 | Functional Parallelism |  |
The Early Mainframe Shop Pipeline:
- A Programmer would write and then submitted the program card decks, called "jobs" through a window in the shop.
- An Operator would stack several jobs together using special job separator cards containing "JCL" (Job Control Language)
- An "offline" computer would read a stack of jobs and write them onto magnetic tape
- An Operator would mount the magnetic tape on a Mainframe attached tape drive.
- The Mainframe would read that tape and process the jobs.
- An Operator would return the card deck, and any hardcopy printed output, to the Programmer.
Front End Processors: These were smaller, less expensive, computers that were built to interact with mainframes
using a propriatory network protocal. As the name implies, front end processors provided many communications services for the mainframe and a network, including the activation of data links with peripherals,
and could be though of a the portal to the mainframe, freeing the mainframe to spend its cycles more productively.
Mini-Computers:
Client Server:
n-Tier:
The Subject of This Course:
(see the page following)