IBM SYSTEM/360

On April 7, 1964, the face of computing changed. Before this time, most computers were designed for a specific purpose. Mathmatics; Science; Engineering. Computing; Communications; Storage. The System 360 was one of the first general purpose mainframe computers.

Linked to this page, you will find graphics of one of the original trade ads for the System 360 computer. In it are pictures of many of the available devices. The one I know for sure is the 2311 disk drive on the right of the large picture. I recognize several of the other devices, but don't know the IBM number for the device. I think that the 360 CPU is in the bottom left corner of the picture on the second page.

In any case, if you recognize the devices, let me know what they are, and we'll annotate the two pictures. To play the game correctly, go look through the pages first, but here's a key to what people have already sent me.

The page following the the large picture are the partial scans I used to stitch the larger image. If you'd like to play with them, and can get a better stitch and color match than I did, please send me a copy and I'll replace the image. You can e-mail me at nix@earthling.net.

Please excuse the yellowing of the paper, the thumb tack holes and the tape marks. This ad was passed down to me through several hands; they obviously didn't send them out to people in grade school. I've had it since about 1975. Excuse also the size of the files. I scanned the pages at 200 dots per inch, and I realize that this has yielded some very large files. They also don't display well in the browser, but I wanted everyone to be able to make best use of the graphics. If viewing the page becomes an issue, I'll reduce the size of the graphics, but let's try it this way first.

On to the ad...

After seeing the machine, have a look at the Green Card collection. Every assembler programmer had to have a pocket reference card, and generally wore them out faster than pencils.