Idioms

big iron

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big iron

slang A very fast and powerful mainframe computer. A basic computer won't work—we need the big iron for this project. A: "You kids were raised on laptops and PCs, you wouldn't even know a big iron if you saw one." B: "Huh?" A: "Exactly." Don't worry, that government office has a big iron we can use to crunch these numbers.
See also: big, iron
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. © 2024 Farlex, Inc, all rights reserved.

big iron

n. a large, mainframe computer. (see also iron.) We’ll have to run this job on the big iron over at the university.
See also: big, iron
McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions Copyright © 2006 by The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc. All rights reserved.
See also:
References in periodicals archive
Heinie, Nighthawk and Wilson big irons run $3,000 to $5,000.
Security Monitoring and Incident Response: Big Iron Solutions security monitoring will validate that security controls are functioning effectively in addition to detecting suspicious behaviour and invalid configuration changes in real time.
Fiona Wilcock, a nutrition consultant and author of The Big Iron Count Report, said: "Many parents don't really understand why iron is important or know which foods supply it.
"I liked it when all the fireworks came through and then the big iron monster started to blow up with fire," he said.
BIG IRON WORLD Old Crow Medicine Show (Nettwerk, 2006)
"One of my childhood memories was when we had to put big iron pillars inside the building to make it bombproof during the war and watching the lads climb on top of the air raid shelter which was just outside.
"Researchers with the Defense Department have a large backlog of requirements for the high-end, computational 'big iron' systems," he notes.
"Sun and Oracle have seen increasing demand for our respective Sun Firex64 servers and database products and while the industry has traditionally thought of our longstanding relationship as only the marriage of big iron with leading database technology, the reality is we're continuing to increase our joint presence in the growing x64 server market," said Stephen Borcich, vice-president, Partner Marketing, Sun Microsystems, Inc.
In the majority of cases, the capabilities of "big iron" in-circuit testers are not needed.
to H-Bomb big iron and steel centers around Leningrad"; "From Tripoli, 2 hrs.
"Big disk drive guys can't continue to move big iron unless they have a server consolidation strategy going on in the customer environment," he notes.
I performed my semi-scientific back-yard test for rust pre ventative miracle oils: I got a bunch of big iron nails degreased 'em handily, then put Clenzoil on some and left some raw and nekkid as a control group.
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