- 1939 - Atanasoff-Berry Computer created at Iowa State.
Beginning in 1935, John Vincent Atanasoff, a physics professor at Iowa State College, pioneered digital electronics for calculating. His students were working with linear partial differential equations, and he experimented with analog, then digital calculators to aid in their solution. Atanasoff built this simple model of the ABC to demonstrate his concepts of digital computation. The number stored in one of the capacitor drums is added to or subtracted from the number stored in the other drum. (On loan from J. V. Atanasoff, X12.80.) Atanasoff and graduate student Clifford Berry built a prototype ABC (Atanasoff-Berry Computer) in 1939, and a full-scale model in 1942. Like the Bell Labs Model I, the ABC was not a computer in the modern sense, since it lacked program control and was not general purpose.
The ABC was the first of several proposals to use electronics for calculation or logic in the decade after Atanasoff began investigations in 1935. Other projects and proposals included those of Bush and Crawford both at M.I.T; Zuse and Schreier in Berlin; the British foreign office; Rajchman at R.C.A. The makers of the ENIAC, the first electronic computer, were familiar with Atanasoff's and Rajchman's work. The degree to which the ABC influenced the ENIAC design is still being debated by participants and historians.
- 1940 - Konrad Zuse's -Z2 uses telephone relays instead of mechanical logical circuits.
- 1943 - Colossus - British vacuum tube computer.
- 1944- Eniac (electronic numerical integrator and calculator )
It was operated in MOORE SCHOOL. The ENIAC has thirty separate units, plus power supply and forced-air cooling, weighed over thirty tons. Its 19,000 vacuum tubes, 1,500 relays, and hundreds of thousands of resistors, capacitors, and inductors consumed almost 200 kilowatts of electrical power. But ENIAC was the prototype from which most other modern computers evolved. It embodied almost all the components and concepts of today's high- speed, electronic digital computers. Its designers conceived what has now become standard circuitry such as the gate (logical "and" element), buffer (logical "or" element) and used a modified Eccles-Jordan flip-flop as a logical, high-speed storage-and-control device. The machine's counters and accumulators, with more sophisticated innovations, were made up of combinations of these basic elements. ENIAC could discriminate the sign of a number, compare quantities for equality, add, subtract, multiply, divide, and extract square roots. ENIAC stored a maximum of twenty 10-digit decimal numbers. Its accumulators combined the functions of an adding machine and storage unit. No central memory unit existed, per se. Storage was localized within the functioning units of the computer.
The primary aim of the designers was to achieve speed by making ENIAC as all-electronic as possible. The only mechanical elements in the final product were actually external to the calculator itself. These were an IBM card reader for input, a card punch for output, and the 1,500 associated relays.
Another design objective was to make the electronics simple and reliable. This goal was achieved by utilizing vacuum tubes in a minimum of basic circuit combinations. To ensure reliable operation, circuits were constructed to rigidly tested standard components which were operated at current, voltage, and power levels below their normal ratings.
The ENIAC was not originally designed as an internally programmed computer. The program was set up manually by varying switches and cable connections.
Specifications-
Codename: ENIAC
CPU: 17,468 vacuum tubes, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors, 1,500 relays, and 6,000 manual switches
CPU speed: ENIAC could execute 5,000 additions, 357 multiplications, and 38 divisions in one second
introduced :1946
OS : hard wired
initial price :total cost approximately $500,000
footprint :167,3 m2
energy consumption :180 kW
- 1945- John von Neumann writes "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC" in which he outlines the architecture of a stored-program computer. This report changed the direction of computer development away from punched paper tape.
- 1951- UNIVAC 1
The first UNIVAC I mainframe computer was delivered to the Census Bureau. Unlike the ENIAC, the UNIVAC processed each digit serially. But its much higher design speed permitted it to add two ten-digit numbers at a rate of almost 100,000 additions per second. Internally. It was the first mass-produced computer. The central complex of the UNIVAC was about the size of a one-car garage: 14 feet by 8 feet by 8.5 feet high. It was a walk-in computer. The vacuum tubes generated an enormous amount of heat, so a high capacity chilled water and blower air conditioning system was required to cool the unit. The complete system had 5200 vacuum tubes, weighed 29,000 pounds, and consumed 125 kilowatts of electrical power.
