NASA Shuts Down Last Mainframe | News & Opinion | PCMag.com: It's the end of an era; NASA announced this week that it has shut down its last mainframe computer. The last NASA mainframe, the IBM Z9, was powered down at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama earlier this month, Linda Cureton, NASA's chief information officer, wrote in a blog post. For those more familiar with smartphones and tablets, Cureton described a mainframe as "a big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful. They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output – that is, writing or reading from data storage devices."
