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Over the years computer technology has gone through many changes. Today there are numerous choices for an organization when deciding on a computer system to implement. Of course, many factors come into consideration with this decision such as, the size of the organization, the type of application, functional needs, and cost. There are small workgroups consisting of a handful of PCs, larger Client/Server configurations, midrange computer systems, such as the IBM AS/400, and mainframe computers. In this paper I will compare and contrast mainframes to PCs or microcomputers. The main topics I will discuss are performance and reliability, centralization, utilization, size and cost. Large computers called mainframes prevailed many years ago when computer technology was first emerging. Today, mainframes are still in use in many organizations. These computers have many benefits to an organization. First, these massive computers are very fast. Processing power is what these computers are known for. They are optimized for large amounts input/output (IO) requests, and as a result, are capable of handling thousands of connections at one time without compromising performance. Secondly, mainframes are designed to store large amounts of data. One of these computers is able to hold hundreds and even thousands of gigabytes of data making them ideal for database applications or data warehousing.
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