“You can put lipstick on a hog, but you can’t make her a Lady”

That’s how my boss introduced me to our IBM Enterprise Server… AKA, the Main-frickin’-frame. The Host. The Big Iron. Big Bertha. The big black box with the big red button, which you are allowed to push only once in your career at the bank (because you will be fired or killed for pushing it… unless of course it’s on fire or something).

Why does this matter? Simple… This week is the 40th anniversary of the release of IBM’s first Mainframe computer. Yay! Go Mainframe! You can read all about it in this article on Wired.

Edit: The boss just told me that despite the Wired article, the IBM 1401 came before the 360 (and there may have been others before that, he didn’t say). He was working on one when the 360 came out. I think the esteemed editors at Wired had a little screwup. IBM agrees.

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