A computer bureau is a
service bureau
A service bureau is a company that provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology-based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Service bureaus are a significant sector within ...
providing computer services.
Computer bureaus developed during the early 1960s, following the development of
time-sharing
In computing, time-sharing is the sharing of a computing resource among many users at the same time by means of multiprogramming and multi-tasking.DEC Timesharing (1965), by Peter Clark, The DEC Professional, Volume 1, Number 1
Its emergence ...
operating systems. These allowed the services of a single large and expensive
mainframe
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...
computer to be divided up and sold as a
fungible
In economics, fungibility is the property of a good or a commodity whose individual units are essentially interchangeable, and each of whose parts is indistinguishable from any other part. Fungible tokens can be exchanged or replaced; for exa ...
commodity. Development of telecommunications and the first
modem
A modulator-demodulator or modem is a computer hardware device that converts data from a digital format into a format suitable for an analog transmission medium such as telephone or radio. A modem transmits data by modulating one or more c ...
s encouraged the growth of computer bureau as they allowed immediate access to the computer facilities from a customer's own premises.
The computer bureau model shrank during the 1980s, as cheap commodity computers, particularly the
PC clone
IBM PC compatible computers are similar to the original IBM PC, XT, and AT, all from computer giant IBM, that are able to use the same software and expansion cards. Such computers were referred to as PC clones, IBM clones or IBM PC clones. ...
but also the
minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a class of smaller general purpose computers that 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, ...
allowed services to be hosted
on-premises.
See also
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Batch processing
Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...
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Cloud computing
Cloud computing is the on-demand availability of computer system resources, especially data storage ( cloud storage) and computing power, without direct active management by the user. Large clouds often have functions distributed over m ...
*
Grid computing
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished from ...
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Service Bureau Corporation
The Service Bureau Corporation (SBC) had its origin in 1932 as the Service Bureau Division within IBM and was spun off as a wholly owned subsidiary in 1957 to operate IBM's burgeoning service bureau businesses.
IBM had operated service bureaus ...
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Utility computing
Utility computing or The Computer Utility is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a ...
References
Time-sharing
Computer systems
Business models
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