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Article: Mainframes
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- Computer Sciences
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CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2002 The Gale Group Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Mainframes
Prior to the advent of the personal computer or PC, the minicomputer, and the microcomputer, the term "computer" simply referred to mainframes. What differentiates the modern mainframe from these other classes of computers is the scope of the processing taking place. The typical mainframe today serves tens of thousands of users processing thousands of transactions every second while maintaining centralized
terabyte
-size databases. Even the mighty supercomputer, although unquestionably faster doing one thing at a time, is not up to this task.
Surprisingly, the processors used in these machines are not much faster than those found in PCs. The architecture of the mainframe, ...