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Mainframes and Personal Computers. Compare ... The more drastic changes for mainframes
and personal computers have been speed and size. Mainframes ...
... Comparing and Contrasting Personal Computers and Mainframes This paper will provide
a comparison and contrast between Personal Computers (PC’s) and mainframes ...
... PC’s and Mainframes Explained Personal computers, otherwise known as Microcomputers,
are everywhere, on our desks, at home and at work, on tables, in offices ...
... The IBM PC By 1980, there were dozens of companies manufacturing personal computers,
but the major producers of the larger minicomputers and mainframes had not ...
... Minicomputers represented a cheaper alternative to mainframes. ... The Altair was the
first PC (Personal Computer ... a massive growth in the popularity of computers. ...
Submitted by Hoops_d on November 6, 2005
Category: Technology
Words: 814 | Pages: 4
Views: 546
Popularity Rank: 14,652
Average Member Grade: N/A (Add a Comment / Grade this Paper)
Compare and Contrast
Mainframes and Personal Computers
Overview
Mainframes and personal computers have evolved over the years but their core functions have stayed the same. The mainframe is used connect multiple users for large organizations while personal computers are generally used for a single users. The more drastic changes for mainframes and personal computers have been speed and size. Mainframes use to be the size of buildings. Now they are the size of a textbook. Personal computer’s origins came from the dumb terminal. The dumb terminal was used just to access the mainframe. Then, the idea came to off load some of the processing from the mainframe and place it on your desktop.
Compare
The hardware is very similar between the mainframe and personal computer. Their architecture has stayed the same over the years. Only the complexity has changed but we have the same components. They both have processors, storage, memory, operating systems, and displays.
They both have memory and hard drives to access. Their operating systems optimize access for I/O because they have the same issue with I/O. I/O is slow and time consuming so other processes are implemented while waiting for I/O to download.
Over the last few years, mainframes and personal computers have become increasingly similar. Mainframes were valuable tools because they can access more address space than a personal computer. Less than ten years ago DOS had a memory cap of one megabyte. Mainframes were able to access many times more than the DOS limit. This helped batch processing for large corporations because batch processing needed more memory. Speed was more valuable to them then cost. Accessing megabytes of address space is no longer a sole benefit of a mainframe. Windows 95 changed that for the personal computer. In the future, there will be no difference between the personal computer and the mainframe.
Contrast
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