Yes. There's a bit of survivor bias in this story and a tendency to look back and think the outcome was inevitable. Although, if you look at the story of the P

Yes. There's a bit of survivor bias in this story and a tendency to look back and think the outcome was inevitable. Although, if you look at the story of the PC Division, there are similarities even though the scale and risk are different. Both the S360 and PC were new creations built by empowered teams that addressed issues with existing technology. Standard interfaces and extensibility were a big part of the success of both stories. Not "open" in the sense we use the word today but standardized - the ISA bus allowed the extensibility of the PC via any number of peripherals, just as whatever the cabling spec of the S360 was for disk, tape, card punch, sorting and tabulating equipment. Enabled by software. A lot is made of the hardware story here, it would be interesting to have part of the operating system development story.