- 1952
*Illiac I, Univac I at Livermore predicts 1952 election,
*AVIDAC built at Argonne
*The Remington (later SperryRand) Model 409 is delivered to the Internal Revenue Service facility in Baltimore.
*MANIAC (mathematical analyzer, numerical integrator and computer) built at Los Alamos by Metropolis. It is responsible for the calculations of Mike, the first hydrogen bomb. This machine is followed by MANIAC II,
*IBM-builds the STRETCH supercomputer and a series of commercial super computers that have made the Laboratory the world's largest scientific computing center.
*The IBM 701 Electronic Data Processing Machine announced by IBM President Thomas J. Watson, Jr. was IBM's first commercially available scientific computer and the first IBM machine in which programs were stored in an internal, addressable electronic memory. It was the first of the pioneering line of IBM 700 series mainframe computers, including the 702, 704, 705 and 709. The computer consisted of two tape units (each with two tape drives), a magnetic drum memory unit, a cathode-ray tube storage unit, an L-shaped arithmetic and control unit with an operator's panel, a card reader, a printer, a card punch and three power units. The 701 could perform more than 16,000 addition or subtraction operations a second, read 12,500 digits a second from tape, print 180 letters or numbers a second, and output 400 digits a second from punched-cards.
- 1953
IBM's drum memory 650 computer, announced. It sells for $200,000 to $400,000 and is a great success: more than 1800 will be sold or leased. The basic IBM 650 has 2000 words of memory and 60 words of core memory. It will be the first computer on which IBM makes a meaningful profit.
- 1954
*IBM 650 (first mass-produced computer) o the market.
*FORTRAN developed by John Backus.
*ORACLE-Oak Ridge Automated Computer And Logical Engine.
*Texas Instruments introduces the silicon transistor.
*Univac II introduced.
- 1955
IBM 704 announced. It was the first large-scale commercially available computer system to employ fully automatic floating point arithmetic commands. It was a large-scale, electronic digital computer used for solving complex scientific, engineering and business problems and was the first IBM machine to use FORTRAN. The 704 and the 705 were the first commercial machines with core memories.IBM 705 announced. Developed primarily to handle business data, it could multiply numbers as large as one billion at a rate of over 400 per second. In a 1954 IBM publication, the 705 was credited with "Forty thousand or twenty thousand characters of high-speed magnetic core storage; Any one of the characters in magnetic core storage can be located or transferred in 17 millionths of a second; Any one of these characters is individually addressable."Honeywell computer business was originated from the Datamatic Corporation, founded in Newton MA, as a joint-venture by Raytheon and Honeywell, to produce large-scale computer systems. Raytheon sells its 40% interest to Honeywell in 1957
- 1956- MANIAC 2, DEUCE (fixed head drum memory), clone of IAS
The Air Force accepts the first UNIVAC Solid State Computer. The machine was one of the first to use solid state components in its central processing unit. Remington Rand was not able to market a commercial version for three years. The UNIVAC Solid State Computer came in two versions: the Solid State 80 handled IBM-style 80 column cards, while the Solid State 90 was adapted for Remington Rand's 90 column cards. A Solid State system consisted of the CPU and drum memory, card reader, card punch, and printer. There was the option of adding a tape controller and up to ten UNISERVO II tape drives. The drives could read both mylar tape and the old UNIVAC metallic tape: the mode was selected by a switch on the front of the drive. Actually a hybrid, the CPU had twenty vacuum tubes, 700 transistors, and 3000 FERRACTOR amplifiers.
