The S/360, the computer that spawned IBM's mainframe line, turns 40 on Wednesday--but it's not wallowing in a midlife crisis. Although some pundits regularly declare the death of the mainframe, the ...

It's always a pleasure to celebrate the anniversary of a technology that's older than me. Thus, small sweet sherries all round for the birthday of IBM's S/360 mainframe, launched 40 years ago today.

Before IBM was synonymous with personal computers, they were synonymous with large computers. If you didn’t live it, it was hard to realize just how ubiquitous IBM computers were in most industries.

Mainframes became the symbol of stolid reliability for many years in IT departments. So when the PC revolution hit in the 1980s, these back-office powerhouses were viewed as something of a throwback, ...

Forty years. Who’d have thought it would last so long? On April 7, 1964, IBM announced its System/360. The 360 wasn’t the first mainframe, or the fastest, or even the most technically advanced. It was ...