Ancestors

Written by Ken Shirriff on 2025-02-01 at 18:56

What is the origin of the word "mainframe"? Digging through archives, I traced it back to 1953. The IBM 701 computer was built from "frames": power frames, a storage frame, a drum frame, and the main frame. This 1953 drawing from the Installation Manual shows the dimensions of the "main frame". 1/n

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Written by Григорий Клюшников on 2025-02-01 at 19:05

This word even made it into Russian, simply translated to Cyrillic as "мейнфрейм". Though there also exists the term "большая ЭВМ" (large electronic computing machine) that means mostly the same.

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Toot

Written by Ken Shirriff on 2025-02-01 at 19:08

@grishka The Russian word for computer "ЭВМ" looks like a translation of IBM :-)

(I checked and it's an abbreviation for "электронная вычислительная машина", electronic computing machine.)

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Descendants