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I don't understand the need for "mainframes" in industries such as banking. Isn't a mainframe just a beefy server? I get that 40 years ago it made sense for a

I don't understand the need for "mainframes" in industries such as banking. Isn't a mainframe just a beefy server? I get that 40 years ago it made sense for a bank processing thousands of transactions per day to have a big computer to do that. But today that could be done on a laptop with a Python script. Has the compute needs really grown proportional to the speedup of the hardware?

poulsbohemian 4y ago
Weeeellll... yes and no. You aren't wrong, but I would just note that mainframes were remarkably reliable. They pushed a lot of boundaries on things that we still kinda struggle with today in terms of data integrity, redundancy, hot-swapability, recovery, etc. No question that today's systems are faster and perhaps in some ways more affordable. Definitely the case that the average person wanting to learn about software has more resources and tools available that once upon a time required access to these multi-million dollar machines. But, there's definitely tradeoffs between those centralized systems and our distributed systems of today.
SoftTalker 4y ago
No they are not just beefy servers. Their raw processing power is not remarkable. They are built for throughput. I/O and peripherals are handled by separate hardware so the CPU only deals with data in memory. They also have more sophisticated virtualization and scalability features than standard servers or PCs. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer