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System/360 was meant to be a good all-around system, not optimized specifically for business or science, as previous mainframes were, but good for both. 360 degrees in a circle, you know.

Notice how it skips System/380. IBM was going to replace the mainframe line with its Future Systems project, which would have single-level store (everything is RAM, everything persists, page cache takes care of moving stuff in and out of physical disk drives) and be so tightly-integrated nobody would be able to clone it, as the plug-compatible vendors had been able to clone parts of the System/360 and /370 systems. The only real result of this was the AS/400 midrange systems, now the i Series, I think.



Re 360

I remember reading that it converged two seperate segments into one. 360 degrees makes sense.

Re System/380

Always wondered why they skipped 380. Thanks for the enlightening details on that. The anti-cloning angle is amusing.




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