NASA turns off its last mainframe computer

NASA’s space programs have been around for decades now, and behind all their explorations and missions, have been large spacecrafts and rockets. Behind the scene, however, there have also been computers - mainframes as they’ve been called. Traditionally, mainframes were large computers, often designed to do application-specific operations. NASA will now be turning off the last of their mainframes - an IBM Z9, according to NASA CIO, Linda Cureton’s blog post. Mainframes were best known for their reliability and their performance. All of the tasks that mainframes handled are now being handled by more complicated pieces of hardware that are able to run most of these processes under virtual environments, like virtual machines and using thin clients.

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