A computer bureau is a
service bureau
A service bureau is a company that provides business services for a fee. The term has been extensively used to describe technology-based services to financial services companies, particularly banks. Service bureaus are a significant sector within ...
providing computer services.
Computer bureaus developed during the early 1960s, following the development of
time-sharing
In computing, time-sharing is the Concurrency (computer science), concurrent sharing of a computing resource among many tasks or users by giving each Process (computing), task or User (computing), user a small slice of CPU time, processing time. ...
operating systems. These allowed the services of a single large and expensive
mainframe
A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterpris ...
computer to be divided up and sold as a
fungible
In economics and law, fungibility is the property of something whose individual units are considered fundamentally interchangeable with each other.
For example, the fungibility of money means that a $100 bill (note) is considered entirely equ ...
commodity. Development of telecommunications and the first
modem
The Democratic Movement (, ; MoDem ) is a centre to centre-right political party in France, whose main ideological trends are liberalism and Christian democracy, and that is characterised by a strong pro-Europeanist stance. MoDem was establis ...
s encouraged the growth of computer bureau as they allowed immediate access to the computer facilities from a customer's own premises.
The computer bureau model shrank during the 1980s, as cheap commodity computers, particularly the
PC clone but also the
minicomputer
A minicomputer, or colloquially mini, is a type of general-purpose computer mostly developed from the mid-1960s, built significantly smaller and sold at a much lower price than mainframe computers . By 21st century-standards however, a mini is ...
allowed services to be hosted
on-premises.
See also
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Batch processing
Computerized batch processing is a method of running software programs called jobs in batches automatically. While users are required to submit the jobs, no other interaction by the user is required to process the batch. Batches may automatically ...
*
Cloud computing
Cloud computing is "a paradigm for enabling network access to a scalable and elastic pool of shareable physical or virtual resources with self-service provisioning and administration on-demand," according to International Organization for ...
*
Grid computing
Grid computing is the use of widely distributed computer resources to reach a common goal. A computing grid can be thought of as a distributed system with non-interactive workloads that involve many files. Grid computing is distinguished fro ...
*
Service Bureau Corporation
*
Utility computing
Utility computing, or computer utility, is a service provisioning model in which a service provider makes computing resources and infrastructure management available to the customer as needed, and charges them for specific usage rather than a fl ...
References
Time-sharing
Computer systems
Business models
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