1964: Thomas Watson Jr. does a 360.

The article focuses on Thomas Watson Jr. IBM's "$5,000,000,000 Gamble," as FORTUNE called it in 1966, grew out of the company's own compatibility problems. Rivalry between the company's two divisions produced a "wildly disorganized" array of offerings, CEO Thomas J. Watson Jr. recalled in his autobiography, Father, Son & Co. It was T. Vincent Learson, one of the "harsh, scratchy types" Watson valued, who gathered executives from across the company at the New Englander Motor Hotel near Stamford, Conn. They produced a report that was the birth certificate of the System/360, a family of computers that would remain compatible with future generations. For the first time the world's computers had a common language.