- 1957- Installation of the first Honeywell Datamatic D-1000 to Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Michigan
- 1958
Nippon Telegraph & Telephone Musasino-1: 1st parametron computer, Jack Kilby-First integrated circuit prototype; Robert Noyce works separately on IC's, NEC 1101 & 1102
- 1959
The fully transistorized IBM 7090 computer system delivered. The system had computing speeds up to five times faster than those of its predecessor, the IBM 709. It was both a scientific and business machine. It was finally withdrawn from production in 1969
The IBM 1401 is called the Model T of the computer business, because it is the first mass-produced digital, all-transistorized, business computer that can be afforded by many businesses worldwide. The basic 1401 is about 5 feet high and 3 feet across. It comes with 4,096 characters of memory. The memory is 6-bit (plus 1 parity bit) CORE memory, made out of little metal donuts strung on a wire mesh at IBM factories. The 1401 has an optional Storage Expansion Unit which expanded the core storage to an amazing 16K. The 1401 processing unit can perform 193,300 additions of eight-digit numbers in one minute. The monthly rental for a 1401 is $2,500 and up, depending on the configuration. By the end of 1961, the number of 1401s installed in the United States alone will reach 2,000 -- representing about one out every four electronic stored-program computers installed by all manufacturers at this time. The number of installed 1401s will peak at more than 10,000 in the mid-1960s, the system will be withdrawn from marketing in February 1971.
- 1960
*Paul Baran at Rand develops packet-switching, NEAC 2201,
*Whirlwind-air traffic control,
*Livermore Advanced Research Computer (LARC),
*Control Data Corporation CDC 1604,
*First major international computer conference
*UNIVAC announces the 1107 (completed in 1962) with the EXEC I operating system which occupied about 8K of the 1107's 32K of memory. The machine is intended to support true multiprogramming: sharing CPU time among several batch runs.
*Introduction of Honeywell 400Decision to launch the GE Mosaic line, a family of four 24-bits computers. The lower models will be announced as GE-415, GE-425 and GE-435. They will be known as Compatible GE-400 series.
- 1961
*IBM Stretch-Multiprogramming
*IBM 7040 and 7044 computer systems announced.
- 1962
*First use of virtual memory in a mainframe computer.
*Control Data Corporation opens lab in Chippewa Falls headed by Seymour Cray,
*Telestar launched,
*Atlas-virtual memory and pipelined operations.
*IBM 7090 console
*Timesharing-IBM 709 and 7090
*Introduction of Honeywell 1800 (first shipps in 1964).
*IBM's 1440 Data Processing System is a low-cost compact electronic computer designed specifically for small and medium-size business firms.
*IBM 7094 computer announced. With a memory reference speed of two microseconds (millionth of a second), the 7094 could in one second perform 500,000 logical decisions, 250,000 additions or subtractions, 100,000 multiplications or 62,500 divisions. The 7094 internally performed mathematical computations 1.4 to 2.4 times faster than the IBM 7090, A typical 7094 sold for $3,134,500. IBM provided customers with a complete package of 7090/7094 programs, including FORTRAN and COBOL programming languages, input-output control system and sorting, without charge. The 7094 was withdrawn from marketing in 1969.
- 1963
Introduction of Honeywell H-200, a machine targeting the IBM 1401, with a similar architecture and a "Liberator" program translator
- 1964
*IBM 360-third generation computer family.
*Burroughs B5000 mainframe introduced. The system can be considered the first of the "third generation" of computer systems. The most remarked-upon aspects are its use of a hardware-managed stack for calculation, and the extensive use of descriptors for data access. It includes virtual memory -- perhaps the first commercial computer to do so -- as well as support for multiprogramming and multiprocessing.(5)
*CDC (Computer Data Corp.) 6600 shipped; 100 nsec cycle time.
*First GE Time-sharing operation at Dartmouth College of the DTSS Dartmouth time-sharing system on a GE-265 (GE-225 + Datanet-30)
*The Burroughs B5500 has multiprogramming and virtual memory capabilities, and is three times faster than the B5000.
- 1965
*IBM ships the midrange 360 model 40 computer which had COBOL and FORTRAN programming languages available as well as the stock Basic Assembly Language (BAL) assembler.
*Introduction of GECOS-II, a multi-programming operating system for the GE-600
- 1967
First IBM 360/Model 91 shipped to NASA GSFC.
