SABRE was a joint American Airlines–IBM investment in real-time transaction processing that turned reservations from a labor bottleneck into strategic software infrastructure.
Minuteman II turned military procurement into demand for integrated circuits at production scale, helping move microelectronics from experimental devices toward an industrial market.
Control Data's CDC 6600 was a concentrated corporate bet on speed, specialized architecture, and semiconductor performance that let a smaller company challenge IBM at the top of scientific computing.
DEC's PDP-8 lowered the price of a programmable computer enough to move computing into laboratories, factories, and equipment, creating a mass market for minicomputers.
IBM's System/360 was a bet-the-company investment in compatibility: one architecture, one peripheral strategy, and one software platform spanning a broad range of customers.