Mainframe mania
Last night I drove down to the Computer History Museum in
Mountain View to hear Frederick Brooks, Jr., Bob Evans and other veterans
of the IBM System 360 project celebrate its 40th
anniversary.
System 360, rolled out in 1964 as IBM's $5 billion, all-in-one,
bet-the-company New Thing, became the core of modern computing. It powered
the original SABRE airline reservation system and the NASA program, and
drove the rise of information technology as an engine of business change.
Its amibitions were vast: It aimed to meet "every need of every user" (!).
Its name referred to the 360 degrees of a circle. It was intended to be
literally all-encompassing. And -- after some rocky initial months -- it
was phenomenally successful, so successful that it became the ultimate
symbol of the computing establishment. That has also made it, ever since,
into a target for revolutionary cudgels. (Apple's famous 1984 ad didn't actually
depict an IBM computer; it didn't have to -- everyone knew who Big Blue
Brother was.)
Today, System 360's mainframe technology has been repeatedly superseded
by succeeding generations: first came the minicomputers from Digital, HP
and others, bringing the price of computing down, extending its
availability and changing its paradigm from batches of cards to
"interactive" sessions; then came the microcomputers from Apple, IBM, and
eventually everyone else, putting a computer on every desktop and, as the
PC visionaries repeatedly told us, changing the world in the process.
What was fascinating to hear on Wednesday night was the number of times
the speakers used the phrase "change the world" to describe the impact of
the System 360 itself. In 1964, Brooks suggested, the design concepts it
embodied were revolutionary in their own right: a single product family,
with upward and downward compatibility, so that software that would run on
the cheapest model would run on the most expensive, and vice versa; a
standard input/output interface allowing for easy swapping of devices; a
disk-based operating system; and other fundamentals of computing that we
take for granted today.
Brooks, who helmed the software development effort for the 360 and then
left IBM for academia, was inspired by his work on the project to write "The
Mythical Man-Month" -- one of the first and still among the very best
explorations of the nature of programming. Someone asked Brooks how he came
to write his classic:
"When I was leaving IBM, Tom Watson came to me, we had a very good
conversation... He said, you've managed the hardware part of a project and
you've managed the software part of a project. What is the difference from
a management point of view between the hardware and the software? Why does
software seem to be so much harder to manage? And I said, well, I can't
answer that on the spot, but I'll think about it. It took five years."
Though Brooks' years of though provided us with some valuable answers to
these questions, Watson's pained query still haunts the computer industry,
40 years later.
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