The IBM 360 . . .


. . . the computer that changed the world is fifty years old today.

Some of its history and impact is detailed here. The mainframe's descendants live on, as the story attests.

My dad worked on the 360, first on the hardware side and then later as a systems programmer and debugger. I remember him coming home with a thick stack of dot matrix paper filled with hexadecimal "dumps." He'd spend hours looking through the stacks for letters out of place that indicated bugs. We made giant paper airplanes when he was done.