On the 7th of April 1964 IBM announced the first mainframe called IBM system 360. The extraordinary thing about IBM system 360 is that an assembler program written for this the first mainframe most likely will be able to execute today almost 51 years later. It will be exciting to see whether Apple or INTEL/Microsoft will be able to acheive the same amount of backward compability. I doubt it.

Even more exciting or rather scary is that fifty percent of us working on the mainframe is born after the 7th of April 1964. At the same time this is also the main challenge for the mainframe. We need to make many more young people interested in and working with the mainframe.

And now over to some funny parts of being more than fifty years old. Here are some interesting links. For instance you can read the original IBM System/360 press announcement. Take a close look at the speed of this machine and the size of the internal memory. Something has really changed during the last fifty years. On the other side IBM was much more foresighted then than in the early 1980s when they announced the PC with an upper limit of memory set at 640KB. An even more interesting and detailed link is the description of IBM System/360 by Wikipedia.

Let me congratulate IBM on the fantastic acheivement of developing an architecture fifty years ago that is still going strong today. I hope IBM will keep up the good work.