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AS 400
The IBM AS/400 (Application System/400) is a family of midrange computers from IBM announced in June 1988 and released in August 1988. It was the successor to the System/36 and System/38 platforms, and ran the OS/400 operating system. Lower-cost but more powerful than its predecessors, an estimated 111,000 installations existed by the end of 1990 and annual revenue reaching $14 billion that year, increasing to 250,000 systems by 1994, and about 500,000 shipped by 1997. A key concept in the AS/400 platform is IBM i#TIMI, Technology Independent Machine Interface (TIMI), a platform-independent instruction set architecture (ISA) that is translated to native machine language instructions. The platform has used this capability to change the underlying processor architecture without breaking application compatibility. Early systems were based on a 48-bit Complex instruction set computer, CISC instruction set architecture known as the ''Internal Microprogrammed Interface'' (IMPI), original ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Midrange Computer
Midrange computers, or midrange systems, were a class of computer systems that fell in between mainframe computers and microcomputers. This class of machine emerged in the 1960s, with models from Digital Equipment Corporation ( PDP lines), Data General ( NOVA), and Hewlett-Packard (HP 2100 and HP 3000) widely used in science and research as well as for business - and referred to as minicomputers. IBM favored the term "midrange computer" for their comparable, but more business-oriented systems. IBM midrange systems * System/3 (1969) was the first IBM midrange system. * System/32 (introduced in 1975) was a 16-bit single-user system also known as the IBM 5320. * System/34 (1977) was intended to be a successor to both the 3 and the 32. It had two 16-bit processors and ran the SSP operating system. * System/38 (1979) was the first midrange system to have an integrated relational database management system (DBMS). The S/38 had 48-bit addressing, and ran the CPF operating ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
