big iron

<jargon> (Or "heavy metal [Cambridge]) Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of number crunching supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. The term implies approval, in contrast to "dinosaur".

[Jargon File]

Nearby terms:
big blue « big-endian « Big Gray Wall « big iron » BIG-LAN » Bigloo » bignum