In 1964, IBM risked its entire corporate empire on the System/360, a chaotic gamble to make all of its future machines compatible with the same software — and the architecture proved so robust that modern enterprise mainframes today are still running sections of binary code written more than sixty years ago (opens in new tab)

On the morning of April 7, 1964, in a coordinated announcement broadcast to more than 100,000 people gathered in 165 cities around the world, IBM did something almost no large company had ever done. It bet itself. The product it was unveiling was called the System/360 — a family of six computers, fifty-four peripherals, and […]