What is the difference between minicomputer and mainframe

They are small in sizes and relatively inexpensive. They are highly flexible and designed for small scale personal use and business application. Nowadays they have come more advance and powerful in technology. The business community uses personal computer for word processing, desktop publication, inventory and accounting software like QuickBooks and spreadsheets.

At home users perform surfing internet and playing games. Compare to mainframe these are midrange computers, small in size and more compact and less expensive. They are designed for computerization of data, scientific research, industrial process, data collection and telephone switches.

Minicomputers are multiprocessing system and can support upto user at a time but the power of processing is not as great as the mainframe and supercomputers. Timesharing, batch processing and online processing is available on these midrange computers. Mainframe computers can store huge amount of data. It contains a huge memory and could support thousands of users as mentioned before. It is mainly employed in the application where the enormously high-speed processing is required like railway and airline reservations, banking and commercial application of large industries or companies where it can sit as a machine to process tons of transaction simultaneously.

The terminals used in mainframe are divided into two categories dumb and intelligent terminals. There is no data is stored and processed in the dump terminal but has input and output devices. As against, the intelligent terminal also has input and output devices but it is capable of processing the data. However, there is no scope of storing its own data for these terminals. The minicomputer is intended for medium scale and is generally smaller in size and slower in speed.

There is a huge difference in the cost of the minicomputer and it is less costly than the other types such as super and mainframe computers. It is used at places where the processing can be distributed among various minicomputers instead of using mainframe. Real-time application are the main application where minicomputers are implemented. PC can also be connected with bigger computers and be used as an intelligent terminal to a bigger computer.

The details regarding their applications in business are included in the last section of this book. They cost somewhere between Rs. They have also been used extensively as gateways between mainframe networks and as main servers for local area networks of microcomputers. Mainframes are bigger computers, capable of handling data processing needs of, say, head office of a bank, or a big multinational company or may be a public utility office.

They also offer the advantage of wider choice with regard to up-gradation of the system in future. The mainframe popularity has fallen due to emergence of micro computers and popularity of client server technology.

They offer tremendous computing power and are being used primarily in scientific research and forecasting. For example, Cray T3E series of computers are packed with computing powers that are incomparable to any big mainframe.

Supercomputers have a speed of between to MIPS. They are quite expensive and cost somewhere around million dollars depending upon the configuration. The speed of a computer system depends, partly, on the memory size, and the number and type of input-output devices connected to it. Figure 6. As may be noticed from Fig. These areas represent the fact that the higher end of smaller computer system may have the capacities equivalent to lower end of bigger computer system.

For example, a highly configured micro computer may be as good as smaller minicomputer. The same is true for a mini computer and the mainframe. These bases are no longer valid for classification. The distinctions are changing and some of them are fast.