It was a moonshot, both in expenditure and magnitude. https://spectrum.ieee.org/building-the-system360-mainframe-nearly-destroyed-ibm https://spectrum.ieee.org

It was a moonshot, both in expenditure and magnitude. https://spectrum.ieee.org/building-the-system360-mainframe-nearly-destroyed-ibm https://spectrum.ieee.org/building-the-system360-mainframe-n... "The company spent US $5 billion (about $40 billion today) to develop the System/360, which at the time was more than IBM made in a year, and it would eventually hire more than 70,000 new workers. Every IBMer believed that failure meant the death of IBM."