Computer industry: Mainframes and More
Computer industry: The First Computers
Computer industry: Microcomputers
Value of Shipments of Electronic Computers
Although by 1990 the microcomputer in its various permutations had become people’s primary image of a “computer,” the mainframe had not vanished. In this market sector, IBM remained the dominant driving force. Critical as the IBM PC and its successors may have been in establishing microcomputer standards, mainframes remained IBM’s bread and butter. The use of microprocessors and superscalar architecture permitted mainframes to shrink from the size of entire rooms to that of small cabinets, but they generally continued to be purchased on the full-service model.With the growth of the Internet and particularly the World Wide Web, mainframes grew popular once again for use as server farmsby companies such as Yahoo!, eBay, and Google, running the infrastructure that served the information superhighway.
At the uppermost end of the mainframe market, a new subtype of computer had appeared—the supercomputer. These giant number crunchers were more the descendants of the university researchcomputers such as ILLIAC than of the business mainframes, but with the rise of companies such as Cray, they became manufactured items that research universities could order froman established model line.
The beginning of the twenty-first century saw the convergence of several information technology industries. The bottom of the mainframe industry began to blur into the high end of the microcomputer workstation market, and some of the smallest laptop and notebook microcomputers began to share features with high-end scientific calculators, digital cellular telephones, and digital cameras. In addition, an increasing portion of the computer industry was devoted to the production and implementation of ubiquitous yet almost entirely invisible microcontrollers built into ordinary household appliances, automobiles, and other mechanical systems to make them run more efficiently and serve their users better. It was often cheaper for manufacturers to buy bulk lots of a standard microcontroller and hire a programmer to write a program to control the appliance’s operations than to design and build a mechanical control system.
