It's the end of an era; NASA announced this week that it has shut down its last mainframe computer.

It's the end of an era; NASA announced this week that it has shut down its last mainframe computer.

The last NASA mainframe, the IBM Z9, was powered down at Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama earlier this month, Linda Cureton, NASA's chief information officer, wrote in a blog post.

For those more familiar with smartphones and tablets, Cureton described a mainframe as "a big computer that is known for being reliable, highly available, secure, and powerful. They are best suited for applications that are more transaction oriented and require a lot of input/output  that is, writing or reading from data storage devices."

Cureton started her career at NASA as a mainframe systems programmer out of Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland "when it was still cool." She worked on an IBM 360-95, which solved complex computational problems for space flight.

"Back then, real systems programmers did hexadecimal arithmetic  today, 'there's an app for it!'" she joked. But, Cureton acknowledged, "all things must change."

"Even though NASA has shut down its last one, there is still a requirement for mainframe capability in many other organizations," she wrote. "The end-user interfaces are clunky and somewhat inflexible, but the need remains for extremely reliable, secure transaction oriented business applications."

Last year, NASA also to its shuttle program. In July, the Shuttle Atlantis its final journey to the International Space Station, bringing NASA's 30-year shuttle program to a close. For more, see PCMag's look back in the slideshow below.