9 Mar
2023
9 Mar
'23
2:09 p.m.
On Mar 9, 2023, at 5:00 PM, Steve Lewis via cctalk
<cctalk(a)classiccmp.org> wrote:
Actually, to answer my own question: if "main frame" refers to the actual
framing... well the PDP-1, PDP-10, PDP-10 were minicomputers and still
required a lot of metal "framing" to set up. So, can't they be considered
mainframes?
(another notion is that mainframes are "multi-user" -- most early
microcomputers were not multi-user, as they just barely supported the needs
of one user; I'm not sure if the very first minicomputers were multi-user?)
I wouldn't think so, but "multi-user" is in part an OS question. Many early
machines were large and expensive enough that they would have been called mainframes if
the term had existed back then, but with small enough memory and lack of hardware
facilities like interrupts that make a multi-user OS problematic. For that matter,
recognizable operating systems didn't appear right at the start. OS/360 is probably
not the oldest software system to deserve the name "operating system" but
clearly many of the early machines, even large ones, were handled by "bare metal
programming".
paul