Jun 08 2008
History of computer mainframe
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