most important hardware announcement ever made by a tech firm?
I think Honeywell started making clones of the old maschines and were successful and then IBM made that code run on 360.
Not quite, as I mention elsewhere they continued incompatible low end systems, most prominently the existing business 1401 series, and used 360 technology to make the affordable 1965 1130. I would assume the same for the 1969 System 3, which eventually evolved in the AS/400 or IBM I as they call it now, which internally is still by far the most sophisticated mass manufactured computer system architecture.
I have to note that the AS/400 was so much ahead of its time it's still, in many aspects, ahead of our time.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/building-the-system360-mainframe-n...
"The company spent US $5 billion (about $40 billion today) to develop the System/360, which at the time was more than IBM made in a year, and it would eventually hire more than 70,000 new workers. Every IBMer believed that failure meant the death of IBM."
I suppose you could say the same thing about the iPhone but it did clearly move things off in a different direction relative to predecessors.
The most important thing the iPhone brought imho was low, fixed-priced data plans that were affordable by regular folks. This was a true innovation by Jobs and perhaps his single most important achievement, although obviously someone else would eventually have pulled it off.
Also having a camera with a large screen eventually made the iPhone take the most pictures of any device.
But the iPhone did have its price slashed by around $200. Also it took til the iPhone 5 to have a great deal of people to adopt the iPhone.
So the announcement and the iPhone itself made it influential and then a few revisions later the iPhone really became dominant.
What a smartphone should do was pretty solidified by then. I used a Sony Ericsson one back then and we had Palm and Windows CE devices as well. What the iPhone has shown was a UX that didn't try to mimic a computer - it was its own thing, with animated transitions and multi-touch. This made all other smartphones look clunky in comparison. The second revolution Apple introduced (later) was the app store. It extended the zero-pain experience of iTunes to applications - no more downloading .prc files and opening them with a custom tool. With the iPhone it was easy.
Also, the integration with OSX apps didn't hurt either - it made the Mac and the iPhone a mostly seamless continuum.
This is partially a result of smartphone design at the time. They were, in design (and sometimes literally), PDAs with phone functionality added. It was assumed that this paradigm was the correct one. Consumers were asking for 'iPod-like' phones at the time, and manufacturers responded by making mp3 player hybrid phones like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LG_Chocolate_(VX8500) We now know that this approach was too literal -- too feature based. What consumers actually wanted wasn't an mp3 player glued to a phone, it was smartphone that was designed for non-business use cases first -- one that wasn't a PDA.
At the time, there was actually a lot of commentary that the iPhone was destined to fail: it ignored what was then seen as the most important parts of building a smartphone at the time, being able to integrate into business communication systems: e.g. Blackberry Enterprise Server or Exchange ActiveSync.
In fact, iPhones weren't even used by many large businesses until later.
The cool factor won, though. When it came out it reminded me of the first LED watches; it you had to push a button on the watch (so now it took two hands to tell time). The red LEDS glowed for a few seconds then vanished. I first saw one in a James Bond movie.
I'm hoping physical controls will make a comeback, but they're often incompatible with water resistance. Maybe some day a touchscreen will emerge with good haptic feedback? I can dream.
(The iPod was similar. A lot of people viewed the initial models as just another and not very compelling MP3 player.)
And you're right that the iPhone also hit the market at a time when data plans were becoming more affordable for people not expensing them. My Treo's plan was fairly reasonable as a recall but then you couldn't really use a huge amount of data anyway.
The iPhone line of products came to blow the doors off the “smart phone” market, like the 360 did with mainframes. You can’t seriously claim that the touch screen was “seen as a disadvantage by many” when the new line sold orders of magnitude more units than any smart phone before it, and became the dominant form factor for all mobile phones within a few years. Like the 360 did with mainframes.
“obviously someone else would eventually have pulled it off” can be said about any innovation, including the 360. What IBM did, like what Apple did decades later, appears obvious in hindsight. But like IBM’s 360 and mainframe computers, Apple is the one that did it with smart phones.
Low price data plans, an app ecosystem several orders of magnitude bigger than anything before it, portable computing in the pocket of billions of people. Nobody achieved that before the iPhone.
Like the impact of the 360, the creation of iPhone eventually enabled a vast number of new businesses and products (for good or ill) including Uber, Snap, and countless others. Pre-existing businesses like Facebook grew significantly after the iPhone was released.
Sure, lots of earlier devices had some of the features that iPhone released with, just like computers existed long before the System/360. But Apple packaged it up in a way that worked, proceeded to own the market for a decade (especially in terms of revenue), and became one of the largest companies in the world on the back of its success.
Much like IBM with the 360.
1) uses architecture that has at least user-space binary compatible descendands today.
2) introduced 32b wordsize with 8b byte addressable memory.
3) was designed to use ASCII. (which is somewhat ironic as all the IBM big iron things are mostly synonymous with EBCDIC, which was only meant as temporary solution because ASCII was not finalized in 1964)
Going from memory and not counting the very limited 360/20, from the 8 bit internally 360/30 all the way to the 360/91 supercomputer you could run basically the same software. Which eventually solved a huge problem for IBM and the industry in general because not so much effort had been put into comparability in the early days, and IBM had two major lines of big computers, decimal ones for business and binary ones officially for science and engineering but by then often used by businesses.
Although stuff at the low end which somewhat like the 360/20 remained incomparable, the business 1401 series remained, also see the scientific 1130 which a lot of people including myself got their first start at programming on. It was a very clever design that used 360 technology to make an affordable system, for quite some time they'd put effort into that niche with the 650 and the CADET, Can't Add, Doesn't Even Try, a backronym from how they based it on a big block of core memory which they were very good at manufacturing by then vs. the drum as used in the 650, and and used that with tables etc. to avoid including an ALU.
And leaders of the effort going all the way up to Tom Watson Jr. made a catastrophic mistake in deciding virtual memory, which they called dynamic address translation (DAT) was a bad thing, which hardened so much the first models of the System/370 which used "monolithic" circuits, ICs, didn't have it (and they didn't do right by their customers who bought those first models).
The affordability of the 360 series and their ability to make so many but much less than initial demand rested on their avoiding too new at the time ICs and using automation to manufacture small boards logic boards on a ceramic substrate: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid_Logic_Technology This was an era in which IBM still massively benefited from its electromechanical wizardry gained in the punched card data processing days.
This lost them the high end computer science community which I believe seriously harmed them in the long term, ultimately made what they now call IBM Z a niche product.
The IBM 1401 could operate on arbitrary strings of digits in hardware ; since that was my first machine, I was disappointed when I used these silly 'binary' machines. However, a typical instruction + operand fetch/store took about 100 microseconds on the '1401; yes, that is 10 kilo-instructions per second! There were many programming tricks to minimize instruction fetch e.g.'chaining' instructions, using left-over contents of the regs in the next instr, and using parts of instr as data, the most common being:
"A *-6,FOO" because "*-6" is relative address, which points to the letter 'A', which was BCD +1, etc. Equivalent to ++FOO;
The pdp-11/45 I used next took about 2.5 usec per instruction with 2 memory operands -- 400 kilo instructions per second! This "40x" speedup of the 11/45 over the IBM 1401 more than compensated for the hardware arbitrary-precision addition/subtraction! (oh, and on the '1401, the HW 'Multiply/Divide Feature' was another big group of electronic cards, if you bought that) http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/ibm-1401.html
(edit: learned that \* needed to not have * gobbled by the markdown italics sentinel https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)