History of IBM Mainframe

“I predict that the last mainframe will be unplugged on March 15, 1996.” — Stewart Alsop,Infoworld,March 1991.

IBM introduce a mainframe called OS/360 in 1964. After that IBM produce more new mainframe each 10 years.
- System/370™ in 1970
- System/370 Extended Architecture (370-XA) in 1983
- Enterprise Systems Architecture/390® (ESA/390) in 1990 (i work in Heitech Padu at PNB Project using this mainframe for ASNB Unit Trust System)
- z/Architecture™ in 2000.

Why Mainframe? What Mainframe can do? IBM Mainframe is a self-contained processing center, powerful enough to process the largest and most diverse workloads in one secure “footprint,” and one that is just as effective when implemented as the primary server in a corporation’s distributed server farm. In effect, the mainframe computer is the definitive server in the client/server model of computing.

IBM Personal Communications - Hot key like Microsoft Word and Dump Terminal?

IBM Personal Communications is one of the popular emulator used to access mainframe or midrange, which we can set the emulator and use our keyboard to use several hot keys that widely used such as Copy, Paste and Cut. One of the way to copy and paste using shortcut key is by using Alt-E-C for copy and Alt-E-P for paste, which is more faster then using mouse to click on the Copy and Paste icon.

However there is another faster way to perform such function, and required some setting in the emulator. First click on the keyboard icon or select it from menu to change the keyboard setting. To set Copy function using the Control-C key, click on the C character, select "Edit Copy" from the function list menu, and then click on the arrow beside the "Ctrl" character (refer to the picture). Next, do the same to change the keyboard setting for Paste function to use Control-V hot key. Click on the V character and select "Edit Paste" from function list menu and then click on the arrow next to "Ctrl" character. To use Control-P key to print screen, choose "Print Screen" from the function list menu.

Some people might like to use "Control" key for "Enter" and "Enter" key for "Newline", same like the old Dump terminal. The step for setting this two key is the same and you can refer to the picture below.