Amethyst
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backbone site is n. A key USENET and email site; one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the USENET maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1991 inclu...
backbone site2 is University, UC Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare {rib site}, {leaf site}.
backgammon is See {bignum}, {moby}, and {pseudoprime}.
background is n.,adj.,vt. To do a task `in background' is to do it whenever {foreground} matters are not claiming your undivided attention, and `to background' something means to relegate it to a lower priority. "For now, we'll just print a ...
background2 is graph-printing problem in background." Note that this implies ongoing activity but at a reduced level or in spare time, in contrast to mainstream `back burner' (which connotes benign neglect until some future resumption of activ...
background3 is processing that they have queued up for their unconscious minds (a tack that one can often fruitfully take upon encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare {amp off}, {slopsucker}. Technically, a task running in backgr...
background4 is was started (and often running at a lower priority); oppose {foreground}. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with {{UNIX}}, but it appears to have been first used in this sense on OS/360.
backspace and overstrike is interj. Whoa! Back up. Used to suggest that someone just said or did something wrong. Common among APL programmers.
backward combatability is /bak'w*rd k*m-bat'*-bil'*-tee/ [from `backward compatibility'] n. A property of hardware or software revisions in which previous protocols, formats, and layouts are discarded in favor of `new and improved' protocols, ...
backward combatability2 is making the transition between major releases. When the change is so drastic that the old formats are not retained in the new version, it is said to be `backward combatable'. See {flag day}.
BAD is /B-A-D/ [IBM acronym, `Broken As Designed'] adj. Said of a program that is {bogus} because of bad design and misfeatures rather than because of bugginess. See {working as designed}.
Bad Thing is [from the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody `1066 And All That'] n. Something that can't possibly result in improvement of the subject. This term is always capitalized, as in "Replacing all of the 9600-baud modems with bicycle courier...
Bad Thing2 is Thing}. British correspondents confirm that {Bad Thing} and {Good Thing} (and prob. therefore {Right Thing} and {Wrong Thing}) come from the book referenced in the etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good Kings but Bad ...
Bad Thing3 is mainstream idiom on the British side of the pond.
bag on the side is n. An extension to an established hack that is supposed to add some functionality to the original. Usually derogatory, implying that the original was being overextended and should have been thrown away, and the new product ...
bag on the side2 is phrase, `to hang a bag on the side [of]'. "C++? That's just a bag on the side of C ...." "They want me to hang a bag on the side of the accounting system."
bagbiter is /bag'bit-*r/ n. 1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A ...
bagbiter2 is inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms {loser}, {cretin}, {chomper}. 3. adj. `bagbiting' Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me compute the f...
bagbiter3 is {losing}, {cretinous}, {bletcherous}, `barfucious' (under {barfulous}) and `chomping' (under {chomp}). 4. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every 5 minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is ...
bagbiter4 is of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to the scrotum, but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized. A program called Lexiphage on the old MIT AI PDP-10 would draw on a selec...
bagbiter5 is BAG" in ornate letters, and then a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off. This is the first and to date only known example of a program *intended* to be a bagbiter.
bamf is /bamf/ 1. [from old X-Men comics] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in {virtual reality} (esp. {MUD}) electronic {fora} when a character wishes to make a drama...
bamf2 is magical transformation, used in virtual reality {fora} like sense 1. 3. [from `Don Washington's Survival Guide'] n. Acronym for `Bad-Ass Mother Fucker', used to refer to one of the handful of nastiest monsters on an LPMUD or other ...
banana label is n. The labels often used on the sides of {macrotape} reels, so called because they are shaped roughly like blunt-ended bananas. This term, like macrotapes themselves, is still current but visibly headed for obsolescence.
banana problem is n. [from the story of the little girl who said "I know how to spell `banana', but I don't know when to stop"]. Not knowing where or when to bring a production to a close (compare {fencepost error}). One may say `there is a ...
banana problem2 is defined or incorrect termination conditions, or in discussing the evolution of a design that may be succumbing to featuritis (see also {creeping elegance}, {creeping featuritis}). See item 176 under {HAKMEM}, which describe...
banana problem3 is implementation.bandwidth n. 1. Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning as the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person, or transmission medium can handle. "Those are amazing graphics,...
banana problem4 is bandwidth, I guess." Compare {low-bandwidth}. 2. Attention span. 3. On {USENET}, a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth.
bang is 1. n. Common spoken name for `!' (ASCII 0100001), especially when used in pronouncing a {bang path} in spoken hackish. In {elder days} this was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford hackers preferring {excl} or {shriek}; ...
