The Platform of the Ages

Dr. Fred Brooks, who led the development of System/360 and OS/360 and documented the latter in his 1975 famous work, “The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering,” wrote a follow-up about the design of this platform 35 years later in his 2010 book, “The Design of Design: Essays from a Computer Scientist.” In the book, he points out that, for the architecture team, the real System/360 was the design concept itself, a platonic ideal computer. 

The very fact that, less than two decades into the modern electronic computing era, it had become possible to establish a “platonic ideal” for system-of-record computing shows how profoundly it had integrity with everything that it was designed to automate, from the accounting of the business world to landing people on the moon. 

While Brooks’ 2010 perspective implicitly highlights the success of this vision, a retrospective from the 60th anniversary of this platform makes it clear that this foundational design continues to form the basis for unlimited innovation that will enable and realize whatever will drive and define IT into the future.

The visionary and foundational architectural innovations continue to emerge from this ultimate platform. Tarquinio explains, “If you zoom out, you'll see so many examples of how we were planting seeds for the future. We are always thinking about, how do we get someplace? And what are the steps we have to take there? 

“And Telum is another great example: We introduced the AI accelerator on-chip so we could do inferencing at scale. Well, that's really setting the stage for how we're going to expand the way we deliver AI compute going forward. So that was the seed, the pretty incredible seed!”

Many IBM partners have taken that innovation a step further. Jeanne Glass, 2022–2023 IBM Champion and founder and CEO, VirtualZ Computing, is one such example. VirtualZ helps clients and prospects solve data access issues by making it easier for cloud applications to access mainframe data.

“We're not innovating a new platform per se, we're extending the value of the mainframe for customers and in many ways mitigating some of the reasons customers talk about getting off the mainframe, by making it easier for the mainframe to coexist in the IT infrastructure as opposed to kind of being a separate space, bringing it together with the rest of the IT platforms,” Glass says.

“So, I know that there is a lot of opportunity for innovation in the mainframe, existing companies that have been developing mainframe software for years are continuing to innovate just like us. But I do think there is opportunity for start-ups in this space, and as I said earlier, I would love to see more start-ups coming to the mainframe space above and beyond VirtualZ.”

IBM continues to plan for future innovations for the platform. In fact, IBM Z’s plan extends at least 10 years out, according to Ross Mauri, general manager, IBM Z and LinuxONE. The mainframe team works closely with IBM Research, which plans even further out. IBM looks 10, 20 and 30 years out, according to Mauri. “And they're also signaling to us the things that we're going to need to take into account technologically wise to solve either technical problems or client business problems.”