In the late 1960s and early 1970s, IBM considered modifying radically the conception of their computing environment to avoid a number of foreseeable bottlenecks in the 1980s given the predicted rate of change. This became the IBM Future Systems project (FS).

Because it implied a major departure of the S/360 concept, which would not have allowed any easy migration from S/360 to FS (just as later no easy migration path would exist between the Apple II and the Apple Macintosh), the project was dropped in the mid-seventies due to user resistance to products which were not forward compatible.

Although FS was dropped as a whole, bits and pieces of Future Systems technology were incorporated in IBM s mainstream product line:

Many of the ideas from Future Systems were later re-used in the IBM AS/400 line of computers.

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