On 04/12/2019 12:41 PM, Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk
wrote:
Building the System/360 Mainframe Nearly Destroyed IBM
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-history/silicon-revolution/building-the-system360-mainframe-nearly-destroyed-ibm
Yup, they bet the company on a new product. it was a VERY
well thought-out bet, but still a big reach. One area they
really made a mistake on was software. They designed a
really ambitious OS (OS/360 MFT) and then an even more
ambitious version (OS/360 MVT) on a poorly thought-out
timeline. Fred Brooks actually had a nervous breakdown over
it, and maybe some other guys, too. Fred Brooks' "The
mythical man month" is just too short, and doesn't have
enough actual anecdotes, but is a good read anyway. At the
time he wrote it, there were probably a bunch of stories
that he couldn't yet tell.
Also, the hardware was a huge leap. IBM went from building
computers with all purchased components on single-sided
paper-phenolic PC boards to making their own transistors and
diodes and packaging them on little ceramic hybrid modules,
and then putting those on 4-layer PC boards. They pioneered
a LOT of packaging technology on the 360. The developed
flip-chip bump-bonding of semiconductors, and were doing
this almost 20 years before anybody else were doing this.
But, of course, there would be growing pains with such
development. The entire state of New York was a bustling
beehive of computer manufacturing. They made disk and tape
drives, printers, hand-assembled close to 20,000 mainframe
CPUs plus all the controllers and memory, between 1965 and
1969. Totally mind boggling!
Jon
