|
The Future Systems project was a research and development project undertaken in IBM in the early '70s, aiming to develop a revolutionary line of computer products, including new software models which would simplify software development by exploiting modern powerful hardware. == Background and goals == Until the end of the 1960s, IBM had been making most of its profit on the hardware, bundling support software and services along with its systems. Only hardware boxes carried a price tag, but those prices included an allocation for software and services. Other manufacturers had started to market compatible hardware, mainly peripherals such as tape and disk drives, at a price significantly lower than IBM, thus shrinking the possible base for recovering the cost of software and services. Early in 1971, after Gene Amdahl had left IBM to set up his own company offering IBM compatible mainframes, an internal IBM taskforce (project Counterpoint) concluded that the compatible mainframe business was indeed a viable business, and that the basis for charging for software and services as part of the hardware price would quickly vanish. Another strategic issue was that the cost of computing was steadily going down while the costs of programming and operations, being made of personnel costs, were steadily going up. Therefore, the part of the customer's IT budget available for hardware vendors would be significantly reduced in the coming years, and with it the base for IBM revenue. It was imperative that IBM, by addressing the cost of application development and operations in its future products, would at the same time reduce the total cost of IT to the customers and capture a larger portion of that cost. At the same time, IBM was under legal attack for its dominant position and its policy of bundling software and services in the hardware price, so that any attempt at "re-bundling" part of its offerings had to be firmly justified on a pure technical basis, so as to withstand any legal challenge. In May–June 1971, an international task force convened in Armonk under John Opel, then a vice-president of IBM. Its assignment was to investigate the feasibility of a new line of computers which would take advantage of IBM's technological advantages in order to render obsolete all previous computers - compatible offerings but also IBM's own products. The task force concluded that the project was worth pursuing, but that the key to acceptance in the marketplace was an order of magnitude reduction in the costs of developing, operating and maintaining application software. The major objectives of the FS project were consequently stated as follows: *make obsolete all existing computing equipment, including IBM's, by fully exploiting the newest technologies, *diminish greatly the costs and efforts involved in application development and operations, *provide a technically sound basis for re-bundling as much as possible of IBM's offerings (hardware, software and services) It was hoped that a new architecture making a heavier use of hardware resources, the cost of which was going down, could significantly simplify software development and reduce costs for both IBM and customers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「IBM Future Systems project」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|