Design of a Small Business Data Processing System

Computer system designs in the 1980's will be technology-driven. The rapid advances in logic and storage technologies that occurred during the 1970's, coupled with the growth in size and function of system software, have produced substantial changes in the design, manufacture, and use of computer systems. Systems designed for the 1980's must be able to take advantage of these continuing advances without being made obsolete by them. This was the challenge presented to a group of engineers and programmers at IBM's Information Systems Division Development Laboratory in Rochester, Minnesota. Their mission was to design a new business data processing system with a stable, long-term architecture that could take advantage of improving technologies, incorporate new and more complex applications, and at the same time meet the needs of the small business environment. The result of their work was the IBM System/38.