Photos: Looking back to the birth of the IBM mainframe

[Borg 386]

It's 50 years since IBM launched the first System/360 mainframe.

The S/360 is feted as the grandfather of modern computing. It introduced processing techniques that would become commonplace, such as lookahead pipelining, branch prediction, multitasking, memory protection and generalised interrupts. It's a reminder that many architectural tricks used inside chips today date back to before man landed on the moon.

Photos: Looking back to the birth of the IBM mainframe - TechRepublic

 

[HoneycombAG]

I wonder if those things on a rack are disks or tapes?

 

[Lava King]

I wonder if those things on a rack are disks or tapes?

Hmm...I can see red reels mounted on the tape decks in both pictures so I'll hazard a guess and say that they're tapes.

I was going to say that there are a lot of tapes on that rack, but then I looked over at my shelves stacked with data CDs and floppy disks (!) and decided to remain silent.