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Mainframes vs. Pc's

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Mainframes vs. PC's

Essentially, mainframes and PC's do the same thing. They manipulate 0's and 1's. Their basic components are the same. Processors, I/O devices, memory and storage devices.
The first computing systems were mainframes. They required large amounts of space, environmentally controlled rooms, and large power supplies. Mainframes are extremely expensive but a valuable tool to large businesses. Mainframes consist of multiple processors, large amounts of memory, storage, and can support thousands of users. Its tremendous number crunching abilities allow business applications to compile large batch processing tasks, which needs more memory, at speed.
The original mainframe system was designed to have one massive computer in one central location and many "dumb" terminals connected to it throughout an office building. The original "dumb" terminals were referred to as such because they had no processing capability on their own, they had to be connected to the mainframe or they were useless. They were made up of a keyboard and a monitor. The keyboard was the input interface to the mainframe and the output was delivered to either the monitor or sent to a printer.
Mainframe computer systems will most likely have more than one processor. The host processor has direct control over all the other processors, storage devices and input/output devices. The other processors relieve the host of certain routine processing requirements. For example, the back-end processor performs the task of locating a particular record on a data storage device. The front-end processor relieves the host processor of communications-related processing duties, the transmission of data to and from remote workstations and other computers. In this way, the host can concentrate on overall system control and the execution of application software.
As technology has

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