Why 360? Trivia Quiz

Answer: Graphics Processing

The processing power required to display and change complex shapes of graphics processing required far more than even the largest of the S/360 computers could provide.
Before being branded as System/360, it was known internally as simply NPL for New Processor Line which was descriptive of the fact that this was an entire line of processors of a brand new design. Prior to the NPL, computer systems were designed to perform a certain set of tasks at a specific price-point. Programs written for one computer were rarely able to be used by one with a different design. The same was true for peripheral equipment such as card readers, printers and tape drives which, for the most part, could only operate with one specific computer model.
Scientific-type processors were designed to handle many calculations involving numbers with a large, varying number of decimal places as well as providing for advanced calculations such as square root and trigonometric functions. Business-type processors did lots of character manipulation, like formatting reports, and performing basic arithmetic functions usually on numbers with no or only a few decimal places of precision.
Both scientific and business computers were able to control the rate of input. The processor determined when it was time to read the next punched card or tape record. Communications processors, on the other hand, had to handle randomly received input, which came whenever the terminal user or sensor decided to send it.
NPL or S/360 was designed so that each model in the line was able to perform scientific, business and communications processing.

Answer: Over 100,000 in IBM offices

The formal System/360 announcement was a major event. Naturally, IBM's President Thomas J. Watson, Jr, made the announcement at the company headquarters in Poughkeepsie NY. Additionally, simultaneous announcements, conducted at 165 corporate offices around the country, were attended by 100,000 business executives.
Within a month, over 1000 orders had been received. The first S/360, a Model 40, was delivered to a customer a year later in April 1965.
According to a 1966 article in "Fortune Magazine", Watson bet the entire company on the S/360. Development required a commitment of $5 billion, which was double IBM's annual revenue and 25 times its annual profit. Not only that, but the announcement instantly obsoleted nearly all of IBM's entire products. Jim Collin's book "Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap...And Others Don't" lists the S/360 as one of the three all-time greatest business products (along with the Model T and the Boeing 707).
The gamble paid off handsomely. By some estimates, 25 years later (in 1989) the S/360 and its descendants continued to account for over 50% of IBM's revenues. They also comprised nearly 50% of large systems in use worldwide.

Answer: None of the Models 60, 62 or 70 were delivered

The models announced as part of the S/360 had a performance range with the highest processor being 50 times more powerful as the smallest. However, S/360 stretched the limits of IBM's technology both in manufacturing and logistics which resulted in serious production difficulties for the higher end models. One year after the initial announcement, IBM announced that Models 60, 62 and 70 were being withdrawn and replaced by different models.
Both Models 60 and 62 (a variation of Model 60 with faster memory) were superseded by the Model 65, which proved to be one of the most popular and long-lived of the entire line.
Model 70 was replaced by the Model 75. An interesting note is that the first Model 75 was delivered to NASA in January 1966 and processed data for Apollo 11's moon landing. NASA continued using it operationally until 1981.
Over the S/360's life, 18 different models were announced of which 14 made it into production and were shipped to customers.

Answer: IBM System/360 Principles of Operation

The "Principles of Operation" and its summarized version "Reference Data" (green card) specified the operation of a S/360 computer including details like the instruction set, addressing and register structure, reserved memory locations, how input and output is performed and the like.
Unlike the previous processors in which the architecture and price-point were designed together to meet the needs of a group of customers, All models were designed to operate the same way to handle the needs of all, or nearly all, users. Hardware models were produced to hit various price points by implementing architectural elements using varying degrees of either microprogramming versus hardwired instructions. This permitted software programs to run with little or no modification on any processor in the entire line.
The introduction of this architecture was probably the most influential element of the S/360 to shape the computer industry. This was especially true as IBM introduced newer systems (such as System/370) as extensions to rather than replacements of the S/360 architecture.
A standard architecture benefitted IBM internally by being able to consolidate their hardware and software development groups greatly reducing redundant development. Customers also benefitted from being able to upgrade to larger systems without the need to modify all the programs they had already developed. Independent software developers (third-party companies) benefitted by being able to develop their software once and market it to a wide range of companies. Finally, thousands of programmers and operators benefitted from having a transferrable set of skills in demand by many companies even though the exact computer configuration differed.
Over the last five decades, IBM has extended the architecture repeatedly including the current (as of 2014) System z.

