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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 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.
Since the rise of the personal computer in the 1980s, IBM and other vendors have created PC-based IBM mainframe-compatible systems which are compatible with the larger IBM mainframe computers. For a period of time PC-based mainframe-compatible systems had a lower price and did not require as much electricity or floor space.
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].
Transaction Processing Facility (TPF) [2] is an IBM real-time operating system for mainframe computers descended from the IBM System/360 family, including zSeries and System z9. TPF delivers fast, high-volume, high-throughput transaction processing, handling large, continuous loads of essentially simple transactions across large, geographically ...
User settings are stored centrally, so that the user can logon from any terminal and that session will remember their previously-chosen commands for each key. Most personal computers copied this, and have a set of 12 or 24 function keys. Even some defaults have endured: the F1 key triggers a "help" function on a large number of mainframe & PC ...
Datacom/DB is a relational database management system [1] for mainframe computers.It was developed in the early 1970s by Computer Information Management Company and was subsequently owned by Insyte, Applied Data Research, Ameritech, and Computer Associates International, Inc. Datacom was acquired by CA Technologies (formerly Computer Associates), which renamed it to CA-Datacom/DB and later to ...