noun

• A computer of medium power, more than a microcomputer but less than a mainframe.

  ‘Agent software is now available for just about every type of hardware device, from the latest communications servers through to the most ancient of Digital Equipment PDP - 11 minicomputers.’

  More example sentences

  • ‘The first Unix was developed at the Bell Labs in 1971 for PDP minicomputers.’
  • ‘The commercial array processors, coupled with minicomputers from Digital Equipment Corporation and Data General, were often used as supercomputers.’
  • ‘The project came in on time, it came in on budget - and it was a miserable failure, because basically you needed a minicomputer for every person.’
  • ‘In the 1980s geeks and hackers were tied together by a love of machine and code, with fierce and regular rifts developing between those who believed in the PC or the minicomputer, the keyboard or the mouse, Intel or Motorola.’
  • ‘The company then reverted to its old systems, homegrown applications it had built for digital equipment vax minicomputers in the 1980s.’
  • ‘It had to kiss that goodbye, when minicomputers and then PCs and servers proliferated.’
  • ‘Because of this, not only are developing countries far more dependent on older PCs, such as Pentium I and PII systems, but even the larger minicomputers often need to be supported long after their officially supported life is over.’
  • ‘To do this, Compaq acquired Tandem Computer, maker of famously reliable mainframes, and then Digital Equipment Corporation, the original maker of minicomputers.’
  • ‘There is a community, a shared culture, of expert programmers and networking wizards that traces its history back through decades to the first time-sharing minicomputers and the earliest ARPAnet experiments.’
  • ‘During his master's work he built a small robot with whiskers and photoelectric eyes controlled by a minicomputer, and wrote a thesis on a computer language for artificial intelligence.’
  • ‘History buffs will recall that Sun Microsystems began in the 1980s with one goal, to put the power of an engineer's minicomputer onto his desktop.’
  • ‘At that time, the lab had a specialized real-time minicomputer: a Hewlett-Packard HP - 1000 F series.’
  • ‘All of a sudden, IBM PCs exchanged information easier with typical minicomputer systems than they did with mainframe computers.’
  • ‘Lam and his colleagues began the first leg of the computation in 1980, using a minicomputer to run through the simplest cases.’
  • ‘A personal data assistant is a minicomputer that can fit in the palm of your hand.’
  • ‘The sound and speech processor is a minicomputer that processes sound into digital information, and then sends that information to the implant package in the form of electrical signals.’
  • ‘That's why the minicomputer makers are gone, that's why the PC makers are going; the growth is in the modern clients.’
  • ‘The lowly transistor, for example, killed the vacuum tube, while PCs, once derided as toys, snuffed minicomputers and currently threaten servers from the likes of Sun Microsystems Inc.’
  • ‘Among other industrial spin-offs of Project Whirlwind was the minicomputer, developed by Kenneth Hogan of the Digital Equipment Corporation.’