But it faces a difficult battle, especially with spending on software weak and companies moving away from the mainframes that are the lifeblood of Computer Associates.
And it has so angered I.B.M., which makes most of the mainframes that its software supports, that I.B.M. is accusing Computer Associates of charging too much for its products.
The mainframes that rose to prominence in computing's early days, especially the military ones, got the security part right:They isolated program commands from the numbers being crunched.
But, he predicts, as businesses tie nitty-gritty, day-to-day processes such as order taking and transaction processing to the Web, they will increasingly load their Web sites onto the mainframes that anchor those functions.
In the early 1980s, two computer science students Michael Toy and Glenn Wichman released a program on to the University of California's Unix mainframe that would eventually inspire the most important genre in independent video game development.
The goal was to make a mainframe that could perform more than one operating system (OS).
Sensors around each entrance are wired to a central mainframe that allows authorities to react swiftly, explained Celia Blauel, president of Eau de Paris.
She learns that her entire department of human "computers" will soon be replaced by an electronic computer an enormous I.B.M. mainframe that's being installed.
In some ways, Watson is a throwback to I.B.M.'s beginnings in computing: a large, stand-alone mainframe that can be programmed for specific tasks.
However, after the meeting, computer scientist Wesley Clark persuaded Roberts that the actual networking should be handled by smaller computers called interface message processors (IMPs) rather than the large mainframes that would be the nodes of ARPANET.
