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A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, [1] is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning, and large-scale transaction processing.
IBM mainframes are large computer systems produced by IBM since 1952. During the 1960s and 1970s, IBM dominated the computer market with the 7000 series and the later System/360, followed by the System/370. Current mainframe computers in IBM's line of business computers are developments of the basic design of the System/360.
The Burroughs Large Systems Group produced a family of large 48-bit mainframes using stack machine instruction sets with dense syllables. [NB 1] The first machine in the family was the B5000 in 1961, which was optimized for compiling ALGOL 60 programs extremely well, using single-pass compilers.
Similarly to the mainframe version of VM/CMS, the VM/PC also created the illusion of virtual disks, but on the PC version these were maintained as PC DOS files, either on floppy or hard disk. For example, the CMS virtual disk belonging to user FRED at device address 101 was stored as the DOS file FRED.101.
These computers are capable of handling and processing very large amounts of data quickly. Mainframe computers are used in large institutions such as government, banks, and large corporations. They are measured in MIPS (million instructions per second) and can respond to hundreds of millions of users at a time [citation needed].
The IBM 704 is the model name of a large digital mainframe computer introduced by IBM in 1954. Designed by John Backus and Gene Amdahl, it was the first mass-produced computer with hardware for floating-point arithmetic. [1] [2] The IBM 704 Manual of operation states: [3]
The first use of channel I/O was with the IBM 709 [2] vacuum tube mainframe in 1957, whose Model 766 Data Synchronizer was the first channel controller. The 709's transistorized successor, the IBM 7090, [3] had two to eight 6-bit channels (the 7607) and a channel multiplexor (the 7606) which could control up to eight channels.
A more interactive form of computer use developed commercially by the middle 1960s. In a time-sharing system, multiple teleprinter and display terminals let many people share the use of one mainframe computer processor, with the operating system assigning time slices to each user's jobs. This was common in business applications and in science ...