IBM launched its first commercial computer (https://ibm.biz/Bd294n), the IBM 701, in 1953, which was the most powerful high-speed electronic calculator of that time. Further progression of the technology produced mainframes, and that revolution was started in the mid-1950s (https://ibm.biz/Bd294p).

Even before co-founding Intel in 1968 with Robert Noyce, Gordon Moore espoused his theory of Moore's Law (https://intel.ly/2IY5qLU) in 1965, which states that the number of transistors incorporated in a chip will approximately double every 24 months. Exponential growth still continues to this day, though this trend may not continue for long. 

IBM created its first official VM product called VM/370 in 1972 (http://www.vm.ibm.com/history), followed by hardware virtualization on the Intel/AMD platform in 2005 and 2006. Monolithic applications were the only choice on early computing machines.

Early machines ran only one operating system. As time passed and machines grew in size, a need to run multiple operating systems by slicing the machines into smaller virtual machines led to the virtualization of hardware.