$5 Million - System/360 Model 91
(The prices are only for the CPU; multiply the price by 3 or 4 to include disk, tape and printers)
UCLA had one. It was down a lot because of water-cooling leaks.
The UCLA guys were our buds.

The same program would run on a cheap Model 30 or an expensive Model 91. This was a revolution. Before, if you wrote a program for the cheap computer, you had to write a new program for the expensive computer.

Imagine if you paid programmers a million bucks for an inventory program. Then your business doubled and you needed a bigger computer. Pay the programmers another million bucks because the computers were entirely different.

Today if your Pentium 1.5Ghz (1,500Mhz) is too slow, you just buy a Pentium 3.0Ghz. You do not have to re-write Windows and Office and Photoshop. The System/360 Model 30 was 1 Mhz.

 

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   System/360 Model 91 Console
Gift of Stanford Linear Accelerator Center
System/360 Model 91 Console
1968
IBM Corporation, United States

The Model 91, the fastest machine in the IBM System/360 family, was primarily used for scientific applications. The first 360/91 began operating in January 1968 at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center.

The computer used IBM Solid Logic Technology (SLT). This advancement involved encapsulating five or six transistors into a small module and represented a bridge between discrete transistors and the integrated circuit.

Memory Type: Core Speed: 16,700,000 Add/s
Memory Size: 64M Cost: $5,500,000 +
Memory Width: (64-bit)

 

Photo
Installation of the IBM 360/91 in the Columbia Computer Center machine room in February or March 1969. Photo: AIS archive.

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Here's an excellent photo of the 360/91 console and 2250 display, just like ours at Columbia, but this is not Columbia. Date and place unknown. See how the console dwarfs the puny humans.

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System/360 Model 91 at Goddard Space Flight Center c. 1968
 

The IBM 360/91

IBM 360/91 Console

The front panel of the IBM 360 Model 91 in the Columbia Computer Center machine room, shortly before it was retired in 1980. Today it (the front panel, not the rest) sits in the Computer Museum History Center, La Jolla, California (search for "360/91"). This photo does not convey the size of the entire machine, but you can get an idea from the ceiling lights, which go off towards the vanishing point. CLICK HERE for an explanation of the buttons, knobs, dials, and switches.

Photo: Bob Resnikoff (cover of CUCCA Newsletter V12#17, 17 December 1980).

Last update: Mon Jan 5 15:20:27 2004

 

http://www.columbia.edu/acis/history/36091.html            Full Size
Finally, here's a shot of our 360/91 control panel in "deep storage" in the Computer Museum's Moffet Field facility, before relocating to Mountain View in June 2003:

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