Twenty years ago, analysts predicted the death of mainframe computers. Today, however, many public and private enterprises throughout the world rely on the mainframe as the backbone of large-scale computing. For example, the U.S. Census Bureau uses mainframe computers to process data about the nation’s people and economy. On the other hand, many of today’s data centers run on racks of PC servers or large-scale PC server farms. How are mainframe computers different from PCs? How are they similar? Search the Web or visit Websites such as openmainframe.org and ibm.com to learn more about how mainframes support an IT infrastructure. List and discuss the major uses of mainframe systems.