Origins
The S/360-67 was intended to satisfy the needs of key time-sharing customers, notably MIT (where Project MAC had become a notorious IBM sales failure), the University of Michigan, General Motors, Bell Labs, Princeton University, and the Carnegie Institute of Technology (later Carnegie Mellon University).
In the mid-1960s a number of organizations were interested in offering interactive computing services using time-sharing. At that time the work that computers could perform was limited by their lack of real memory storage capacity. When IBM introduced its System/360 family of computers in the mid-1960s, it did not provide a solution for this limitation and within IBM there were conflicting views about the importance of and need to support time-sharing.
A paper titled Program and Addressing Structure in a Time-Sharing Environment by Bruce Arden, Bernard Galler, Frank Westervelt (all associate directors at UM's academic Computing Center), and Tom O'Brian building upon some basic ideas developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) was published in January 1966. The paper outlined a virtual memory architecture using dynamic address translation (DAT) that could be used to implement time-sharing.
After a year of negotiations and design studies, IBM agreed to make a one-of-a-kind version of its S/360-65 mainframe computer for the University of Michigan. The S/360-65M would include dynamic address translation (DAT) features that would support virtual memory and allow support for time-sharing. Initially IBM decided not to supply a time-sharing operating system for the new machine.
As other organizations heard about the project they were intrigued by the time-sharing idea and expressed interest in ordering the modified IBM S/360 series machines. With this demonstrated interest IBM changed the computer's model number to S/360-67 and made it a supported product. When IBM realized there was a market for time-sharing, it agreed to develop a new time-sharing operating system called TSS/360 (TSS stood for Time-sharing System) for delivery at roughly the same time as the first model S/360-67.
The first S/360-67 was shipped in May 1966. The S/360-67 was withdrawn on March 15, 1977.
Before the announcement of the Model 67, IBM had announced models 64 and 66, DAT versions of its 60 and 62 models, but they were almost immediately replaced by the 67 at the same time that the 60 and 62 were replaced by the 65.
Read more about this topic: IBM System/360 Model 67
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