Supermini

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A supermini (formally super-minicomputer) 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.

See also