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IBM System/360

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A computer announced by IBM on April 7 1964. One of the first general purpose mainframe computer families, all sharing the same instruction set. The S/360 family initially consisted of six computers and forty common peripherals, there were thirteen models in all. The cheapest model was the 360/20 with 24k on memory only half the registers, and the instruction set was not binary-compatible with the rest of the range. The most significant model was the 360/67 (firts shipped in August 1966), which was the first to offer "virtual machine" computing to its users through its CP-67 operating system, later called VM/370.

Operating System/360 (OS/360) was developed for mid-range System/360. The smaller machines used DOS/360 and the larger were supposed to use TSS/360 (Time-Sharing System, a Multics copy), but it never worked properly and was replaced with either CP-97, MTS (Michigan Time-Sharing System), TSO (Time-Sharing Option for OS/360) or a number of others.

The System/360 introduced a number of the standards for the industry, such as 8-bit bytes (although there was financial pressure during development to reduce the byte to 4 or 6 bits!) and byte addressable memory, 32-bit words, segmented and paged memory, the EBCDIC character set and was the first to use micro-code.

The S/360 was replaced by the S/370 range in 1971.

Gene Amdahl was the chief architect for the S/360.

This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC, used with permission.

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