In the 1970s midrange computers (minicomputers) steadily gained ground on the mainframe computers, then the 1980s Personal Computer explosion marked the decline of that growth. Today they are making a comeback in all areas of business.
Editorial By: James Saylor
Once, the midrange computer was truly king, companies like Digital Equipment Corp., Data General, Wang and Prime Computer employed tens of thousands of people and earned billions of dollars in revenue by turning out minicomputer systems based on highly profitable proprietary hardware and software.
In 1981 while assisting a student attending Cornell University we engaged in a discussion about the corporate business environment in regards to their core computing needs. At that time I explained that my observations led me to believe that there would be a computing evolution within 10 years. It would be the migration from the "Big Iron" big boxes with dumb terminals to empowered desktop systems and then back to the "Big Iron" and dumb terminals only limited by one factor - Speed of Communications. In effect we predicted we would come full circle.
At that time businesses depended heavily on their in-house systems, but they were limited to "in-house" availability. Staff had to be on-site to use the "In-house" systems. Communications at that time was primitive at best. The fledgling "Internet" (Arpanet) was limited to the government and colleges as well as limited by modem speeds of 1200 to 2400 Baud. These low rates made even those communications at times unbearable.
Main frame and midrange businesses that could afford the expensive 9600 baud communications were starting to see the benefits of connecting remote sites to their "Big-Iron". The two factors that had the greatest impact on the evolution were the cost of computing and speed of communications.
As integrated circuits toke the place of transistors and discrete components both the physical size as well as the cost just stated down ,generation by generation of new systems.
Today, Prime, Digital Equipment, Data General and Wang Labs are all gone. The new players in the "midrange" market are IBM, Unisys, HP/Compaq and Sun. Today the whole world sees a new shining light, it's called fiber-optics and it has given us speeds even from home as fast as 1,472,000 Baud with business having speeds ten times that available.
It truly is like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the midrange computer has again taken flight, bringing business users higher levels of performance and the advantages of newer technologies, all at lower costs and many without the proprietary baggage of the past.
While PCs have made tremendous gains in the business office environment, many government information processing, agencies and other businesses are finding certain limitations with desktop computers.
In fact, vendors say that state and local governments are showing renewed interest in midrange computers as their reliance on technology continues to increase. G2 Research Inc., of Mountain View, Calif. has reported the use of mainframe platforms dropping from 78 percent in 1988 to 42 percent by 1998, while use of midrange and PC computers grew substantially over the same period of time.
Vendors point to superior performance, systems support, connectivity, high fault tolerance and a wide choice of out of the box applications when discussing the difference between midrange computers and high-end PCs.
Since 1989, the performance of midrange computers has increased six-fold while the price per MIPS (millions of instructions per second) has dropped eight-fold during the same period. The price/performance changes of midrange computers have occurred at a faster rate than PCs, partly as a reaction to the rapid growth of the PC market.
But don't just look at MIPS performance when comparing midrange computers to PCs. A better measurement of midrange computers is their performance in a range of tasks, from multitasking to multiprocessing, if you factor in the high degree of functionality of midrange computers, their value increases substantially when matched against PCs.
Midrange computers differ from high-end PCs with their support for larger memories, larger storage devices as well as the ability to run applications from a purely dumb terminal. They also provide better systems and network support.
Finance and administration, especially at the city and county level, have been frequent users of midrange computers to drive payroll, human resources, accounting and other applications. Public safety is another area of government which relies on the high availability of midrange systems, especially for computer-aided dispatching. A third key area is the growing field of imaging and database applications. Midrange computers typically have the performance to drive the complex software and the numerous devices that make up an imaging system, including such peripherals as optical storage jukeboxes, scanners, faxes, printers, as well as high-performance workstations.
Three significant trends are behind the increased use of midrange computers in state and local government. One is the shift to open systems, the second trend is government's growing dependence on networking and the third being the availability of high speed connections between offices.
The governments want to share more information between agencies, but in a distributed environment so that each agency continues to control their own data. Midrange computers are more suitable for these kinds of applications.
Some agencies are finding as their local PC area networks add more users, their network performance exponentially decreases with the number of users. They need the strength of a midrange computer to handle the job of running mission-critical applications, over the network.
In reality, midrange computers are not in competition with PCs, they are working partners. Due to the difference in computing power, multi-processors and redundancy not just computing speed, midrange computers are better suited for high end computing networks. Networks used for imaging as well as database intensive applications, are often best configured by having a midrange computer as the server and PCs on the users desktops.
The one true limiting factor will always be the speed of communications.
As the ancient and revered Jedi Master Yoda would say, full circle we have come.