what mainframe computer is and how it works
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The important part of Mainframe is the word “frame”. Back in the day when a large computer would have a room dedicated to it, the “frame” was what was inside the cabinets and was used to attach storage and other other peripherals. Think of a classical computer room from the 60’s and 70’s.
As computers got smaller and more powerful, the term drifted to simply mean a large scale, powerful computer. Typically with a lot of storage and usually located in a different place than the users.
Weirdly, mainframe computers were not necessarily “faster” than smaller computers, but they typically were designed to input/output large amounts of data and had a lot of storage. They would process transactions for banks, insurance companies etc. The computation is easy, but the amount of data moved was quite large.
They were the first broadly used machines to handle I/O in hardware. Smaller computers might have used software to manage network data, disk I/O, etc. A mainframe would have external hardware to handle that data being moved, freeing the computer to only have to do the actual computation. This allowed a mainframe to outperform a smaller computer of similar CPU power, by 10x or more.
Today, all computers, even phones, delegate the I/O to dedicated hardware, so the term mainframe really just means a large computer that does a lot of data-processing that is usually located in a different location than the users.
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