Minicomputer

A rather old fashioned description of a medium powered computer.

In the early days of computing a 'mainframe' was housed in a large air-conditioned room and could attend to hundreds of people, whilst the 'microcomputer' was a low-powered personal computer.

In-between lay the 'minicomputer'. This was powerful enough to serve the needs of a small company or department but nowhere near the cost of a mainframe. Terminals would be connected to the minicomputer so several workers could use it at the same time.

These days, a file server running within a LAN (Local Area Network) is the more common setup.