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 flips a second ( 2 MHz). Today's cheapest personal computers are at least 10,000 times more powerful.
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