- 1970
IBM announces a family of machines with an enhanced instruction set, called System/370. The 370s proved so popular that there was a two-year waiting list of customers who had ordered a systems.
- 1973
Introduction of virtual memory on IBM S/370 Models 158 and 168.
- 1977
IBM 3033 computer system announced
- 1985
The most powerful IBM computer system of its time, the 3090 high-end processor of the IBM 308X computer series incorporated one-million-bit memory chips, Thermal Conduction Modules to provide the shortest average chip-to-chip communication time of any large general purpose computer. The Model 200 (entry-level with two central processors) and Model 400 (with four central processors) IBM 3090 had 64 and 128 megabytes of central storage, respectively. At the time of announcement, the purchase price of a Model 200 was $5 million. A later six-processor IBM 3090 Model 600E, using vector processors, could perform computations up to 14 times faster than the earlier four-processor IBM 3084.
- 1999
IBM releases a new generation of S/390.
- 2002
The IBM S/390 G5/G6 enterprise server family has up to 256 channels, from 2 to 8 Cryptographic Coprocessors, from 8 to 32 Gigabytes of memory, and can run under OS/390, MVS, VM, VSE, or TPF operating systems. It can also host an unbelievable amount of hard drive storage.
- 2004
The 3/4 ton IBM eServer zSeries 890, dubbed the "Baby Shark" can host up to 32 GBytes of memory.
The four PCIX Crypto Coprocessor (and optional PCI Crypto Accelerators) on the z890 have seven engine levels, giving a total of 28 capacity settings overall.
With it's advanced virtualization technology the 64-bit z890 can run several operating systems at the same time including z/OS, OS/390®, z/VM®, VM/ESA®, VSE/ESA, TPF and Linux for zSeries and Linux for S/390®.
The z890 is upgradeable within z890 family and can also upgrade to z990 from select z890 configurations.
Configured with the new Enterprise Storage Server Model 750 which handles from 1.1TB up to 4.6TB of data, the x890 makes an awesome server.
WHAT CLASSIFIES A MAIN FRAME COMPUTER???
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A mainframe has 1 to 16 CPU's (modern machines more)
Memory ranges from 128 Mb over 8 Gigabyte on line RAM
Its processing power ranges from 80 over 550 Mips
It has often different cabinets for Storage ,I/O ,RAM
Separate processes (program) for task management program management job management serialization catalogs inter address space communication .
MAINFRAMES Vs SUPER COMPUTER
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The distinction between supercomputers and mainframes is not a hard and fast one, but supercomputers generally focus on problems which are limited by calculation speed while mainframes focus on problems which are limited by input/output and reliability ("throughput computing") and on solving multiple business problems concurrently (mixed workload). The differences and similarities include:
- Both types of systems offer parallel processing. Supercomputers typically expose it to the programmer in complex manners, while mainframes typically use it to run multiple tasks. One result of this difference is that adding processors to a mainframe often speeds up the entire workload transparently.
- Supercomputers are optimized for complicated computations that take place largely in memory, while mainframes are optimized for comparatively simple computations involving huge amounts of external data. For example, weather forecasting is suited to supercomputers, and insurance business or payroll processing applications are more suited to mainframes.
- Supercomputers are often purpose-built for one or a very few specific institutional tasks (e.g. simulation and modeling). Mainframes typically handle a wider variety of tasks (e.g. data processing, warehousing). Consequently, most supercomputers can be one-off designs, whereas mainframes typically form part of a manufacturer's standard model lineup.
- Mainframes tend to have numerous ancillary service processors assisting their main central processors (for cryptographic support, I/O handling, monitoring, memory handling, etc.) so that the actual "processor count" is much higher than would otherwise be obvious. Supercomputer design tends not to include as many service processors since they don't appreciably add to raw number-crunching power.
There has been some blurring of the term "mainframe," with some PC and server vendors referring to their systems as "mainframes" or "mainframe-like." This is not widely accepted and the market generally recognizes that mainframes are genuinely and demonstrably different.
