Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
to compete directly with the Honeywell H-200) to the model 360/90
supercomputer, which compared favorably to the CDC-6600. By
making all of these machines software compatible (theoretically, at
least), IBM supplied an inexpensive upgrade path for its customers. The
client could purchase just the amount of computing power that they
needed, knowing that if their needs changed in the future they could
simply transfer their existing applications and data to the next level of
System/360 hardware. They could also make use of their existing periph-
erals, such as tape readers and printers, without requiring an expensive
upgrade.
The System/360 was an enormously risky and expensive undertaking.
The
Fortune
journalist Tom Wise referred to it as “IBM's $5,000,000,000
Gamble.” He quoted one senior IBM manager as calling it the “we bet
the company” project.
35
The riskiest and most expensive component of
System/360 development was the OS/360 operating system. As men-
tioned earlier, in the years between 1963 and 1966, over fi ve thousand
staff years of effort went into the design, construction, and documenta-
tion of OS/360. When OS/360 was fi nally delivered in 1967, nine months
late and riddled with errors, it had cost the IBM Corporation half a
billion dollars—four times the original budget, or “the single largest
expenditure in company history.”
36
Although the System/360 project turned out to be a tremendous
success for IBM, sealing its position of leadership in the commercial
computer industry for the next several decades, the OS/360 project was
generally considered to be a fi nancial and technological disaster. The
costs of the OS/360 debacle were human as well as material; according
to Frederick Brooks, they were “best reckoned in terms of the toll it took
on people: the managers who struggled to make and keep commitments
to top management and to customers, and the programmers who worked
long hours over a period of years, against obstacles of every sort, to
deliver working programs of unprecedented complexity.” Many in both
groups left, victims of a variety of stresses ranging from technological to
physical.
37
The highly publicized failure of the OS/360 project served as a dra-
matic illustration of the shortcomings of the hierarchical management
method. Techniques that had worked well on an application requiring
ten thousand lines of code failed miserably when applied to a million
lines of code project. Faced with serious schedule slippages, quality
problems, and unanticipated changes in scope, the OS/360 managers did
what traditional manufacturing managers were accustomed to doing:
