X-Nico

20 unusual facts about mainframe computer


Alternating current

Off-shore, military, textile industry, marine, computer mainframe, aircraft, and spacecraft applications sometimes use 400 Hz, for benefits of reduced weight of apparatus or higher motor speeds.

Body shopping

Body shopping in IT originated during 1996-1999 where there was huge demand for people with mainframe, COBOL and related technology skills to prevent systems being affected by the Y2K bug.

Bromochlorodifluoromethane

Bromochlorodifluoromethane was introduced as an effective gaseous fire suppression agent in the mid 1960s for use around highly valuable materials in places such as museums, mainframe rooms and telecommunication switching centers.

Celestica

Celestica's Toronto headquarters were originally the location of IBM's Toronto sales and support offices, which also supported a small manufacturing unit which built metal boxes for their mainframe computers and associated support systems.

Data quality

Before the rise of the inexpensive server, massive mainframe computers were used to maintain name and address data so that the mail could be properly routed to its destination.

DEC 7000/10000 AXP

The DEC 7000 AXP was positioned as a data center system, whereas the DEC 10000 AXP was positioned as a "mainframe" system.

DECsystem

The DECsystem (or DECSYSTEM) name was also used for later models of the PDP-10 mainframe, namely the DECsystem-10 and DECSYSTEM-20 series.

IBM 6400

These printers are designed for use on a variety IBM systems including mainframes, servers, and PCs.

Michael S. Hart

During Hart's time there, the University of Illinois computer center gave Hart a user's account on its computer system: Hart's brother's best friend was the mainframe operator.

Monolithic system

Mainframe computers used a monolithic architecture with considerable success.

Multiseat desktop virtualization

It is similar to server based computing only in the fact that one mainframe is supporting multiple users.

Multitier architecture

Typically, the user interface runs on a desktop PC or workstation and uses a standard graphical user interface, functional process logic that may consist of one or more separate modules running on a workstation or application server, and an RDBMS on a database server or mainframe that contains the computer data storage logic.

NSSC-1

The NSSC-1 had an assembler/loader/simulator toolset hosted on Xerox XDS 930 (24- bit) mainframe.

Rob Leatham

At the time, the computer room was a room full of mainframes that had less computing power than the average PC today.

The Standard Procurement System

While DoD had previous experience in licensing software, it largely revolved around either desktop computing (operating systems, office automation products, etc.) or back-end servers (mainframe operating systems, relational database management systems, etc.).

Vanilla software

As example, IBM's mainframe text publishing system BookMaster, provides a default way to specify which parts of a book to publish, called "vanilla", and a fancier way, called "mocha".

VAX 9000

The VAX 9000, code named Aridus or Aquarius, was a family of Supercomputer and mainframe computers developed and manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) using processors implementing the VAX instruction set architecture (ISA).

Virtual tape library

It was targeted for a mainframe market, where many legacy applications tend to use a lot of very short tape volumes.

Outside of mainframe environment, tape drives and libraries mostly featured SCSI.

Virtualization engine

Virtualization engines have existed in the mainframe environment for years, but the concept is only now catching up in heterogeneous corporate computer networks.


Anthony Stafford Beer

The system used a network of about 500 telex machines located at enterprises throughout the country and in government offices in Santiago, some of which were connected to a government-operated mainframe computer that would receive information on production operations, feed that information into economic modeling software, and report on variables (such as raw material supplies) that were outside normal parameters and might require attention.

Coldplug

In most computer systems, CPUs and memory are coldpluggable, but it is common for high-end servers and mainframes to feature hotplug capability of these components.

End-of-transmission character

The EOT character is used in legacy communications protocols by mainframe computer manufacturers such as IBM, Burroughs Corporation, and the BUNCH.

Fujitsu VP

Fujitsu had built a prototype vector co-processor known as the F230-75, which was installed attached to their own mainframe machines in the Japanese Atomic Energy Commission and National Aerospace Laboratory in 1977.

Fully qualified name

On the mainframe operating system MUSIC/SP, if one asks for the file name "X", one is making an unqualified reference either to the file X in the user's library, or to the file X in the common library if the user does not have a file named X and one does exist in the common library.

Gameframe

Whilst the Cell blades account for the required computing power, it's the high data throughput of the mainframe which is of particular interest.

ICL Direct Machine Environment

Direct Machine Environment, abbreviated DME, was a mainframe environment for the ICL 2900 Series of computing systems from International Computers Limited that was developed in the 1970s.

JEF codepage

JEF is a stateful EBCDIC charset used in Fujitsu mainframe systems called FACOM and some OASYS series personal word processors.

KEIS

KEIS is a stateful EBCDIC charset used in Hitachi mainframe systems.

LISTSERV

The original Listserv software, the Bitnic Listserv (also known as BITNIC LISTSERV) (1984–1986), allowed mailing lists to be implemented on IBM VM mainframes and was developed by Ira Fuchs, Daniel Oberst, and Ricky Hernandez in 1984.

Lotus DataLens

It provided drivers for a number of common data sources, including a variety of mainframe SQL servers, microcomputer database files of various sorts, and even flat-file systems.

Point-and-shoot interface

A point-and-shoot interface is an efficient object-oriented, text-based interface, usually presented on a non-GUI platform such as DOS or mainframe computers.

SAP R/2

What was unique about R/2 was that it was a packaged software application that processed real-time on a mainframe computer taking advantage of Time Sharing Option and integrated all of an enterprise's functions, such as accounting, manufacturing processes, supply chain logistics and human resources.

Supervisory program

Historically, this term was essentially associated with IBM's line of mainframe operating systems starting with OS/360.