Intended to be sold in large amounts as departmental machines ("VAX killers"),[9] the 9370 initially suffered from lack of software and the failure of IBM to market it properly.

[10] Nevertheless, the systems were popular at least with users actually needing System/370 compatibility while not wanting to accept the expense of a larger system (like e.g. smaller software houses) or with users (like some large IBM customers) preferring hierarchically structured distributed processing solutions rigidly managed by central communication controllers like IBM 37xx.

In 1990 IBM announced the "ES/9000" series; the rack-mounted models 120-170 with 31-bit Enterprise Systems Architecture (ESA) and ESCON were the suggested upgrades for ES/9370 users.

A militarized variant of the 9370 named the System/MIL-370 was announced alongside the original 9370 models, designed to operate in harsher environmental conditions than the standard 9370 hardware.

An upgrade (Miscellaneous Equipment Specification, MES) was available which involved - among other things - replacing the 9332 FBA drives with CKD enabled DASDs.