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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.
This list of computer size categories attempts to list commonly used categories of computer by the physical size of the device and its chassis or case, in descending order of size. 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 ...
The term mainframe computer was created to distinguish the traditional, large, institutional computer intended to service multiple users from the smaller, single-user machines. These computers are capable of handling and processing very large amounts of data quickly.
A mainframe computer is a much larger computer that typically fills a room and may cost many hundreds or thousands of times as much as a personal computer. They are designed to perform large numbers of calculations for governments and large enterprises.
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.
Reliability, availability and serviceability (RAS), also known as reliability, availability, and maintainability (RAM), is a computer hardware engineering term involving reliability engineering, high availability, and serviceability design. The phrase was originally used by IBM as a term to describe the robustness of their mainframe computers ...
In computing, channel I/O is a high-performance input/output (I/O) architecture that is implemented in various forms on a number of computer architectures, especially on mainframe computers. In the past, channels were generally [ a ] implemented with custom devices, variously named channel , I/O processor , I/O controller , I/O synchronizer ...
The IBM System/360 (S/360) is a family of mainframe computer systems announced by IBM on April 7, 1964, [1] and delivered between 1965 and 1978. [2] System/360 was the first family of computers designed to cover both commercial and scientific applications and a complete range of applications from small to large.