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Happy Birthday, Mainframe!
On April 7, 2009, the IBM mainframe "officially" celebrates its 45th birthday. That's because on April 7, 1964, IBM announced the System/360, the direct ancestor of today's System z10. (The first System/360 machines actually shipped in early 1965.)
There's just nothing else to point to that's even remotely similar to this accomplishment. The mainframe, if anything, has widened its lead in the computing industry. A partial analogy can be found in Boeing's 737. Boeing began designing the original 737 in May, 1964. But even that analogy doesn't quite fit.
There's a lot of credit to go around, but the biggest credit has to go to mainframe users. Mainframe users continue to challenge IBM to keep pushing the boundaries of technology, but with a fanatical focus on enterprise business needs. You know, all the "dull, boring" stuff like being able to generate millions of customer bills perfectly, every time, and before deadline — and satisfy 100 or more other business functions concurrently in the same highest quality way. It doesn't matter whether those business functions are over 40 years young or less than 5 minutes old, they just run and run and run and....
Next up: the mainframe's 50th birthday, in 2014. I expect IBM's engineers, software and hardware, will continue to amaze and thrill.
| by Timothy Sipples | April 8, 2009 Permalink |
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Comments
I completely agree (see http://community.ca.com/blogs/execio/archive/2009/04/07/in-the-prime-of-life.aspx). Looking back from the distant future, where business computing is concerned, this will be seen to be in the heart of the era of the mainframe.
Posted by: Reg Harbeck | Apr 8, 2009 10:37:18 AM
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