What are mainframes? How different are they from PC's?

Answer 1

the mainframe is a super computer wich have multy processors, best speed and used for multy users and mostly using for server computer

Answer 2

I used to operate a mainframe from 1984 to 1993. I still do programs on a mainframe, I am not a computer operator anymore. In 1984 our mainframe had 640 K on it. That's K like thousand, tiny by today's standards, yet this was about the time radio shack came out with 80 K super home computers. Wow, nothing by today's standards at all. Mainframes have gone from filling up whole buildings, down to one room of an office building. When you have tons of users needing data off a computer, mainframes are your best bet. Mainframes can hold a whole lot more than the hard drive on your PC. Most users go through servers to get to the mainframe we use. Our offices are spread out over the entire State and PC users access the mainframe to pull data about individuals which are stored in a centralized location. One nice thing about mainframes, is viruses are not a problem like on PC's.

Answer 3

PC's are typically single-user machines that do mostly client-type processing. Mainframes are large multiuser machines that handle large, shared applications and batch processing. A mainframe would be typically much more powerful than a PC.

In the old days there were generally 3 types of computers--micro, mini, and mainframe. Micro computers eventually became known as PC's, after IBM gave their popular and dominat line the name Personal Computer. Note that the name MICROsoft was derived from the original name.

Mainframes were huge computers that would take up a whole room. Users would access them from terminals--the terminal could do nothing on it's own; it didn't have a processor, RAM, storage, etc. They also had all kinds of other device connected to them, but not part of them, like tape drives, disk packs, huge laser printers, etc. They would typically take user input all day, and do batch processing at night.

For example, a large company might have empolyees taking orders, shipping, and so forth all day; and then at night they would process everything.

Mainframes are still used today, but not as much. People typically don't use a dumb terminal anymore, they have special terminal software on their PC.

But the PC architecture has also grown into the mainframes domain in the form of small, relatively cheap rack servers. These are often gathered into clusters to mimick the power of a mainframe.

The mini computers I mentioned were like mainframes, just smaller. They still exist today too. One other type I didn't mention is the supercomputer. These aren't many of them in comparison to the others and are generally used in research. Their forte is pure processing power.

Answer 4

Mainframes are very high end systems when compared with the PC's . Mainframes have high storage and memory capacities.

But today, with the advent of fast growing technology, PC's are becoming the legends and diminishing the barriers between the mainframes and PC's.

Answer 5

Mainframes are the large computers that does all the brute work and data maintenance. i.e. IBM 360 and Cray super computer. These machine requires a cooler environment to keep them from overheating. In the old days they were huge and occupies a large area, since then they have decreased in size but are still fairly big as compared to PC. PC stands for personal computer. They are fairly small running small application programs. They could withstand a little abuse and tolerant to average room temperatures. PC could be linked to the mainframe to share programs and upload/download informations. A Laptop is the portable smaller version of the PC.

Answer 6

They used to be s big they took up entire buildings, and while people used to take turns using them, eventually there were terminals, that didn't have any computing power themselves, but all ran on the same big computer.

I used to work in an office doing cad that used such a computer. It had two Gigabytes in the hard drive, and thirty people did their work on it, a big PC at the time had perhaps 80 megabytes, so it was impressive, even if you can carry 15 -50 times as much as that in your pocket today

Today the internet itself is becoming a vast mainframe that is rumored to be approaching 1 yottabyte in size, yes they already have a name for it and it is 1,208,925,819,614 ,629,174,706,176 bytes or 2 to the 80th power or 1.2089258 times 10 to the 24th power

It might be a while before you can carry that much in your pocket

Answer 7

Dummy terminal < PC < Mainframe < Super Computer

Answer 8

It's a large scale computer with hundreds or thousand plus MIPS million instructions per second and can handle over 50 servers.
Major difference with PC is when speed is the key of success and money is not a question.

Answer 9

They are used in big organisations like banks.
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