8 Sep
1998
8 Sep
'98
1:21 p.m.
If it has the same qualifications as a mini, but takes
up more than say 4 racks,
*requires* air conditioning, it's a mainframe. An additional clue - mainframes
usually don't speak unix. A mainframe does exactly the same job as a mini,
except that it's much larger and can handle many more users.
I seem to defending the mainframe today...
Anyway, mainframes are not big minis! Minis are generally very interactive
(process terminal keypresses one at a time, or maybe respond to external
signals from an A/D box). Mainframes are not interactive things - they
like to work on huge jobs that require moving tons of information on
disk or tape to more disk or tape, often with little human interaction at
all. Take a look at IBMs terminals (327x) - they are quite smart, sending
out whole chunks of data, preassembled for the mainframe. The mainframe
need not be bothered dealing with escape characters and such to move the
cursor around - it has better things to do. The less keypresses, the
better.
William Donzelli
william(a)ans.net