via Penney Berryman and Planet Mainframe
Globally, 1969 was a noteworthy year – socially, politically, and technologically. Significant moments included:
- First humans landed and walked on the Moon, catapulting space exploration forward
- Beatles released the Abbey Road album, a landmark and final album
- First computer-to-computer link established on ARPANET, a precursor to the internet
- First use of an artificial heart in a human, pioneering new organ failure treatments
- IBM released the customer information control system (CICS) for its System/360 mainframes on July 8, revolutionizing transaction processing.
This July, Planet Mainframe proudly shines the spotlight on a true mainframe legend: Customer Information Control System (CICS). For 55 years – Happy Birthday! – CICS has powered high-volume transaction processing across industries, from banking and insurance to healthcare, government, and retail.
At its release in 1969, CICS contained 100 KLOC (Thousands of Lines Of Code) and cost $600 per month. That’s $5,255 in 2025 dollars, adjusting for inflation. Today, it handles 30 billion transactions per day to be precise.
And make no mistake: CICS is anything but stuck in the past. As we step into this month’s theme, we’ll explore how CICS continues to evolve, integrating with cloud-native tools, supporting modern frameworks like Java 21 and Spring Boot, and embracing observability with OpenTelemetry. The CICS of today is fast, resilient, and more accessible than ever.
“By using CICS, developers can focus on solving business problems and coding business logic into their applications rather than worrying about system functions such as database integration and security control points.”
—IBM Redbook Solutions Guide
