1788, "bottle containing two quarts of wine or spirits," from L. magnum, neut. of magnus "great" (see magnate). Registered 1935 by Smith & Wesson Inc., of Springfield, Mass., as the name of a powerful type of handgun.
A database language for DEC-10's, used internally by Tymshare, Inc.. MAGNUM was designed in the late 1970's by Dale Jordan, Rich Strauss and Dave McQuoid originally, and was written in BLISS-10. It was the world's first commercial relational database. It was in the process of being written in 1976. (1995-01-25)