SPEED AND PERFORMANCE
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The CPU speed of mainframes has historically been measured in millions of instructions per second (MIPS). MIPS have been used as an easy comparative rating of the speed and capacity of mainframes. The smallest System z9 IBM mainframes today run at about 26 MIPS and the largest about 17,801 MIPS. IBM's Parallel Sysplex technology can join up to 32 of these systems, making them behave like a single, logical computing facility of as much as about 569,632 MIPS.[
The MIPS measurement has long been known to be misleading and has often been parodied as "Meaningless Indicator of Processor Speed." The complex CPU architectures of modern mainframes have reduced the relevance of MIPS ratings to the actual number of instructions executed. Likewise, the modern "balanced performance" system designs focus both on CPU power and on I/O capacity, and virtualization capabilities make comparative measurements even more difficult. See benchmark (computing) for a brief discussion of the difficulties in benchmarking such systems. IBM has long published a set of LSPR (Large System Performance Reference) ratio tables for mainframes that take into account different types of workloads and are a more representative measurement. However, these comparisons are not available for non-IBM systems. It takes a fair amount of work (and maybe guesswork) for users to determine what type of workload they have and then apply only the LSPR values most relevant to them.
To give some idea of real world experience, it is typical for a single mainframe CPU to execute the equivalent of 50, 100, or even more distributed processors' worth of business activity, depending on the workloads. Merely counting processors to compare server platforms is extremely perilous.
OPERATING SYSTEMS
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At first there was no operating system. Most machines were hard wired. Programming it meant rewiring panels and setting hundreds of switches to have the machine calculate a table.The next years when programming languages became available and memory was no longer a problem programmers created operating systems. You no longer had to be an electrical engineer to program a machine like that.
That made it possible for scientists and other users to quickly make a program and get the results.
To take care of all this a mainframe needs a sophisticated Operating System. And as you look at it closely also quite different from what you find on your desktops machine. Almost always text based terminals (no graphics) are connected to it. Also PC's can be connected to a mainframe with a special interface program - often called 3270 emulation.
But a mainframe does have some particular properties:
- It manages a large number of users
- Distributes the sheer workload that can be handled by the machine over different processors and in/output devices.
- All processes are running on the host and not on your terminal.
- Output is sent to your terminal through a program running (in background) on the host(mainframe). Nothing else goes over the line. It is like you are connected to a large computer by long wires. That is also the reason why it seems that your keyboard typing sometimes appears slower on your monitor then you actually type
- Operating systems for mainframes are few in number: UNIX, Linux, VMS, Z/OS, Z/VM, VSE/ESA. The latter three are of IBM origin and all three: VMS, Linux and Unix also run on IBM mainframes
However there are some dialects of VMS, Linux, and Unix running on different machines
PROGRAMMING MAINFRAMES
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When the first programming languages like Cobol, Fortran and Algol were created every large company and institution could hire people to do the programming of administration or complicated scientific calculations. The atomic bomb project in Los Alamos was a prime example of doing calculations using computers, without it the project never had succeeded in time.
COMPANIES
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To create a mainframe one needed at least a few hundred thousand dollars to build the first types.Later types of the 60' and 70's required a few million dollars and now depending on what capacities you need mainframes range between two three hundred to several tens of millionsIt is reasonable to say that small companies can not afford to spent that kind of money to develop one machine or prototype.
Firms are:
Ahmdal (Hitachi)
BullComparex (Hitachi)
DEC (Compaq)
Fujitsu
Hitatchi
IBM
ICL (Hitachi)
NEC
Siemens
Unisys
Sun
CONCLUSION
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A (modern) mainframe is still a very large machine, sometimes tens of square meters. Has usually more than one processor and loads of memory: often running between a few mega- to several hundreds Gb of RAM. It has tons of disk space and other storage facilities in large size and quantities that are not normally found with mini or micro computers. And although it looks like hundreds of users are using the machine simultaneously it is all governed by a sophisticated time sharing system, hence: serialization. (per processor)