Answer: Gene M. Amdahl

Gene Amdahl was a brilliant computer designer and one of the few people who employed by IBM twice. From 1952-55, Amdahl was one of the lead developers on the tube-based IBM 704, a high-performance processor for scientific-type workloads. Always an opinionated engineer, Amdahl left IBM over disputes on the design of the Stretch computer.
Five years later, in 1960 Amdahl was rehired by IBM and shortly thereafter was added to as Head of Design on the NPL (S/360) team where he played a significant role in developing the architecture. Once again, Amdahl differed with IBM on the direction of the follow-on computer line (called ACS or Advanced Computing System). Upon leaving IBM, he founded Amdahl Corporation which produced a line of large systems which were compatible with IBM's architecture and able to run both IBM operating systems and applications developed for them.
IBM was never an employer of David Packard, a founder of Hewlett-Packard (HP), Ken Olsen, a founder of Digital Equipment (DEC), or Steve Wozniak, a founder of Apple.

Answer: Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.

Another veteran of the IBM's Stretch project, Fred Brooks was S/360 Project Manager from its beginning until February 1964, shortly before the announcement. At that time, Brooks started managing OS/360 development.
OS/360 was the operating system for the large systems, typically Models 65 and larger. It was an ambitious design, intending to automate many functions which previously required manual intervention by a computer operator. During development it became obvious that the project was significantly behind schedule, so staff was added to catch up, but to no avail. Being released before it was fully stable, OS/360 went through well over a dozen major releases over the next several years before it became widely accepted.
Brooks left IBM becoming a professor at the University of North Carolina. In 1975, he published his analysis of software development in "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering."
In an essay sharing the name of the book, Brooks explains that developing very large software systems is completely different than small systems. The complexity of interactions prevents one from simply scaling up a small project into a large one. He makes an analogy that because a woman takes nine month to have a baby does not mean that nine women can reduce the time to one month. From this, we get Brooks' Law which states that "adding manpower to a late software project makes it later."
Gerald (Jerry) Weinberg's 1971 book "The Psychology of Computer Programming" is a delightful look at the human side of programming.
Tracy Kidder won a Pulitzer Prize for his 1981 "Soul of a New Machine." A writer rather than a computer technician, Kidder spent about a year working with the development team at Data General working on the Eclipse MV/8000 super minicomputer.
Donald Knuth produced "The Art of Computer Programming" or TAOCP which is a seminal work on computer algorithms which has received numerous awards and is widely regarded as a seminal work in the field. The first volume was published in 1968 and, as of 2010, four of the projected seven volumes have been published.

Answer: DOS/360

The Model 30 was one of the most popular of the smaller S/360 computers. It could have a maximum of 64 kB of main storage (that's not a typo, it's kilobytes) with many systems having only 16 or 32 kB.
OS/360, discussed in a previous question, was designed for multiprogramming, handling up to 16 tasks simultaneously but it required much more storage and processor capacity than was available at the low-end of the S/360 line. On the smaller systems, DOS/360 (or Disk Operating System/360 but usually called 'DOS') was the most widely used operating system. Other than a similar name, DOS/360 is totally unrelated to PC-DOS developed by Microsoft for the IBM Personal Computer. DOS/360 proved to be a very reliable operating system and has continued its enhancements, including DOS/VS, DOS/VSE, VSE/ESA and the current z/VSE.
TOS/360 (Tape Operating System/360) was a scaled down version of DOS/360 used in the early days of the S/360 by companies who could not afford the expense of hard drives, or in IBM's terminology, DASD (Direct Access Storage Device). In TOS/360, the operating system was loaded from magnetic tape which, needless to say, was extremely slow compared to loading from a disk.
OS/PCP (Operating System/Primary Control Program) was a scaled down version of OS/360 that had the same basic structure as the multiprogramming versions but instead ran only a single task. It was mainly used in the early days of S/360 by companies that were preparing to implement a multiprogramming version of OS once they received upgraded hardware.

