I think the 360 marked the change from hardware-driven development to software-driven. The 'arcane' architectures would have maximised performance for a given amount of hardware, and programmers were relatively cheap. But the 360 reversed that, hardware was now cheap and didn't need to work at 100% efficiency, but software development was expensive so writing and re-writing needed to be minimised.
Computer Science seems to be mostly developed in the 1968 - 1973 time frame by average people with access with a (personal) computer with about 32K of memory. All the new software development was Time Sharing of some kind, or a revised BETTER our NEW programming language, that
wants faster and larger core memory and the deluxe Binary-Trinary-Decary virtual ALU*. That why I suspect the state of computers is so dismal today. Ben. * Implemented by a patented serial computron. PS: Strange how Unix runs millions of users, and Multics never really made it out of the lab.
