Home - Knowledge
Center - Healthcare Technologies
- Computer Hardware
MINICOMPUTERS
A minicomputer is an intermediate computer, in terms of size
and power between the mainframes and the
microcomputers The term ‘minicomputer’ is now obsolete and the
computers that fall in this category are now referred to as midrange servers.
Sun Microsystems has a set of computers that also fall into
this category but they have decided to call them midframe servers, to signify
the fact that their architecture is based on the mainframe technology.
advertisement
Minicomputers are cheaper than mainframes and support less
users simultaneously (between 4 and 200).
The first commercial minicomputer, the PDP-8 was made in 1965
by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC). They soon followed this with the
commercially successful PDP-11 and VAX. Other minicomputers manufacturers such
as Digital General, Hewlett Packard, Prime and Wang also found success with
their own products in the 1970s.
The availability of cheap minicomputers in the 1970s enabled
healthcare organisations to introduce departmental information systems
(radiology information systems, lab information systems, etc). However at the
time of their introduction, many of these systems were interoperable. It was
not until the introduction of information exchange standards such as DICOM,
that they would stop being isolated islands of information.
Today’s minicomputers are far more sophisticated and cheaper
than their earlier counterparts and their uses are no longer restricted to be
being departmental information systems as small to medium sized organisations
can now afford to have them form the backbone of organisation-wide computer
systems and double up as Internet and e-mail servers.
advertisement
|