Answer: Channel

Conceptually, a channel was a separate processor with its own unique instruction set. Channels executed "channel programs" which operated independently of and simultaneously with the main processor to perform such actions as reading a punched card, writing data on magnetic tape or locating and transferring data to or from DASD (a disk drive).
At the lower end of the S/360 line, channel programs were executed in microcode as part of the main processor. These small systems lost some performance but at substantial cost savings. On the higher end models, separate hardware channels were expensive but enabled the main processor to be much more effective at multitasking.
Drivers are software to control peripheral devices primarily outside of the IBM mainframe environment. Personal computers brought the term into the common vocabulary of computer users worldwide.
A Data Bus is the internal hardware connection used to move data from one part of the system to another, such as between the processor and memory (RAM).
Peripheral Processor was another term used for Channel by other manufacturers such as Control Data Corp.

Answer: Model 67

The Model 67 was referred to by competitors as a "fighting machine" because it was only available by special bid when IBM feared losing a customer to a competitor. Based on the Model 65, the Model 67 was enhanced by the addition of DAT (Dynamic Address Translation) hardware which enabled Virtual Storage allowing the computer to run programs requiring far more storage than was actually available on the system.
The Model 67 ran a unique operating system unrelated to either OS/360 or DOS/360, which were discussed earlier. CP-67/CMS (Control Program-67/Conversational Monitor System) allowed the processor to run many separate, seemingly independent virtual systems within a single computer. This allowed each time-sharing user to operate as though he/she had control of the entire system from remote terminals.
Model 67 is very significant because many, if not most, of its unique features were later incorporated to the System/370 architecture and hardware introduced in the early 1970s. The CP-67 operating system became VM/370 and its successors survive in 2014 as z/VM.
Model 65 was a traditional S/360 computer designed primarily for batch processing.
S/360 Model 44 was another so-called "fighting machine" available by special bid in competitive situations such as engineering requiring large-scale scientific type computing. The Model 44 was based on the Model 40 but instead of using microprogramming, the instructions were hardwired making it much faster than all but the largest processors in the S/360 line but at a significantly lower price.
The S/360 Model 195 was the largest system shipped as part of the S/360 line. It has the distinction of being the only computer with the same Model number in two successive lines. The S/370 Model 195 was very similar but had different processing characteristics.

Answer: HP

Although HP (Hewlett-Packard) marketed computers during the 1960s, including the HP 2100 introduced in 1966, it wasn't until later that their sales rose to the level to be considered a major player in the computer marketplace.
Six of the seven dwarves that are generally agreed upon are Burroughs, Univac (Sperry Rand), CDC (Control Data Corp.), Honeywell, GE (General Electric) and RCA (Radio Corp. of America). Yes, GE and RCA really did make computers back in the days of dinosaurs.
The seventh dwarf varies depending on who wrote the list or when it was written. NCR (National Cash Register) is the most common. Other names that sometimes appeared in these lists include SDS (Scientific Data Systems), ICL (Britain's International Computers Limited) or DEC (Digital Equipment Corp.)
By the early 1970s, GE and RCA had abandoned the computer field. Then popular term for IBM's competitors became the BUNCH for Burroughs, Univac, NCR, CDC and Honeywell.

If you're still interested in the S/360 history, IBM's historian, Emerson W. Pugh, has two excellent books. "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems," written in conjunction with Lyle R. Johnson and John H. Palmer) is an exhaustive (800+ pages) and somewhat dry history of the development of the two named systems, primarily focusing on the hardware aspects.
Much more readable, and half the length, is Pugh's "Building IBM: Shaping an Industry and Its Technology." Pugh covers IBM's history from its predecessors prior to Watson Senior's creation of IBM and its punched card monopoly, through the mainframe computer era including System/360 development and into the 1980s and 1990s era of personal computers and other developments.