The Future Systems project (FS) was a research and development project undertaken in IBM in the early 1970s to develop a revolutionary line of computer products, including new software models which would simplify software development by exploiting modern powerful hardware.
There were two key components to FS. The first was the use of a single-level store that allows data stored on secondary storage like disk drives to be referred to within a program as if it was data stored in main memory; variables in the code could point to objects in storage and they would invisibly be loaded into memory, eliminating the need to write code for file handling. The second was to include instructions corresponding to the statements in high-level programming languages, allowing the system to directly run programs without the need for a compiler to convert from the language to machine code. One could, for instance, write a program in a text editor and the machine would be able to run that directly.
Combining the two concepts in a single system in a single step proved to be an impossible task. This concern was pointed out from the start by the engineers, but it was ignored by management and project leaders for many reasons. Officially started in the fall of 1971, by 1974 the project was moribund, and formally cancelled in February 1975. The single-level store was implemented in the System/38 and moved to other systems in the lineup after that, but the concept of a machine that directly ran high-level languages has never appeared in an IBM product.