When the System/390 line was introduced in September 1990 as
IBM's most comprehensive announcement of products, features
and functions in more than a quarter century, it included the
IBM Enterprise System/9000 family of 18 new processors.
One measure of the announcement's breadth was that a total
of 23 different IBM manufacturing and development sites around
the world were involved in the roll-out. The new
processor family provided significant price performance gains
and flexible growth options spanning a 100-fold performance
range increase from the smallest (model 120) to the most
powerful (model 900 six-way multiprocessor.)
The ES/9000s exploited new technologies such as high-speed
fiber optic channels with IBM's new ESCON architecture,
ultra-dense circuits and circuit packaging that provided
higher performance, extended supercomputing capabilities and
twice the processor memory previously available.
