Meaning – The term Big Iron is used to describe a very large, expensive, and powerful computer. The most common examples of Big Iron Computers, are Cray’s Supercomputer and IBM’s Mainframe computer.
The origin of this slang dates back to the 1970s, when numerous people friendly mini computers were introduced, and in order to avoid any confusions, people started referring to the larger, more powerful computers, as Big Iron Computers.
Big Iron computers are used by companies to process large amounts of data. To help them accomplish this task, the Big Iron computers feature considerable internal memory, a high aptitude for external storage, top-quality internal engineering, superior technical support, fast throughput input/output and reliability.
Example of Usage – “As the bank had to process multiple transactions in a day, they resorted to using a a Big Iron Computer.”
