Technology History | IBM Poughkeepsie — The Announcement Promised Delivery Next Year

The most interesting sentence in IBM's press release of 7 April 1964 is the last one.

Deliveries of the small configurations were scheduled to begin in the third quarter of 1965, and the largest in the first quarter of 1966.

IBM had just announced a computer family it would not ship for well over a year, and it announced it very loudly indeed.

A special train carried reporters up the Hudson to the company's Poughkeepsie plant, where Thomas Watson Jr. called the event the most important product announcement in the company's history.

The release claims that more than 100,000 businessmen attended meetings in 165 American cities that day.

What they were shown was System/360: nineteen combinations of processor speed and memory capacity, more than forty types of peripheral equipment, and one set of programming instructions running across all of it.

A customer could start on the smallest machine and grow into the largest without rewriting anything.

That sounds unremarkable now, and it was not then, because IBM's own computers did not run each other's software and outgrowing a machine meant starting over.

The prices are in the release too.

Rental ran from $2,700 a month for a basic configuration to $115,000 for a large multisystem one, with outright purchase between $133,000 and $5,500,000.

Development had cost something in the region of $5 billion, a figure IBM has repeated for sixty years, and the company was betting itself on it.

The gap between the announcement and the machines is the part usually left out.

Deliveries began in 1965 as promised, but the operating system was late and enormous, and Fred Brooks, who ran that effort, spent the following decade working out why adding people to a late software project makes it later.

He published the answer as The Mythical Man-Month.

Poughkeepsie is still where IBM builds mainframes.

An IBM quantum computing data centre now sits on the same campus, a few hundred metres from where the press train unloaded.

The photograph shows a System/360 Model 30, the smallest of the six processor models announced that day, at the Computer History Museum.

Sources: IBM Data Processing Division press release, 7 April 1964; Computer History Museum; IEEE ETHW; Congressional Record, 15 June 2011.

Photo: ArnoldReinhold, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.