IBM's System/360 was 50 years old on April 7, 2014

[HP67]

That's one of the many things I love about this platform. I've worked all my career on it and watched it evolve and grow, yet virtually nothing I learned had to be thrown away. That's lasting value and I don't regret a minute of it. I hope I can keep working in this environment until I retire.

There is a common aspect in what HP has done when it produces a top-quality, best-of-breed family of calculators with refinements over the years. They're careful not to make you throw out the skills and code you already acquired, to the extent possible. It's a lot different, since the IBM ecosystem is gigantic and cannot be replaced in the near or mid-term (and certainly not for the lack of attempts and trillions of dollars) but HP has still done a lot of things right, extraordinary if you consider how much committment they had to enter and differentiate in such a small market.

I hope both companies retain their traditional values as much as possible. Here's to another 50 years of IBM mainframes and HP calculators!