The company plans to announce the retooling of the little-known program, an aging workhorse of mainframe computing, this week.

The disk drive not only had a crucial role in I.B.M.'s early dominance of mainframe computing.

By the mid-1990s, SAP followed the trend from mainframe computing to client/server architectures.

"One of the hottest shots in the world of mainframe computing."

It has changed the economics of the high-performance segment of the computer industry and is beginning to infiltrate corporate mainframe computing as well.

The shift from mainframe computing, he added, should save his company several million dollars over five years.

The new company grew rapidly as large corporations began to adopt mainframe computing.

In the past, skeptics of that concept pointed to the PC's flexibility and convenience, as well as to the problems with mainframe computing.

The previous one was the change in focus from mainframe computing to personal computing.