Related Searches  IBM 7094  IBM mainframe   First and second
generation   IBM initially sold its computers without any
software, expecting customers to write their own; programs were
manually initiated, one at a time. Later, IBM provided compilers
for the newly developed higher-level programming languages
Fortran and COBOL. The first operating systems for IBM computers
were written by IBM customers who did not wish to have their
very expensive machines ($2M USD in the mid-1950s) sitting idle
while operators set up jobs manually, and so they wanted a
mechanism for maintaining a queue of jobs. It is generally
thought that the first operating system used for real work was
GM-NAA I/O, produced by General Motors' Research division in
1956. IBM enhanced one of GM-NAA I/O's successors and provided
it to customers under the name IBSYS. As software became more
complex and important, the cost of supporting it on so many
different designs became burdensome, and this was one of the
factors which led IBM to develop System