
IBM Sells First of New Computers (1993) - mcenedella
https://www.nytimes.com/1993/04/07/business/company-news-ibm-sells-first-of-new-computers.html
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skissane
Why isn't a 2-way/3-way/4-way/6-way IBM 3090 with the optional Vector Facility
installed a "parallel supercomputer"? Non-uniprocessor models of the 3090 are
parallel computers, and the Vector Facility was one of IBM's many attempts to
address the supercomputer market (even if that particular attempt wasn't very
succesful). And this was in the mid-to-late 1980s, not 1993.

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StudyAnimal
Mainframes are general purpose machines optimized for high (IO) throughput of
bulk business operations rather than number crunching. The answer to your
question is probably marketing and avoiding confusion. You wouldn’t call a
supercomputer a mainframe even though it could probably do the work.

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skissane
It's more complicated than that, there is an overlap. (It doesn't exist any
more, but it did exist in the 1980s.)

S/370-based supercomputers like the Hitachi S-3800 are both IBM-compatible
mainframes AND supercomputers at the same time. The Fujitsu FACOM VP and VP
2000 supercomputer series were also based on IBM-compatible mainframe
architecture. In a similar category is the NEC SX-1 (1983) and SX-2 (1985)
supercomputers (but not the SX-3 and later), but rather than being
S/370-compatible, they are based on an ACOS-4 mainframe architecture, which is
a Japanese derivative of GE/Honeywell/Bull GECOS mainframes.

Arguably, 3090+VF belongs to the same category, the mainframe-supercomputer
overlap. Technically it is quite similar to Hitachi/Fujitsu/NEC's approaches,
in being a mainframe-based supercomputing solution. IBM introduced VF to try
to sell mainframes to the supercomputer market. It wasn't very successful,
whereas their POWER-based supercomputers were much more successful. On the
other hand, Japanese manufacturers like Hitachi that tried the same strategy
had significantly more success with it than IBM did.

(I understand from a marketing/PR perspective how vendors want to forget their
old unsuccessful products when introducing new ones. Nobody wants to say "this
is our 2nd attempt to address this market, the first one was not very
successful, hopefully this new one will succeed where the prior one failed" at
a new product launch. You just pretend the prior attempt never happened.)

(Going back to the early 1960s, arguably IBM 7030 Stretch and IBM 7950 Harvest
are both IBM 7000 series mainframes and supercomputers.)

