If you wonder what it's doing there : I'm counting down towards April 7, 2014. I still vividly remember the day I read the S/360 announcement on April 7, 1964 and how excited I was about it. No, just kidding, as a three year old toddler I had other problems and joys than that at the time. But if you want to have a look at the announcement, it's over here in the IBM Archives. It strikes me that it's way much shorter than recent announcements. But, that was then . . .
I myself started out just half way in 1988 with an IBM mainframe training. The very first courses were assembler (!), Cobol, JCL, DASD ... But I do remember April 7 so well because in 2004 it marked the 40th anniversary of the S/360 ànd the announcement of the z890. It was the first announcement I attended in the presales function I'm doing now. So, we're almost ten years later and those ten years were quite exciting ones.
I'm not sure what 'festivities' will be held next year but I can see on Twitter that IBM (mainly marketing) people are more and more referring to the event. So just to warm you up, I have this nice document from Chuck Boyer called 'The 360 Revolution' that you can find over here. It was written back in 2004 and it focuses mainly on that sixties era. I can tell you, it's a great document. The pictures alone are worth a look. So let me share a couple of them with you.
"[System/360] was the biggest, riskiest decision I ever made, and I agonized about it for weeks, but deep down, I believed there was nothing IBM couldn’t do".
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