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Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English
mainframe
noun
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADJECTIVE
large
▪ Where computer systems have been investigated they have been large mainframe systems.
■ NOUN
application
▪ This includes customers downsizing their mainframe applications to a distributed Unix or client-server environment.
▪ Midland Bank, another Micro Control user, is only now migrating away from mainframe applications.
business
▪ Hitachi asks AT&T to take its mainframe business as well.
▪ It is hoped too, that 30% to 40% growth in personal computer sales seen for 1993 will offset waning mainframe business.
▪ But the company's mainframe business is quite the opposite.
▪ The mainframe business has been affected, too, but only indirectly ... so far.
computer
▪ Fifty years later Fujitsu was well established as a supplier to Siemens of mainframe computers.
▪ The same is known to be true of the reel-to-reel tapes favoured by the older mainframe computers.
▪ Water cooling eliminates the problem in mainframe computers, but smaller machinery must find an alternative.
▪ There are high speed links direct from the School of Geography to the University's mainframe computers.
▪ At the heart of that strategy was the replacement of the company's mainframe computers with networks of high-powered desktop workstations.
▪ A mainframe computer can control the computing applications of a whole company or university.
▪ A minicomputer can often carry out many of the tasks of a mainframe computer but is smaller and needs less staff.
▪ Whereas a few years ago a mainframe computer would have been essential to perform corpus processing, a desktop computer now suffices.
software
▪ Unicenter is an open systems equivalent to its current mainframe software for data centre management.
▪ Though it has made its name as a mainframe software house, Compuware is keen to broaden its horizons.
system
▪ Sales of mainframe systems are still thought to be earning the biggest profit.
▪ Where computer systems have been investigated they have been large mainframe systems.
▪ The company was established in 1974, originally as a software house developing applications for mainframe systems.
user
▪ SmartStream is intended to provide a means for mainframe users to move to client/server arrangements without abandoning their existing systems.
■ VERB
use
▪ Bureaux and micros are not suitable, so a choice must be made between using an in-house mainframe and buying a mini.
▪ Students undertake laboratory and design office work, use state-of-the-art mainframe and microcomputers and attend a surveying field course.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
▪ If a company has an in-house mainframe, there may well be attractions in using it.
▪ In the SmartStream scheme, mainframes can be retained as file servers while cheaper Unix boxes assume its traditional tasks.
▪ Midland Bank, another Micro Control user, is only now migrating away from mainframe applications.
▪ Students undertake laboratory and design office work, use state-of-the-art mainframe and microcomputers and attend a surveying field course.
▪ The mainframe will soon be history, the AS/400 is still worth saving, but time is desperately short.
▪ The company claims it costs a third to a half less than non-fault-tolerant storage systems used in mainframe environments.
▪ They have been so successful that the strongest machines available are now about as good as the best mainframes of five years ago.
▪ Water cooling eliminates the problem in mainframe computers, but smaller machinery must find an alternative.
The Collaborative International Dictionary
mainframe

mainframe \main"frame`\ n. (Computers)

  1. A large digital computer serving 100-400 users and occupying a special air-conditioned room. At any given point in development of computer technology, the mainframe will be faster, have large main memeory, and be more capable than a minicomputer, which will in turn be faster and more capable than a personal computer. The typical personal computer in 1999 is faster than a mainframe was in 1970.

    Syn: mainframe computer.

  2. The board holding the CPU and the memory forming the central part of a computer to which the peripherals are attached.

Douglas Harper's Etymology Dictionary
mainframe

"central processor of a computer system," 1964, from main (adj.) + frame (n.).

Wiktionary
mainframe

n. (context computer hardware English) A large, powerful computer able to manage very many simultaneous tasks and communicate with very many connected terminals; used by large, complex organizations (such as banks and supermarkets) where continuously sustained operation is vital

WordNet
mainframe
  1. n. a large digital computer serving 100-400 users and occupying a special air-conditioned room [syn: mainframe computer]

  2. (computer science) the part of a computer (a microprocessor chip) that does most of the data processing; the CPU and the memory form the central part of a computer to which the peripherals are attached [syn: central processing unit, CPU, C.P.U., central processor, processor]

Wikipedia
Mainframe (comics)

Mainframe is a fictional character appearing in American comic books published by Marvel Comics. He appeared in the series A-Next.

Mainframe (G.I. Joe)

Mainframe is a fictional character from the G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero toyline, comic books and cartoon series. He is the G.I. Joe Team's communications expert and debuted in 1986.

Mainframe (disambiguation)

Mainframe may refer to any of the following:

  • Mainframe computer, a type of large data processing system
  • Mainframe Entertainment, a computer animation company
  • Either of two fictional Marvel Comics characters:
    • Mainframe (comics), from the series A-Next
    • Mainframe, a character from the Guardians of the Galaxy series
  • Mainframe (Transformers), a character in the Transformers series
  • Mainframe (G.I. Joe), a character in the G.I. Joe universe
  • A character from the game Gunman Chronicles
  • Mainframe, the city in which the animated series ReBoot takes place
  • A character in Gene Wolfe's novel/series The Book of the Long Sun

Usage examples of "mainframe".

The Communications Center also contained a computerised printing plant, the press for records, recording studio, and four mainframe computers hooked into the Worldwide Evangelist Information Network.

Rosenfeld had dishonestly broken into the MIT mainframes, Kapor himself might have never invented Lotus 1-2-3 and the PC business might have been set back for years!

Immediately, her machine began to sift through the data encoded on his hard drive, searching for the keys to the Pangen mainframe.

Reasoning that whoever was behind this would almost certainly have to be unbalanced, he instructed the CURE mainframes to limit the search to Russian ultranationalists with known or suspected mental problems.

Borgmann made it ever so much easier for them to push us around by showing them how to connect our little biocomputers to their huge mainframes.

Sigint database was loaded on IBM 370 mainframes, and obsolete PDP-8 and PDP-11 computers were used for linguistic analysis.

Artificial intelligence, which really works better strung out on a mainframe, and hard-wearing, hazardproof bodywork which most cyber-engineering firms designed to spec for the task in hand.

Security took up most of the twenty-first floor, a suite of offices around the perimeter and then a maze of cubicles surrounding the protected core where the mainframes and their backups lived.

Sun Microsystems mainframe computer that had enough power to administer the entire country, if need be.

For all that it's made out of binary code in a mainframe and words scrolling on a screen, LambdaMOO is as vividly concrete and detailed as the room from which I access it, and as engaging and crowded, as friendly or as menacing, as the bar down the street.

Someone had been digging into the floor, opening up crawl spaces and installing a loom of cables that ran to a compact signal-processing mainframe squatting on the remains of what had once been a very expensive dressing table.

It's an android, a mobile anti-pardoner unit, plugged right into the big Entity mainframe in Culver City.

Before the age of personal computing, he'd used the dumbest of dumb terminals--a teletype--to communicate with a mainframe somewhere, along with other BC students, and more still from other local schools.

All in all, it used up vast amounts of storage space, and as a result delivery trucks were constantly bringing new disk storage devices to Fort Meade, Maryland, where they were hooked up to the mainframe computers so that if a target person was identified, then his e-mails dating back for months or even years could be screened.

All in all, it used up vast amounts of storage space, and as a result delivery trucks were constantly bringing new disk storage devices to Fort Meade, Mary­land, where they were hooked up to the mainframe computers so that if a target person was identified, then his e-mails dating back for months or even years could be screened.