Supermini
From Computer History Wiki
Revision as of 16:32, 22 December 2023 by Jnc (talk | contribs) (Jnc moved page Super-mini to Supermini over redirect: None of the others have -'s; this is the preferred form, anyway)
A super-minicomputer (commonly just super-mini) was the name for a category of small computers which were, as the name implies, more powerful than a traditional minicomputer, but were not as large or powerful as a mainframe. They had a brief period of popularity, before personal computers took over the world. They were typically 32-bit computers; usually used in time-sharing mode.
About the earliest, and very successful, one was the VAX-11/780 from DEC, but the Data General Eclipse was another early one. The super-mini was soon obsoleted during the late 1980s by smaller and faster microcomputer-based machines, to great distress to manufacturers like DEC.
