What is a mainframe???

Answer 1

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mainframe_computer

Answer 2

A mainframe is simply a very large computer. And totally different from what you have on your desk. Don't say: what seems to be a mainframe today is on your desktop tomorrow. Apart from the CPU's (processors) that is far from true

Mainframe is an industry term for a large computer. The name comes from the way the machine is build up: all units (processing, communication etc.) were hung into a frame. Thus the maincomputer is build into a frame, therefore: Mainframe

And because of the sheer development costs, mainframes are typically manufactured by large companies such as IBM, Amdahl, Hitachi.

Their main purpose is to run commercial applications of Fortune 1000 businesses and other large-scale computing purposes.

Think here of banking and insurance businesses where enormous amounts of data are processed, typically (at least) millions of records, each day.

But what classifies a computer as a mainframe?

A mainframe has 1 to 16 CPU's (modern machines more)
Memory ranges from 128 Mb over 8 Gigabyte on line RAM
Its processing power ranges from 80 over 550 Mips
It has often different cabinets for
Storage
I/O
RAM
Separate processes (program) for
task management
program management
job management
serialization
catalogs
inter address space
communication
Historically, a mainframe is associated with centralized computing opposite from distributed computing. Meaning all computing takes (physically) place on the mainframe itself: the processor section.


^_^

Answer 3

I not sure this word used much today.
The Mainframe is the main Computer. It house "all" the information or database.
I try to give an example. Yahoo would have everything, web-pages, answers, mail etc. stored on a mainframe. We access this information from our computers. But, today, with multitasking, networking and redundant storage. Mainframe seem to me a little old-school.