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owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

The IBM mainframe computer has evolved over a period spanning almost six decades and in part, this has been in response to wider industry trends, with notably the advent of “midrange” and personal computers, and the sweeping success of TCP/IP. However, the mainframe has also been responsible for delivering features and functionality which would only come much later to smaller systems, not to mention enduring and enviable reliability which is hard to beat today.

This post takes a look at the IBM 3270 Information Display System, which played a key role in enabling a single mainframe computer to scale and serve thousands of users. It should also be noted that, while discussing the system mostly in the past tense, the mainframe itself very much lives on and actually so does 3270, albeit nowadays as a protocol that is run on top of TCP/IP.

Original Submission