IBM System/360 Model 67 - Legacy

Legacy

The S/360-67 had an important legacy. After the failure of TSS/360, IBM was surprised by the blossoming of a time-sharing community on the S/360-67 platform (CP/CMS, MTS, MUSIC). A large number of commercial, academic, and service bureau sites installed the system. By taking advantage of IBM's lukewarm support for time-sharing, and by sharing information and resources (including source code modifications), they built and supported a generation of time-sharing centers.

The unique features of the S/360-67 were initially not carried into IBM's next product series, the System/370, although the 370/145 had an associative memory that appeared more useful for paging than for its ostensible purpose. This was largely fallout from a bitter and highly visible political battle within IBM over the merits of time-sharing versus batch processing. Initially at least, time-sharing lost.

However, IBM faced increasing customer demand for time-sharing and virtual memory capabilities. IBM also could not ignore the large number of S/360-67 time-sharing installations – including the new industry of time-sharing vendors, such as National CSS and Interactive Data Corporation (IDC), that were quickly achieving commercial success.

In 1972, IBM added virtual memory features to the entire S/370 series, a move seen by many as a vindication of work done on the S/360-67 project. The survival and success of IBM's VM family, and of virtualization technology in general, also owe much to the S/360-67.

In 2010, in the technical description of its latest mainframe, the z196, IBM stated that its software virtualization started with the System/360 model 67.