Description

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, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$25,000, with an input-output device such as a teleprompter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC.

The class formed a distinct group with its own software architectures and operating systems. Minis were designed for control, instrumentation, human interaction, and communication switching as distinct from calculation and record keeping. Many were sold indirectly to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) for final end use application. During the two decade lifetime of the minicomputer class (1965–1985), almost 100 companies formed and only a half dozen remained. When single-chip CPU microprocessors appeared, beginning with the Intel 4004 in 1971, the term "minicomputer" came to mean a machine that lies in the middle range of the computing spectrum, in between the smallest mainframe computers and the microcomputers. The term "minicomputer" is seldom used today; the contemporary term for this class of system is "midrange computer", such as the higher-end SPARC from Oracle, Power ISA from IBM, and Itanium-based systems from Hewlett-Packard. The term "minicomputer" developed in the 1960s to describe the smaller computers that became possible with the use of transistors and core memory technologies, minimal instructions sets and less expensive peripherals such as the ubiquitous Teletype Model 33 ASR. They usually took up one or a few 19-inch rack cabinets, compared with the large mainframes that could fill a room.In terms of relative computing power compared to contemporary mainframes, small systems that were similar to minicomputers had been available from the 1950s. In particular, there was an entire class of drum machines, like the UNIVAC 1101 and LGP-30 that share some features of the minicomputer class. Similar models using magnetic delay-line memory followed in the early 1960s. These machines however, were essentially designed as small mainframes, using a custom chassis and often supporting only peripherals from the same company. In contrast, the machines that became known as minicomputers were often designed to fit into a standard chassis and deliberately designed to use common devices like the ASR 33. Another common difference was that earlier small machines were not "general purpose", in that they were designed for a specific role like process control or accounting. On these machines, programming was generally carried out in their custom machine language, or even hard-coded into a plug board, although some used a form of BASIC. DEC wrote, regarding their PDP-5, that it was "the world’s first commercially produced minicomputer".

Thanks ®ards
 John Gresham 
Journal coordinator
International Journal of Innovative Research in Computer and Communication Engineering

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