Gary Link asked:



>I wonder if anyone would care to generalize for me the types of data that
>reside on a mainframe computer.

I'll take a shot at this (although I don't pretend to be an IT expert).
Mainframe computers, in their heyday back in the 1970s and 1980s, were
used for large-volume enterprise applications such as financial/accounting
systems, procurement, contracts, and personnel.  Depending on the
organization's line of work, there may have been additional uses such as
drawings/plans (engineering, facilities, real property) or test data (you
can tell that I spent many years in aerospace; other types of industries
might generate other large collections, e.g., student records at a large
university).  Mainframes were primarily used as repositories for
structured data (databases), not unstructured data (documents).

Generally speaking, the cost of acquiring and maintaining/supporting a
mainframe computer and its applications -- along with the data it housed
-- was prohibitively expensive unless the scale of the operation being
supported was large enough (and costly enough) to make such an investment
cost effective.  

This tended to promote standardization, since the only way to realize the
speed of automated data processing was to use the single enterprise
approach that was then available.

(OK, listserv geeks: tear this apart.  I yearn to learn.)

Pilar C. McAdam, CRM, ERMm
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Los Angeles, CA

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