mainframe

noun main·frame \ ˈmān-ˌfrām \

|Updated on: 17 Jun 2018

Definition of mainframe

1 : a large, powerful computer that can handle many tasks concurrently and is usually used commercially

… the million-dollar mainframe computers that took up entire floors of corporate premises …
—John Derbyshire

2 dated : a computer with its cabinet and internal circuits especially when considered separately from any peripherals connected to the computer

See mainframe defined for English-language learners

See mainframe defined for kids

Recent Examples of mainframe from the Web

Their first game was Computer Space, which was based on Spacewar!, a game Bushnell had seen running on a PDP1 mainframe computer at the University of Utah.

— nellie bowles, BostonGlobe.com, "Ted Dabney, an Atari founder, Pong creator, dies at 81," 1 June 2018
Their first game was Computer Space, which was based on Spacewar!, a game that Mr. Bushnell had seen running on a PDP1 mainframe computer at the University of Utah.

— nellie bowles, New York Times, "Ted Dabney, a Founder of Atari and a Creator of Pong, Dies at 81," 31 May 2018
The technologically enlightened Boros would send data about each game to a mainframe in Philadelphia, then retrieve updated analysis the following day.

— bruce schoenfeld, New York Times, "The Mets Try the Personal Touch," 25 Apr. 2018
Before the Chinese-Australian model crashed the international fashion mainframe in a scene-stealing debut at Louis Vuitton’s 2015 fall runway show, Ly was an architecture student in Sydney.

— sølve sundsbø, Allure, "Modern Muses: Three Models Reflect on Asian Representation in Beauty for Our First-Ever Hair Guide," 15 May 2018
That all began to change after the introduction of the IBM mainframe in the late 1960s and the adoption of a numbering system known as CUSIP to keep track of securities.

— rob urban, Bloomberg.com, "Wall Street Is Moving, and It’s Reshaping New York," 14 May 2018
His elementary school had a teletype machine that was connected to a mainframe computer.

— rob wile, miamiherald, "Jeff Bezos opens up about his childhood—and ignores Miami | Miami Herald," 2 May 2018
Maybe that was because our mainframe was also in New Hampshire, on the PDP-1-based Dartmouth Time-Sharing System, which had been implemented in 1963 by Basic authors John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz.

— virginia heffernan, WIRED, "Scrolling, Rickrolling, and Trolling," 12 Mar. 2018
Imagine big mainframe computers that require their own rooms and were originally configured to use punch cards.

— elizabeth weise, USA TODAY, "IRS site back up and running — drawing on computer codes that date back to the 1960s," 18 Apr. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'mainframe.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.