They wrote off the mainframe computer decades ago. So why did IBM unveil yet another number cruncher last week? FORTY YEARS ago, on April 7 1964 — the world's first general purpose mainframe supercomputer, the IBM Systm/360 was unveiled. As big as two refrigerators, and accompanied by a roomful of tape drives and punched card readers, the 360 was the leviathan of its day: with all of 2 megabytes (MB) of memory and 6 MB of storage, chugging at 2 million …
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…anytime soon'' says Colleen Martin, marketing director of IBM's zSeries, ``We are focused on the future and next 40 years, and the mainframe will continue to evolve and customers will become reliant on it.'' Wishful thinking? Who can say? Some innovative computing topologies, described in the box, have emerged, which may give new meaning to the phrase `collaborative computing'. And as Ms Martin says, it took billions of years for the dinosaur to become extinct.