This chapter highlights some of the history of IMS and describes how IMS fits into contemporary IT multitiered enterprise architectures.

IMS is IBM’s premier transaction and pre-relational database management system, virtually unsurpassed in database and transaction processing availability and speed. IMS clients have trusted IMS with their most critical business asset—their operational data—for decades.
Today’s IMS has only a superficial resemblance to the product that first shipped in 1969. However, an application program that ran on IMS in 1969 will still run today, unchanged, on the current release of IMS. From the beginning, IBM’s focus on the future of IMS has been unwavering.
IMS continues to be a strategic component of today’s enterprise computing environments. This chapter highlights some of the history of IMS and describes how IMS fits into contemporary IT multitiered enterprise architectures.
In This Chapter

• IMS and the Apollo Program
• IMS as a Database Management System
• IMS as a Transaction Manager
• Who Uses IMS?
• IMS and Enterprise Integration

IMS and the Apollo Program

On May 25, 1961, United States President John F. Kennedy challenged American industry to send an American man to the moon and return him safely to earth, thus launching the Apollo program. North American Aviation, in partnership with IBM, fulfilled the requirement for an automated system to manage large bills of material for the construction of the spacecraft in 1965. In 1966, the IBM and North American Aviation teams were joined by three members from Caterpillar Tractor. Together, they designed and developed a system that was called Information Control System and Data Language/Interface (ICS/DL/I).
The IBM team completed and shipped the first release of ICS in Los Angeles in 1967, and in April 1968, ICS was installed. The first “READY” message was displayed on an IBM 2740 typewriter terminal at the Rockwell Space Division at NASA in Downey, California, on August 14, 1968. Less than a year later, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 landed on the moon’s surface. ICS was subsequently relaunched as Information Management System/360 (IMS/360) and made available to the IT world. In short order, IMS helped NASA fulfill President Kennedy’s dream and also became the foundation for the database management system (DBMS) business.
Much has changed since 1968; IMS continues to evolve to meet and exceed the data processing requirements demanded by today’s enterprise businesses and governments.