Technical Brief

Platforms in Business

While computers were first developed by the academe for use by the armed forces , their first major non-military customer was business , especially the banking sector . In the 1960s , IBM was manufacturing mainframe computers for business needs . These computers which were the size of several cabinets performed tasks such as electronic filing systems , data processing and bank transit systems . Today , banks and businesses are still major users of computers and in the past four to five decades computers have become a more pervasive feature of the modern business landscape

. Computers from the most basic terminals to the largest mainframes occupy their space in the modern business arena . This brief gives a basic introduction to the kinds of computers that a typical business will encounter

The differences in these platforms can be found in their processing power , their memory and storage capacities , the software they run , their reliability , as well as their cost and size . These different computer platforms exist to satisfy different groups of needs and users . One particular platform may be best suited to a particular application but may be terribly under or over powered for another application

Processing power is an important metric when discussing these platforms Computers are number crunching machines built to perform billions of calculations per second . Processing power would refer to how many calculations a particular computer can do per second as well as how complex a calculation a particular computer can do in a single step . A more powerful computer can perform in 1 second something that another computer would take 10 seconds to finish . While the processing power within computers in a particular platform may vary between one unit to the next , the differences in processing power between platforms are magnitudes apart . Differences in hardware account for the differences in processing power as faster , more advanced processors and larger amounts of memory allow the computer to do more things simultaneously

Network Computers

As the name implies , network computers are to a network where they have access to a much more powerful computer which does the number crunching for them . Network computers are designed to do very simple tasks which makes it impractical to make them very powerful Additionally , they are intended to be work together over a very large area , hence the model of many dumb ' nodes being served by one smart ' computer over the network . One example of a network computer would be the computer operating an ATM machine . The task for an ATM machine is very simple , provide a user interface , read the ATM card count the money and talk to the network . The ATM is not doing the actual subtraction of the withdrawal from the customer 's account , nor is the customer 's banking details stored in the ATM machine . It is easy to see that such an event , apart from being impractical , serves as a large security risk . Rather , all the computing related to banking is performed by a more powerful computer at the bank...