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