What even is a mainframe? I’ve been involved in software and infrastructure for 20+ years, I understand data centres, servers, services, microservices, databases, HA/SPOF, clusters and all the cloud equivalents, but never came across a mainframe. It’s almost a legend – are mainframes a real thing? What do/did they do? What’s happening to them? Where are they?
In: Engineering
Mainframe computers were essentially giant servers that users would connect to using a thin client / terminal. Computers were expensive so you would buy one large one and give users a monitor and keyboard (later a mouse) to use it. In the late 80’s and early 90’s the price of computers dropped so you started seeing more computers and less mainframes. Server clusters started replacing mainframes as it was easier to manage.
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