Mainframes are often designated as “legacy platforms”. This triggers the mental image of those old 80’s era enormous bulky computers which can be found in any good computers museum and vintage videos, and leaves a mixed feeling about the place of such machines in todays computing world.
However, nothing could be such wrong:
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A lot of the technologies which made today’s computing what it is actually owe to the mainframe world.
Things like non-executable memory, process isolation, virtualization and symmetric multiprocessing to name just a few are all technologies that were first developed for mainframes environments, and only then ported onto other architectures.
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Today’s mainframes hardware has nothing in common with antique computers, they evolved as the rest of the computer world did.
They are bulky but not as much as one may imagine, the size of a large fridge to give a rough idea. They remains …