Related:

• dinosaur pen: n. A traditional {mainframe} computer room complete with raised flooring, special power, its own ultra-heavy-duty air conditioning, and a side order of Halon fire extinguishers.
  See {boa}. -- The AI Hackers Dictionary...
• dinosaur: n. 1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power.
  Used especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer microprocessor-based machines....
• dinosaur n. 1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power.
  Used especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer microprocessor-based machines....
• cram switch: [from the nuclear power industry] n. An emergency-power-off switch (see {Big Red Switch}), esp.
  one positioned to be easily hit by evacuating personnel....
• boa: [IBM] n. Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a {dinosaur pen}.
  Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of their own when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have been coiled for some time....
• big iron: n. Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers.
  Used generally of {number-crunching} supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes....
• mainframe: n. Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or `main frame' of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine.
  After the emergence of smaller `minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes....
• box: n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box' where foo is some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, `UNIX box', `MS-DOS box', etc.
  ) "We preprocess the data on UNIX boxes before handing it up to the mainframe....
• iron: n. Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of {mainframe} class with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers).
  Often in the phrase {big iron}. Oppose {silicon}....