They’re the machines that won’t die. In the 1960s many airlines, banks, and governments began processing sensitive transactions using giant mainframe computers—and their descendants are still in use.

The era of mainframe computers and directly programming machines with switches is long past, but plenty of us look back on that era with a certain nostalgia. Getting that close to the hardware and ...

Mainframes continue to excel at traditional tasks such as high-speed transaction processing and running large batch workloads. Mainframes also have the ability to easily handle large amounts of ...