PC Hardware A Beginner’s Guide

Chapter 1: The Personal Computer^7

fulfill the entire computing needs of a small- to medium-sized company as well as serve
as a very powerful communications server. Minicomputers are much too big, in terms of
processing power and size, not to mention price, to be used as a personal computer.
For more information on the minicomputer, visit the following Web sites:

 Minicomputer http://www.whatis.com/minicomp.htm

 Stanford University gobi.stanford.edu/computer_history/mini.htm

 SPARC Directorywww.sparcproductdirectory.com/history.html

Other Computers

You may have heard of a couple of other computer classifications: the supercomputer
and the embedded computer. Asupercomputer,like the one pictured in Figure 1-5, is an
extremely powerful computer used mostly in research and space, military, and govern-
mental applications. A supercomputer, which can cost tens of millions of dollars, contains
the equivalent of thousands of personal computers that share in the processing load to
solve very large and complex problems in hours or days instead of weeks, months, or
years. A supercomputer is the largest and most powerful computer, sometimes equaling
the power of several mainframes combined. For example, the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) is using a supercomputer to calculate the value of the mathematic

Figure 1-4. Minicomputers were as powerful as mainframes, only smaller