This is kind of a scatterbrained article, it doesn't tie in mainframes in a meaningful way. The CDC 6600 and IBM 7030 Strech would have been a better starting point for supers. The S/360 mainframe was primarily a business line of computers, although the 360/91 was a capable super.<p>So to expand on mainframes in particular, which are less well documented/understood by my generation:<p>The IBM mainframe continued being primarily a business computer but they often had enhanced capability models like the 3090 with optional vector facilities that put them in competition with dedicated supercomputers.<p>Few people that came into computing in the 1990s and thereafter realize that a lot of what we might assume to be "modern" capabilities existed since the 1970s, via these machines. The machines gave companies inter-office memos (email), document preparation (word) and document/image storage (like modern dropbox, gdrive etc), OLTP (like later RDBMS oracle etc), OLAP (like modern hadoop, terradata etc), custom applications and hardware for all kinds of line of business activities like automated logistics via bar code systems, point of sales cash registers and bar code scanners, ATMs, complex billing generators printers that could customize/cut/collate bills and notices, bill processors with check printers/OCR scanners, phone switchboard integration for call routing and auto-attendant etc.<p>VTAM and SNA allowed the machines to communicate, and intercommunicate with machines of other companies across the globe. Time sharing services were offered for smaller companies in a way not dissimilar to modern "cloud computing". International networks existed to interchange data between different computer types like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tymnet</a>.<p>The machines were also critical to the design and engineering of large construction, manufacturing, PLM, and simulation. Aircraft, ship building, power plant design, space exploration, automotive, circuit board and VLSI chip design/layout/EDA.. all that was primarily done on these machines up until the early '90s when UNIX workstations took over. CADAM, CATIA etc lots of good history covered on <a href="http://mbinfo.mbdesign.net/CAD-History.htm" rel="nofollow">http://mbinfo.mbdesign.net/CAD-History.htm</a>.<p>It's actually kind of astounding how much these did and how quickly it was washed out of common knowledge. If you had a white collar job in the '70s-early '90s you probably directly and indirectly spent a lot of time on these machines. 3270 terminals and later PCs with 3270 emulation.<p>Today, the mainframe is still integral to the running of Western civilization, although they are almost exclusively back office transaction processing and batch reporting systems.