Regulators set to renew a mainframe battle with IBM

It is 40 years to the week since the US government filed its last official antitrust complaint against IBM, and more than 50 years since it reached a landmark consent decree with the computer maker to open up the early computing industry.

Yet some technology monopolies never die. The market for mainframes – the heavy-duty, monolithic machines that dominate the high-end of the computing market – once attracted the attention of companies including General Electric to Honeywell.

As recently as the 1990s, the mainframe industry attracted competitors such as Hitachi and the Fujitsu-owned Amdahl.Today, though, it is once again the almost exclusive preserve of IBM, with whose name it has become almost synonymous.

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