The large computers that like the dinosaurs disappeared from most aspects of business life disappeared not suddenly but steadily as the technology improved.
Like the ice age and other prehistoric events the change from discrete components, where each component in the circuit had to be soldered in the printed circuit board, the development and continuous development of microelectronics the effect was like the ice age and other important developments of life on earth
An illustration of ther problems of discrete components is shown in this diagram - simplified illustration
In spite of the limitations of these early mainframes they did an immense amount of useful work in business processing. Operators could schedule and reschedule tasks waiting to be carried out according to priority. However a good example of the limitation of these early machines is tasks at the time consuming such as payroll, which even for a medium-size company could take whole day to process
It is difficult to envisage that such large computers generally in use in all but smaller companies.
If you consider that the only secondary storage available was magnetic tapes. To sort a file held on one magnetic tape, for example, was a major undertaking. It involved the use of a number of tape decks which were used to store the intermediate information. The process could take a considerable amount of time, and could be complicated even more if one of the tapes broke.
Computer operation was a real skill as the operators had the job of ensuring that the very expensive machine was fully occupied to avoid wasting a rapldy depreciating system.
However the basic operation of the microprocessor chip although produced in such large quantities is still basically the same.
What has changed is the amount of components in a very small space than the speed at which they can operate because of the short distance between these components.
The batch processing computers of the 1960s and 1970s while decreasing an overall size still relied on the use of punched cards and punched paper tape.
This meant that many smaller firms computers available at that time were not suitable for running a business and up-to-date information pretty on stocks was imperative. The visible record computer fill this gap for some years until computers shrank even more became more powerful. The floppy disk largely replaced the record cars using this type of computer but it nevertheless provided computer proof processing the large number of smaller businesses.
The visible record computer is covered well Internet articles
the introduction of the Sabre seat reservation system for airlines heralded the start of terminal access and use on a worldwide basis.
