Mainframes are powerful computer

Computer

A computer is a programmable machine designed to sequentially and automatically carry out a sequence of arithmetic or logical operations. The particular sequence of operations can be changed readily, allowing the computer to solve more than one kind of problem...

s used primarily by corporate and governmental organizations for critical applications, bulk data processing such as census

Census

A census is the procedure of systematically acquiring and recording information about the members of a given population. It is a regularly occurring and official count of a particular population. The term is used mostly in connection with national population and housing censuses; other common...

, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise resource planning

Enterprise resource planning

Enterprise resource planning systems integrate internal and external management information across an entire organization, embracing finance/accounting, manufacturing, sales and service, customer relationship management, etc. ERP systems automate this activity with an integrated software application...

, and financial transaction processing

Transaction processing

In computer science, transaction processing is information processing that is divided into individual, indivisible operations, called transactions. Each transaction must succeed or fail as a complete unit; it cannot remain in an intermediate state...

.

The term originally referred to the large cabinets that housed the central processing unit and main memory of early computers. Later the term was used to distinguish high-end commercial machines from less powerful units.

Most large-scale computer system architectures were firmly established in the 1960s.