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◈ALB Atlas

OS/360 Dead

OS/360
KindOperating system
Appeared1966
Ended1972
StatusDead
CreatorIBM
FamilyOS/360
PlatformSystem/360
Sourcebitsavers.org ↗

The operating system that broke Brooks and taught the world software doesn't scale linearly — 'The Mythical Man-Month' is its postmortem.

Succeeded by MVS
Ran on IBM System/360
Created by IBM
Descendants MVS

OS/360 shipped in 1966 after consuming more manpower than any software project before it — Fred Brooks documented the disaster in The Mythical Man-Month. It introduced JCL, multiprogramming, and the System/360 family's promise of one OS across a 50:1 performance range.\n\nIts descendants — MFT, MVT, MVS, then z/OS — kept binary compatibility; a 360 jobstream can still run today.

Sources

  1. bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/
  2. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OS/360_and_Successors