Looking back at the last 50 years of technology is a fascinating exercise . Most technologies we use today take up a |
power that once needed a roomful of machines can now be found in an ordinary mobile phone that back in the day required a battery the size of a briefcase and now fits nicely |
such as Google Glass , and consider it perfectly normal to have a never ending supply of new Apps that support our daily living , whether that ’ s monitoring our exercise , |
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The mainframe |
fraction of the space required by |
into the palm of your hand . We have |
making transport bookings and even |
has seen more innovations in the last few years than ever before . |
their predecessors . Processing |
seen the rise and fall of innovations |
evaluating our sleeping patterns .
One piece of technology that has evolved but is still firmly with us is the mainframe . The predecessor of
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Image courtesy of IBM Archives |
these powerful computers graced |
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us in 1952 to serve government |
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organisations in the Cold War , |
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and was nicknamed the Defense |
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Calculator . Just over a decade later , |
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in 1964 , IBM unveiled the modern |
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mainframe , the IBM System / 360 . |
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Today , a significant proportion of |
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the world ’ s corporate data is still |
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managed by mainframes . Janet Sun , |
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manager of software engineering |
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at Rocket Software , stated at last |
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year ’ s SHARE conference that , |
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‘ 96 of the world ’ s top 100 banks , |
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23 of the 25 top US retailers , and |
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nine out of 10 of the world ’ s largest |
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insurance companies run on IBM ’ s z |
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Systems mainframes ’. |
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With the adoption of cloud |
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and distributed computing and the |
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upsurge in mobile applications , |
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mainframes have seen more |
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innovations in the last few years than |
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ever before . |