Minisupercomputer
Minisupercomputer was a class of computer that emerged in the mid-1980s. As scientific computing in the form of vector processors became more popular, the need for lower-cost systems that might be used at the departmental level instead of the corporate level created a market opportunity for new computer vendors to enter the market. As a generalization, the price targets for these smaller computers were one-tenth of the larger supercomputers. These computer systems were characterized by the combination of vector processing and small-scale multiprocessing.
Some Minisupercomputer companies:
The appearance of scientific workstations with high performance Floating point units in the 1990s (such as those based on the MIPS R6000 and IBM POWER2 microprocessors) eroded the demand for this class of computer.
