Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
The Cyber 18 is a 16-bit minicomputer which was a successor to the CDC 1700 minicomputer. It was mostly used in real-time environments. One noteworthy application is as the basis of the 2550—a communications processor used by CDC 6000 series and Cyber 70/Cyber 170 mainframes. The 2550 was a product of CDC's Communications Systems Division, in ...
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 ...
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.