After a stint as president of IBM’s Federal Systems Division, in 1969 Evans was named president of IBM’s Systems Development Division (SDD). He was responsible for the development of what was announced on June 30, 1970 as the IBM System/370 product line, initially with three models, later gradually expanded to 17 models. The hardware was supported by four main operating systems. Any application that had run on System/360 could run on System/370. Equally important, where most of the processing on System/360 had been batch-oriented, with only the beginnings of interactive processing, new features of the System/370 opened the door to explosive growth in online transaction processing.