That massive computer in the latest season of Mad Men is the real thing.
The machine that takes up a whole room in the fictional 1960s ad agency at the heart of the critically acclaimed TV series—and leads ad man Michael Ginsberg to chop off his own nipple—is one of the most important systems in the short history of computing. It’s an IBM System/360, and this year, we celebrate its fifteenth anniversary.
The 360 was actually a whole family of machines, the first line of general purpose computers that all ran the same operating system. That meant you could use all models with pretty much the same software applications and peripherals. Today, we take this sort of thing for granted. Myriad iPhones run the same OS, so they can run the same apps and plug into all the same speakers and headsets. But in the 1960s, these concepts were brand new.
via Wired
