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One generation's "supercomputer" is the next generation's "mainframe", and a "PDA" does not have the same set of functions as a "laptop", but the list still has value, as it provides a ranked categorization of devices. It also ranks some more obscure computer sizes.
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of smaller general-purpose computer developed in the mid-1960s [1] [2] and sold at a much lower price than mainframe [3] and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors.
Since the late 1950s, [NB 3] mainframe designs have included subsidiary hardware [NB 4] (called channels or peripheral processors) which manage the I/O devices, leaving the CPU free to deal only with high-speed memory. It is common in mainframe shops to deal with massive databases and files. Gigabyte to terabyte-size record files are not ...
These traditional minicomputers in the last few decades of the 20th century, found in small to medium-sized businesses, laboratories and embedded in (for example) hospital CAT scanners, often would be rack-mounted and connect to one or more terminals or tape/card readers, like mainframes and unlike most personal computers, but require less ...
HP 3000 Series III. The HP 3000 series [1] is a family of 16-bit and 32-bit minicomputers from Hewlett-Packard. [2] It was designed to be the first minicomputer with full support for time-sharing in the hardware and the operating system, features that had mostly been limited to mainframes, or retrofitted to existing systems like Digital's PDP-11, on which Unix was implemented.
Companies that sold mainframe computers began to offer machines in the same price and performance range as superminicomputers. [10] By the mid-1980s microprocessors with the hardware architecture of superminicomputers were used to produce scientific and engineering workstations. [11] The minicomputer industry then declined through the early ...
For example, the computers behind the first Space Shuttle simulator consisted of thirty-six 32-bit minis inputting and/or outputting data to networked mainframe computers (both IBM and UNIVAC), all in real-time. The 8/32 was used in the Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, Department of Planetary Sciences at the University of Arizona for research ...
Midrange computers, or midrange systems, were a class of computer systems that fell in between mainframe computers and microcomputers. [1] [failed verification]This class of machine emerged in the 1960s, with models from Digital Equipment Corporation (PDP lines), Data General (), and Hewlett-Packard (HP 2100 and HP 3000) widely used in science and research as well as for business - and ...