products for attachment to it.The authors, all affiliated with IBM Research, are
coauthors of IBM's Early Computers, a critically acclaimed technical history
covering the period before 1960.