The Era Of General Acceleration Has Begun

The era of general purpose computing began in April 1964 with the launch of the aptly named System/360 mainframe by IBM. Computing was simpler then: Batch processing of integer data and, eventually, online transaction processing.

But the idea was that one family of systems could support a whole stack of systems software, including operating systems, databases, transaction monitors, programming tools, and such. Thanks to the System/360’s enormous success, soon thereafter dozens of different minicomputer makers stormed the datacenter with their own unique processors and software stacks tuned for them, aimed at specific workloads – some of them back office work like the System/360 mainframes did, some of them focused on new eras such as simulation and modeling.

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