System/360 Archives

The Time Is Now To Get A GenAI Strategy

March 18, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

I was born a little less than a year after IBM launched its venerable System/360 mainframe platform, arguably the first information technology platform ever created and sold at scale. I graduated from college six months after the AS/400 was launched and was the founding editor of this newsletter you are now reading a little more than a year after Silverlake came to market and showed what a real platform could look like.

I was present during the Unix revolution, the client/server revolution, the commercial Internet revolution, and the big data revolutions, and I was absolutely at the forefront of commercial …
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IBM: A Brand Is Not Everything, But It Is Important To Have A Good One

February 19, 2024 Timothy Prickett Morgan

If you want to trace the roots of Big Blue back to the beginning, you start with Herman Hollerith at Columbia University and the punch card tabulating machines he created and that were ultimately used in their first big commercial application to do the calculating for the US Census in 1890.

Back then, mainframes were made of wood, copper, and paper, and in 1911, Hollerith’s punch card machine business, known as the Tabulating Machine Co, were united with the Dayton Counter Scales, Dayton Industrial Scales, and International Time Recorder machines that were part and parcel of the Industrial Revolution. The …
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Don’t Have A Conniption If Big Blue Goes All Subscription

August 14, 2023 Timothy Prickett Morgan

Big Blue has been pretty clear that it is not only going to put Power Systems machinery in its own cloud as well as those run by its business partners, but that it going to offer hardware and systems software alike under a cloud consumption model with as much of a unified pricing scheme, based on subscriptions, for on premises, IBM Cloud, and partner cloud deployments.

As we have already reported back in February, the IBM i operating system and its integrated Db2 for i relational database is already available under subscription pricing, which includes the license to use the …
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Time To Design – And Deliver – The Application System/360

July 19, 2021 Timothy Prickett Morgan

The stupidest thing IBM ever did was create a system other than the System/360. It had the perfect name and it had the right idea of creating a compatible line of small, medium, and large enterprise systems that ran a widening variety of operating systems and workloads, often concurrent on the same machine. The AS/400 really should have been the third generation of System/360 machines, and the systems today would be somewhere around the sixth of seventh or even tenth generation, however you want to think about it.

Every decade or so in IBM’s history, it has tried to converge …
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IBM’s Possible Designs For Power10 Systems

August 31, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

In the past two weeks, we have been telling you about the future Power10 processor that will eventually be able to support the IBM i platform as well as AIX, Big Blue’s flavor of Unix, and Linux, the open source operating system that is commercially exemplified by IBM’s Red Hat Enterprise Linux distribution. The leap in performance with Power10 is akin to those we saw between the generations spanning from Power6 through Power9.

This week, we want to contemplate the systems that will be using the Power10 chip and how they will be similar to and different from past and …
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What The New Top Brass At Big Blue Means For IBM i

February 3, 2020 Timothy Prickett Morgan

We have been expecting such an announcement for many years, but now all of the pieces are in place and Ginni Rometty can retire to chairman of the board and let other executives steer International Business Machines for the next decade or so.

Sam Palmisano, who was an assistant to former IBM president, chief executive officer, and chairman Louis Gerstner, without question saved IBM from disaster in the early 1990s, tapped Rometty to be president back in October 2011. It is the tradition that IBM’s president becomes the next CEO and eventually chairman, so succession is not a question …
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IBM Takes A Hands Off Approach With Red Hat

July 15, 2019 Timothy Prickett Morgan

IBM has been around long enough in the IT racket that it doesn’t have any trouble maintaining distinct portfolios of products that have overlapping and often incompatible functions. The System/3, which debuted in 1969, is only five years younger than the System/360, which laid the foundation and set the pace for corporate computing when it launched in 1964. Both styles of machines continue to exist today as the IBM i on Power Systems platform and the System z.

With the $34 billion acquisition of Red Hat, which closed last week, neither of those two legacy products are under threat and …
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Fifty Years Of Operating IBM Systems

March 11, 2019 Bill Hansen

The world is celebrating some important 50th anniversaries this year. My interests in aerospace and music led me to recall four events from 1969. The most famous event was the first manned moon landing in July, which occurred the same week that I turned 21. Two months before that was the first flight of the Concorde supersonic transport. I mark the beginning of the “summer of love” with the Woodstock concert, and its end with the tragic concert at Altamont Speedway. (Who knew that Hell’s Angels would not make great security guards?)

For me, all of this pales in comparison …
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