IBM (System/360 Launch)

Contribution to AI

Before 1964, a faster computer meant rewriting everything that had run on the slower one, because each machine carried its own instruction set and that set was inseparable from the circuits executing it. The System/360 announcement broke the link: six processor models covering a fiftyfold range in performance, all software-compatible, replacing five incompatible IBM product lines at once — and on the cheaper models the compatibility came from microcode rather than matched hardware. Amdahl, Blaauw and Brooks then published the specification itself , which fixed the modern sense of architecture in computing: an interface defined apart from any machine that implements it and expected to outlive all of them. Descendants of that definition are still executing S/360 instructions six decades later . For artificial intelligence the consequences were oblique. One was a parting of ways: when Project MAC sought a machine for its next-generation time-sharing work, it chose the GE-645 over IBM's System/360 proposal , and the AI laboratories that followed did their work on interactive minicomputers while the 360 line took the corporate data centres — two computing cultures that stayed separate for twenty years. The second was IBM's own answer to the problem it had lost. Cambridge Scientific Center built CP-40 and then CP-67, running multiple client operating systems at once and founding the VM family . Virtualisation began as a way to time-share a mainframe; rented compute for training now rests on it.

Drafted with AI and edited by hand (claude-opus-5, reviewed 2026-08).