On April 7, 1964, Worldwide Enterprise Machines launched a brand new pc dubbed the System/360 however referred to as a “mainframe” in reference to the big cupboard that housed the circuit boards. The low-end mannequin, the Mannequin 30, got here with 8 KB to 64 KB of reminiscence, whereas higher-end fashions may have as much as 8 MB of important reminiscence.
From that got here a know-how platform that has survived six a long time and quite a few predictions of its demise. In 2024, because it reaches 60 years previous, the mainframe continues to be having fun with vital use. According to IBM:
- Mainframes are utilized by 71% of Fortune 500 corporations.
- Mainframes deal with 90% of all bank card transactions.
- Mainframes are utilized in 44 of the highest 50 banks.
- Mainframes deal with 68% of the world’s manufacturing IT workloads, but they account for under 6% of IT prices.
Forrester Analysis in its State Of Mainframes, Global, 2024 report stated, “Opposite to the declare that mainframes are slowly disappearing, 54% of respondents whose enterprises at the moment use a mainframe count on to extend their mainframe use over the subsequent two years with 27% reporting no change, whereas solely 15% count on decreased utilization.”
