Personal Computers v Mainframes
James Ratti
POS355
April 9, 2012
John Stewart

Abstract

The world of Information Technology covers many variations of computers, from smart phones to supercomputers like IBM’s Watson. While smart phones and tablets have are becoming more popular, there are two venerable machines that are at the heart of computing, the Personal Computer and the Mainframe. With advances in technology the lines between the two are fading, but will never disappear completely.

Personal Computers v Mainframes
The information systems backbone of many companies is their mainframe computer. The mainframe computer is a large centrally located machine capable of processing multiple very large transactions at the same time. Users access these large computers by workstations that can resemble a personal computer, but are often a dumb terminal.
What is a Mainframe and how would you define what it is? It really comes down to centralization and distribution rather than computing power (Oman, n.d.). With ever increasing technologies, the actual computing power of Personal Computers is rivaling that of Mainframes, however, the Personal Computer becomes limited when it comes to how many users can log on to it and how many jobs can run. The huge amounts of data that can be processed by many more users than can be logged into a personal computer and the ability of the mainframes users to be located around the globe and stay secure are all things that define a mainframe.
A simpler way of defining a mainframe might simply be cost. One of the major drawbacks to the mainframe is the initial cost. Starting in the tens of thousands of dollars, into the hundreds of thousands, the cost of a mainframe is simply too much for many companies. The cost to run the mainframe is quite extensive as well. There are few administrators that have the required