Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
College campuses used computer mainframes in education since the initial days of this technology, and throughout the initial development of computers. The earliest large-scale study of educational computer usage conducted for the National Science Foundation by The American Institute for Research concluded that 13% of the nation's public high schools used computers for instruction, although no ...
The arrival of the personal computer, with the Altair 8800 in 1975, changed the field of software in general, with specific implications for educational software. Whereas users prior to 1975 were dependent upon university or government owned mainframe computers with timesharing, users after this shift could create and use software for computers in homes and schools, computers available for ...
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.
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 ...
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.
Ownership was later on transferred to Unisys and the product and mainframe computer centre resources transitioned to Unisys ACUS, the "Australian Centre for Unisys Software" in Sydney, Australia. Gil Simpsons Christchurch team went on to create the Jade language/database that could import and run LINC code on commodity hardware.
In 1973, APL was generally available only on mainframe computers, and most desktop sized microcomputers such as the Wang 2200 or HP 9800 offered only BASIC. Because SCAMP was the first to emulate APL\1130 performance on a portable, single user computer, PC Magazine in 1983 designated SCAMP a "revolutionary concept" and "the world's first ...