Discover the Exciting Stories of the IT Industry from the 1960s

The 1960s was perhaps the most contradictory and exciting decade in the history of computing. While the world was gripped by Cold War tensions, the Vietnam War, and the hippie movement, a quiet but all-consuming revolution was taking place in the depths of research laboratories and corporate boardrooms. This was the decade when the computer evolved from an exotic toy for scientists into an indispensable infrastructure of modern civilization. Not only did technology advance, but the mindset itself changed. The software industry was born, plans for the first global networks were created, and humanity interacted with machines in real-time for the first time. The story of the 1960s is not about bits and bytes, but about risk-taking, genius, and the foundations upon which our digital world was built.

The "Big Blue" All-or-Nothing Game – The IBM System/360 Legend

In the early 1960s, IBM (International Business Machines) was already undisputedly the king of computing, but its empire stood on unstable legs. The company's product portfolio was chaotic. They manufactured seven different computer families that were neither hardware nor software compatible with each other. If a customer outgrew their machine and wanted to upgrade to a larger one, everything (the entire software code, data structures, and hardware control processes) had to be rewritten, which was an expensive and painful process that opened the door for competitors.

In 1961, under the leadership of Vice President T. Vincent Learson, the SPREAD (Systems Programming, Research, Engineering, and Development) committee was formed, which articulated the future in a radical 80-page report. A single, unified computer family must be created that uses the same architecture and software from the smallest model to the most powerful. This idea was considered heresy at the time. Engineers rebelled, saying that a machine optimized for scientific calculations could not be good for business data processing as well. However, Thomas J. Watson Jr., IBM's president, understood the strategic significance and approved the project.

The scale of development was incomprehensible. The $5 billion budget (equivalent to tens of billions of dollars in today's value) exceeded the cost of the United States' atomic weapon development program, the Manhattan Project. This was capitalism's largest privately financed commercial risk venture in history. Watson later said: "This was the biggest gamble I ever played". If the System/360 failed, IBM would probably go bankrupt.

Chief architect Gene Amdahl and his team worked on the technical challenges, introducing concepts that are now considered fundamental, such as the 8-bit byte (instead of the previous 6-bit), the 32-bit word length, and general-purpose registers. However, completing the hardware was only the beginning. The real nightmare was the software, the OS/360 operating system. The project's leadership fell to Fred Brooks, who directed thousands of programmers in ever-growing chaos. This is when the famous "Brooks's Law" was born, which he later formulated in his seminal work "The Mythical Man-Month": "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later". Training new people and increasing the number of communication channels takes more time than the extra manpower brings.

Finally, on April 7, 1964, IBM announced the System/360. The success was overwhelming. Companies loved the promise of "compatibility". They could buy the smaller model and know that their software would run on the larger machines years later. With this step, IBM not only swept the market but also created the basic model of modern computing: platform thinking. The System/360 architecture proved so robust that IBM's mainframe computers today are still capable of running some of the binary code written in the 1960s.

The "Seven Dwarfs" and the BUNCH – Survival in IBM's Shadow

IBM's dominance was so overwhelming (they controlled more than 70% of the market) that the press and the industry only referred to the market players as "Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs". The dwarfs—Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, Control Data Corporation (CDC), Honeywell, General Electric (GE), and RCA—fought a desperate battle for the crumbs. The brutality of the situation is well illustrated by the fact that by the end of the decade, two giants, GE and RCA, also gave up the fight and exited the computer business because they saw no prospect of profitability against IBM. At that point, the acronym changed to "BUNCH" (Burroughs, UNIVAC, NCR, CDC, Honeywell), which aptly described the remaining quintet.

