Minicomputer | EPFL Graph Search

A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of smaller general-purpose computer developed in the mid-1960s and sold at a much lower price than mainframe and mid-size computers from IBM and its direct competitors. In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than (), with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC. The class formed a distinct group with its own software architectures and operating systems. Minis were designed for control, instrumentation, human interaction, and communication switching as distinct from calculation and record keeping. Many were sold indirectly to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for final end-use application. During the two-decade lifetime of the minicomputer class (1965–1985), almost 100 companies formed and only a half dozen remained. When single-chip CPU microprocessors appeared, beginning with the Intel 4004 in 1971, the term "minicomputer" came to mean a machine that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the smallest mainframe computers and the microcomputers. The term "minicomputer" is seldom used today; the contemporary term for this class of system is "midrange computer", such as the higher-end SPARC from Oracle, Power ISA from IBM, and Itanium-based systems from Hewlett-Packard. The term "minicomputer" developed in the 1960s to describe the smaller computers that became possible with the use of transistors and core memory technologies, minimal instructions sets and less expensive peripherals such as the ubiquitous Teletype Model 33 ASR. They usually took up one or a few 19-inch rack cabinets, compared with the large mainframes that could fill a room. In terms of relative computing power compared to contemporary mainframes, small systems that were similar to minicomputers had been available from the 1950s.

Compact Model for Continuous Microfluidic Mixer

Jean-Michel Sallese, Christophe Lallement

While the development of lab-on-chip is increasing, the lack of dedicated computer-aided design tools appears as a bottleneck preventing the emergence of large-scale industrial applications. One of the answer relied on 50 years of CAD experience in microel ...

IEEE2020

FloDB: Unlocking Memory in Persistent Key-Value Stores

Rachid Guerraoui, Mihail Igor Zablotchi, Vasileios Trigonakis, Oana Maria Balmau

Log-structured merge (LSM) data stores enable to store and process large volumes of data while maintaining good performance. They mitigate the I/O bottleneck by absorbing updates in a memory layer and transferring them to the disk layer in sequential batch ...

2017

SABRes: Atomic Object Reads for In-Memory Rack-Scale Computing

Babak Falsafi, Edouard Bugnion, Boris Robert Grot, Alexandros Daglis, Stanko Novakovic, Dmitrii Ustiugov

Modern in-memory services rely on large distributed object stores to achieve the high scalability essential to service thousands of requests concurrently. The independent and unpredictable nature of incoming requests results in random accesses to the objec ...

Ieee2016