Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM

Summary

A short list of the most transformative products of the past century and a half would include the lightbulb, Ford’s Model T—and the IBM System/360. This mainframe series forever changed the computer industry and revolutionized how businesses and governments worked, enhancing productivity and making countless new tasks possible.In the years leading up to its 7 April 1964 launch, however, the 360 was one of the scariest dramas in American business. It took a nearly fanatical commitment at all levels of IBM to bring forth this remarkable collection of machines and software. While the technological innovations that went into the S/360 were important, how they were created and deployed bordered on disaster. The company experienced what science policy expert Keith Pavitt called “tribal warfare”: people clashing and collaborating in a rapidly growing company with unstable, and in some instances unknown, technologies, as uncertainty and ambiguity dogged all the protagonists.Ultimately, IBM was big and diverse enough in talent, staffing, financing, and materiel to succeed. In an almost entrepreneurial fashion, it took advantage of emerging technologies, no matter where they were located within the enterprise. In hindsight, it seemed a sloppy and ill-advised endeavor, chaotic in execution and yet brilliantly successful. We live in an age that celebrates innovation, so examining cases of how innovation is done can only illuminate our understanding of the process.By the end of the 1950s, computer users faced a seemingly intractable problem. Had it not been solved, it would have prevented computers from becoming widespread, and any thoughts of living in an Information Age would have been fiction.The S/360 was designed to replace IBM’s 1401 mainframe, which was popular but couldn’t be expanded or upgraded.Photo: IBMOrganizations were acquiring computers in great numbers, automating many of the old punch card operations and doing more with data processing. The popularity of the IB...