alt Hacker NewsS/360 is what pushed 8 bit bytes to worldwide prominence.
IBM was ridiculously huge, both by actual IBM hardware, but also by clones, and manufacture of S/360-compatible systems. Even many wildly different computers often had third party interfaces to hook up S/360 channel devices, or controllers for the actual devices (it was common for channel devices to be linked like this: S/360 -> channel processor -> controller -> device-specific connections -> actual device).
Even the fact that we format code usually to 72 characters is related to 80-character standard S/360 punched card, where the remaining 8 characters were used for sorting/comment code, and why professional terminals (as opposed to things like 40 column mode on home computers) had 80 column displays.
Also, had ASCII been ready earlier, S/360 would have used ASCII as default encoding - IIRC S/360 team decided they can't wait for ASCII to be finalized and they needed to start design and making of various devices that would have to be encoding-aware, thus EBCDIC was born.
I think IBM's influence was more out-sized than mainstream tech people today realize. The 8-bit byte is a piece of it, for sure. I think the S/360 represented one of the first long-term-stable computing platforms-- something companies could plan on investing in and using for decades.
I didn't realize until recently how much IBM spend on S/360. It was simply astounding to me. In his Computer History Museum's oral history [0][1] Dr. Fred Brooks[2] says:
> I think was somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 million in 1964 dollars, which would be $4 billion today roughly
That checks out, from an inflation calculator perspective. That's wild. I had no idea money like that was being spent on platform development in the 60s.
[0] https://archive.computerhistory.org/resources/access/text/20...
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3S2g3VDwrlI
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Brooks