3 ms·
> In the first month following the S/360 announcement, customers worldwide ordered over 100,000 systems. Orders equal to 5 times the installed base in US, US,
by dmckeon 8y ago
> In the first month following the S/360 announcement, customers worldwide ordered over 100,000 systems.
Orders equal to 5 times the installed base
in US, US, EU, and JP, at a development cost
of $50k/order [5 billion $/100k orders = 50k in 1965 USD, ~400k in 2019 USD].
From a software perspective, Brooks’ book was
educational, but from a business perspective,
the order numbers are inspiring.
- lucas_membrane 8y ago> over 100,000 systems Where did that number come from? How many were model 20's? That would be 100 mainframes for each company in the Fortune 1000. How many of the 100,000 were installed and paid for? At even a low $50k per machine, that would be almost double IBM's total annual revenue in the mid 1960's, and they sold lots of punch cards, tabulators, sorters, collators, printers, minicomputers (1130's machines would have taken and 1620's, right?), calculating card punches, disk drives, tape drives, data cells, YNI. I toured the IBM mainframe production line at Poughkeepsie in early 1967, and it did not move quickly nor was it a beehive of activity, maybe 5 machines in process, and none of them moved in the 30-60 minutes I was there. I did not get the idea they could churn those things out in the 1000's.