Big Red Switch

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Big Red Switch (BRS) is a hacker term for the shutdown button or power switch on a computer, especially the red "Emergency Pull" switch on IBM mainframe operator consoles. (The term has also sometimes been used for the power switch on IBM PCs: "This !@%$% bitty box is hung again; time to hit the Big Red Switch.")

On recent mainframes a block physically droped into place so that they can't be pushed back in. Because the use of a Big Red Switch will bring down a computer in an "uncontrolled fashion", getting the machine up and running again can be a nontrivial and cumbersome task taking quite some time. Therefore, particularly in the early mainframe computer era, people risked getting fired for pulling/pushing the BRS of a production batch processing mainframe if this wasn't absolutely necessary as part of an emergency action (see molly-guard).

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This article was originally based on material from the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, which is licensed under the GFDL.

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