• 1975

Hardware Description

Amdahl Corp. launched its first product, the Amdahl 470/6, in 1975, competing directly against IBM's high-end machines in the then-current System/370 family, but with IBM's announcement of Dynamic Address Translation (DAT), Amdahl announced the 470V/6 and dropped the 470/5. (At IBM, Gene Amdahl had co-designed the groundbreaking 32-bit architecture, 24-bit addressing, System/360 line of computers. Applications written for the System/360 can still run, unmodified, on today's zSeries mainframes four decades later.) At the time of its introduction, the 470V/6 was less expensive but still faster than IBM's comparable offerings. The first two 470V/6 machines were delivered to NASA (Serial Number 00001) and the University of Michigan (Serial Number 00002).