Interesting article in Spectrum about IBM's System/360

On 04/12/2019 12:41 PM, Carlos E Murillo-Sanchez via cctalk wrote: Yup, they bet the company on a new product. it was a VERY well thought-out bet, but still a big reach. One area they really made a mistake on was software. They designed a really ambitious OS (OS/360 MFT) and then an even more ambitious version (OS/360 MVT) on a poorly thought-out timeline. Fred Brooks actually had a nervous breakdown over it, and maybe some other guys, too. Fred Brooks' "The mythical man month" is just too short, and doesn't have enough actual anecdotes, but is a good read anyway. At the time he wrote it, there were probably a bunch of stories that he couldn't yet tell. Also, the hardware was a huge leap. IBM went from building computers with all purchased components on single-sided paper-phenolic PC boards to making their own transistors and diodes and packaging them on little ceramic hybrid modules, and then putting those on 4-layer PC boards. They pioneered a LOT of packaging technology on the 360. The developed flip-chip bump-bonding of semiconductors, and were doing this almost 20 years before anybody else were doing this. But, of course, there would be growing pains with such development. The entire state of New York was a bustling beehive of computer manufacturing. They made disk and tape drives, printers, hand-assembled close to 20,000 mainframe CPUs plus all the controllers and memory, between 1965 and 1969. Totally mind boggling! Jon