The key to survival was specialization. Since they couldn't win by "force", competitors tried to succeed through technological innovation or special market niches:

Burroughs: They bet on technical elegance and the banking sector. Their B5000 machine was revolutionary. The hardware was specifically designed to support high-level programming languages (especially ALGOL). While Assembly ruled on other machines, Burroughs engineers believed that the future belonged to structured languages. Their stack-based architecture was decades ahead of its time and in many respects was safer and more efficient than IBM's solutions.
UNIVAC: The former market leader (which was synonymous with computers in the 1950s) remained strong in the government and large enterprise sector. They were the first to experiment with dual-processor systems to increase reliability.
NCR (National Cash Register): As their name suggests, they came from commerce. Their strategy was brilliant. They didn't compete for supercomputers but targeted the digitization of cash registers and back-end systems, dominating retail data processing.
Honeywell: They followed the "cheaper and simpler" strategy. Their famous "Liberator" software could convert programs written for the IBM 1401 to run on Honeywell machines, thus luring away price-sensitive customers.

This competitive situation, although it seemed like a comfortable monopoly for IBM, actually created a constant pressure to innovate. It was the BUNCH companies that often introduced technological innovations first (virtual memory, multiprocessing), which IBM only adopted later, but with greater marketing.

Seymour Cray and the "Wizard of Chippewa Falls" – The Speed Obsessives

Of the "Seven Dwarfs", Control Data Corporation (CDC) chose the boldest path. William Norris, the company's CEO, set a single goal: they would manufacture the world's fastest scientific computers. The key figure in this vision was a reclusive, brilliant engineer, Seymour Cray.

Cray didn't like corporate bureaucracy. In 1962, he told Norris that he could only build the new supercomputer if he could move away from the company's Minneapolis headquarters. Norris agreed and built him a lab in his hometown, Chippewa Falls, in the woods of Wisconsin. Here, far from the harassment of managers, Cray and a handful of 34-person team (including the janitor and cleaner) set out to do the impossible: defeat IBM's development army of thousands.

The result was the CDC 6600, unveiled in 1964. This machine wasn't just faster than its competitors; it was the first machine to be called a "supercomputer". The CDC 6600's secret lay in its revolutionary architecture. Cray recognized that the central processing unit (CPU) was slowed down by administrative tasks such as reading data or printing. Therefore, in the 6600, he built 10 smaller so-called "peripheral processors" (PP) alongside a single, brutally fast central processor. These "small" processors did the dirty work, allowing the central brain to focus exclusively on mathematical calculations. This configuration was the precursor to today's modern GPUs and heterogeneous systems.

The machine's speed (3 megaflops) was three times that of IBM's then top machine, the Stretch (IBM 7030). The cooling was also unique. The heat from thousands of transistors was dissipated by circulating freon gas, making the inside of the machine look like an industrial refrigerator. The CDC 6600 immediately became a favorite of nuclear research institutes (such as Los Alamos), meteorological services, and the military.

When Thomas Watson, IBM's president, saw the market data, he wrote an angry internal memo (the famous "Watson memorandum"): "I don't understand how it's possible that a 34-person laboratory, where the janitor is included in the headcount, was able to defeat us, the world's largest computer manufacturer". Cray's response was reportedly laconic: "It seems Mr. Watson answered his own question". CDC's success proved that in the IT industry, sheer size cannot substitute for genius and focused engineering work.

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The article continues on Stacklegend IT Blog, with interesting stories such:

The Minicomputer Rebellion – When the Machine Came Down to the People
"Spacewar!" and the Big Bang of the Gaming Industry
The "Software Crisis" and the Birth of Software Engineering
SABRE – The Real-Time Business Revolution
The Data Storage Leap – The "Disk Pack" and Portability
BASIC – The Democratization of Programming at 4 AM
Douglas Engelbart's "Mother of All Demos" – A 90-Minute Vision of the Future
The Birth of ARPANET and the First "LO" – The Ancestor of the Internet
Packet Switching – How to Survive Nuclear War (and YouTube)
ASCII and Bob Bemer – Creating a Common Language
The Founding of Intel – The "Traitorous Eight" and the Birth of Silicon Valley
The Olivetti Programma 101 – The Forgotten First PC
The HP 9100A – The "Programmable Calculator" That Wasn't Really a Calculator
ELIZA – Artificial Intelligence's First "Psychologist"
Unimate – The First Industrial Robot on the Assembly Line
Why Are the 1960s the Most Important Decade in IT History?

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Discover the Exciting Stories of the IT Industry from the 1960s

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