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Comment by tablespoon | Hacker News Reader

> The IBM System/360 was a groundbreaking family of mainframe computers announced on April 7, 1964. System/360 was an extremely risky "bet-the-company" project for IBM, costing over $5 billion

$5 billion in 2022 dollars or 1960s dollars?

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The company spent US $5 billion (about $40 billion today) to develop the System/360.

From this article, which describes the development of S/360 in detail: https://spectrum.ieee.org/building-the-system360-mainframe-n...

Ken - Dad got to see the S/360 assembly line one time (Kemet was a supplier for the 360), and he told me they had a machine built to probe & verify all the wiring in a cabinet. Pneumatic pistons pushed the test connectors (all of them, all at once) into the cabinet, and then another computer would run a set of verification tests to ensure that each wire ran to where it was supposed to, and that it had certain electrical properties (presumably crosstalk, signal loss, etc.)

While each model of 360 was standardized, customers could request certain options for their machine and IBM would accommodate them. So the testing computer would have to know what the customer's configuration was to know what the wiring was supposed to be for that particular cabinet.

I think it was actually 1960s dollars. The project was huge for its time, and had it failed, IBM would be but a footnote in the history of computing today.

$5 billion in 1964 is about $45 trillion today. so, uh, yeah, 2022 dollars. https://www.in2013dollars.com/us/inflation/1964?amount=50000...

The link your provided says $45 billion, not trillion.

The link says "$5,000,000,000 in 1964 is equivalent in purchasing power to about $44,968,064,516.13 today", which is $45 billion.

Considering that the entire revenue for IBM in 1964 was $3.2 billion (1964 money), spending $5 billion on a project (over several years) was certainly a "bet the company" move.

$45Tn is half the GDP of the whole planet (~$80Tn).

I should know. Law enforcement were trying to indict me for $100Tn in currency fraud. I wanted to point out to them that this was higher than the GDP of Planet Earth, but I don't think they would have understood what GDP is.

Story time?

I was arrested. In my wallet was a $100Tn bill. Law enforcement send it to the State crime lab for analysis. Lab report says it is the most sophisticated piece of currency forgery they have ever seen. It checks 8 of their 9 boxes (it's been eight years since I saw the report) which I remember some were: correct paper, correct ink, metal strip, hologram, dots.. I don't remember the rest. I can't remember which one it failed.

They finally decided not to follow-through on the prosecution for it. I guess someone eventually realized that:

a) It was a real bank note, not a forgery

b) It wasn't US currency as they had believed, but a note from Zimbabwe:

https://www.banknoteworld.com/zimbabwe-currency/100-trillion...

Wow.

I'm struggling to imagine multiple professional law enforcement staff closely examining it and not noticing that it makes no claims to be US currency.

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