Influential features
The System/360 introduced a number of industry standards to the marketplace, such as:
- The 8-bit byte (against financial pressure during development to reduce the byte to 4 or 6 bits), rather than adopting the 7030 concept of accessing bytes of variable size at arbitrary bit addresses.
- Byte-addressable memory (as opposed to bit-addressable or word-addressable memory)
- 32-bit words
- The bus and tag I/O channel standardized in FIPS-60[7]
- Commercial use of microcoded CPUs
- The IBM Floating Point Architecture (until superseded by the IEEE 754-1985 floating-point standard, 20 years later)
- The EBCDIC character set[NB 2]
- Nine track magnetic tape
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