mainframe

n. Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor
unit or main frame of a room-filling Stone Age batch machine. After the
emergence of smaller minicomputer designs in the early 1970s, the
traditional big iron machines were described as mainframe computers and
eventually just as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine
designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an
interactive timesharing operating system retrofitted onto it; it is
especially used of machines built by IBM, Unisys, and the other great
dinosaurs surviving from computing's Stone Age. It has been common wisdom
among hackers since the late 1980s that the mainframe architectural
tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for
number-crunching supercomputers having been swamped by the recent huge
advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. The wave of
failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers in the
early 1990s bore this out. The biggest mainframer of all, IBM, was compelled
to re-invent itself as a huge systems-consulting house. (See dinosaurs
mating and killer micro ). However, in yet another instance of the cycle of
reincarnation , the port of Linux to the IBM S/390 architecture in 1999
assisted by IBM produced a resurgence of interest in mainframe computing as
a way of providing huge quantities of easily maintainable, reliable virtual
Linux servers, saving IBM's mainframe division from almost certain
extinction.
