Computing · 1964

IBM System/360

One compatible family of computers, from small to huge.

IBM bet about $5 billion on a line of machines sharing one instruction set, so software ran unchanged as customers upgraded. It standardized the 8-bit byte and dominated mainframes for decades.

See it in the living tree Wikipedia

Arcs above join it to what it stood on, arcs below to what it led to. The bar places this stretch on the tree's whole timeline.

What it built on 3

COBOL 1959
Magnetic-core memory 1953
Transistor 1947

What it led to 1

Virtual machines 1967

Related measurements

The dashed line marks when it first worked.

Computation per constant dollar, 1850-2006 Latest: 7.3B million units of computer power per 2006 $ (2003) Source: Nordhaus 2007, Two Centuries of Productivity Growth in Computing, J. Econ. Hist. 67(1), Table 6

Cost of memory and storage Latest: Memory: 1.09k $/TB (2023) Source: Our World in Data