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==History==
The ACS project began in 1961 as ''Project Y'' with a goal of “building"building a machine that was one hundred times faster than [[IBM 7030 Stretch|Stretch]]”".<ref name="smotherman">{{cite web | last = Smotherman | first = Mark | title = IBM ACS-1 Supercomputer | date = 2006-05-31 | url = http://www.cs.clemson.edu/~mark/acs.html | accessdate = 2007-02-27}}</ref> Initial work began at the [[Thomas J. Watson Research Center|IBM Watson Research Center]]. Several significant computer pioneers contributed to the project, including [[John Cocke (computer scientist)|John Cocke]], [[Herb Schorr]], [[Frances E. Allen|Frances Allen]], [[Gene Amdahl]], and [[Lynn Conway]].
In late 1964, Amdahl had taken a teaching position at [[StandfordStanford University]]. In January 1965 he was named an [[IBM Fellow]] for his work on the [[System/360]], which bywas thisintroduced timeshortly before he left the company. Even after less than a year, the 360 was one of the most successful computers in history with an order book many times longer than predicted. Around the same time, IBM decided to centralize development of the ASC at a new ___location in [[Mountain View, California]]. As a Fellow, heAmdahl was entitled to work at any IBM facility of his choosing, and having heard of the move, asked to join ASC. After a short time, in August 1965 he argued that the machine should be based on the System/360 instruction set, which caused ASC management to ostracize him.<ref name=interview>{{cite journal |journal= IEEE Design and Test of Computers |date=April 1997 |title=Interview with Gene Amdahl}}</ref>
Over the next two years, the issue of 360 compatibility was argued back and forth. In January 1967, [[Ralph L. Palmer]] asked [[John Backus]], [[Robert Creasy]], and Harwood Kolsky to review the project. Kolsky concluded that this would be too difficult, and pointed out that the ASC was aimed at the [[CDC 6600]] market, not the 360's, so if the customer was interested in compatibility, 6600 would seem more useful. The next month, Amdahl once again argued for 360 compatibility for marketing reasons, and then in December he met personally with Kolsky to demonstrate how this might work. The previous month, in November 1967, Herb Schorr had presented a timeline for the first delivery in 1971 with a development budget for software on the order of $15 million. Amdahl argued that a fast 360 platform would offer much of the performance yet eliminate the need to develop a new [[operating system]] and all of the associated programming languages and support, and that that money would be better spent on improving OS/360 in general, which would improve the entire line.<ref name="smotherman"/>
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