bang2 is it (esp. via the term {bang path}) and it is now certainly the most common spoken name for `!'. Note that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic written `!'; one would not say "Congratulations bang" (except possibly for humorous p...
bang3 is exact characters `foo!' one would speak "Eff oh oh bang". See {shriek}, {{ASCII}}. 2. interj. An exclamation signifying roughly "I have achieved enlightenment!", or "The dynamite has cleared out my brain!" Often used to acknowledge...
bang4 is immediately after one has been called on it.
bang on is vt. To stress-test a piece of hardware or software "I banged on the new version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't crash once. I guess it is ready to release." The term {pound on} is synonymous.
bang path is n. An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to the addressee, so called because each {hop} is signified by a {bang} sign. Thus, for example, the path ...!bigsite!foovax!...
bang path2 is to machine bigsite (presumably a well-known location accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine foovax to the account of user me on barbox. In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers b...
bang path3 is compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see {glob}) to give paths from *several* big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliably (example ...!{seismo, ut-sally, ih...
bang path4 is 10 hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See {{Inter...
banner is n. 1. The title page added to printouts by most print spoolers (see {spool}). Typically includes user or account ID information in very large character-graphics capitals. Also called a `burst page', because it indicates where to bu...
banner2 is one user's printout from the next. 2. A similar printout generated (typically on multiple pages of fan-fold paper) from user-specified text, e.g., by a program such as UNIX's `banner({1,6})'. 3. On interactive software, a first sc...
banner3 is and/or a copyright notice.
bar is /bar/ n. 1. The second metasyntactic variable, after {foo} and before {baz}. "Suppose we have two functions FOO and BAR. FOO calls BAR...." 2. Often appended to {foo} to produce {foobar}.
bare metal is n. 1. New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an {operating system}, an {HLL}, or even assembler. Commonly used in the phrase `programming on the bare metal', which refers to the arduous work of {bit b...
bare metal2 is for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compil...
bare metal3 is real development environment. 2. `Programming on the bare metal' is also used to describe a style of {hand-hacking} that relies on bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for speed and space optim...
bare metal4 is overlapping instructions (or, as in the famous case described in appendix A, interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become less common...
bare metal5 is and machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial embedded systems. See {real programmer}. In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming (especially in s...
bare metal6 is considered a {Good Thing}, or at least a necessary thing (because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and poorly designed to make it necessary; see {ill-behaved}). There, the term usually refers to bypassing the ...
bare metal7 is application to directly access device registers and machine addresses. "To get 19.2 kilobaud on the serial port, you need to get down to the bare metal." People who can do this sort of thing are held in high regard.
barf is /barf/ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit'] 1. interj. Term of disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Val\-speak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!) See {bletch}. 2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar exp...
barf2 is hack and he barfed" means only that he complained about it, not that he literally vomited. 3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input. May mean to give an error message. Examples "The division operation barfs if you try...
barf3 is operation checks for an attempt to divide by zero, and if one is encountered it causes the operation to fail in some unspecified, but generally obvious, manner.) "The text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before writing o...
barf4 is Commonwealth hackish, `barf' is generally replaced by `puke' or `vom'. {barf} is sometimes also used as a metasyntactic variable, like {foo} or {bar}.
barfulation is /bar`fyoo-lay'sh*n/ interj. Variation of {barf} used around the Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?"
barfulous is /bar'fyoo-l*s/ adj. (alt. `barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.
baroque is adj. Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of {elephantine} or {monstrosity} but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. "Meta...
baroque2 is variations to its letterform output. Now *that* is baroque!" See also {rococo}.
BartleMUD is /bar'tl-muhd/ n. Any of the MUDs derived from the original MUD game by Richard Bartle (see {MUD}). BartleMUDs are noted for their (usually slightly offbeat) humor, dry but friendly syntax, and lack of adjectives in object descrip...
BartleMUD2 is `brand172', for instance (see {brand brand brand}). Some MUDders intensely dislike Bartle and this term, and prefer to speak of `MUD-1'.
BASIC is n. A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers. This is another case (like {Pascal}) of t...
BASIC2 is deliberately designed as an educational toy gets taken too seriously. A novice can write short BASIC programs (on the order of 10--20 lines) very easily; writing anything longer is (a) very painful, and (b) encourages bad habits tha...
BASIC3 is hack in a real language. This wouldn't be so bad if historical accidents hadn't made BASIC so common on low-end micros. As it is, it ruins thousands of potential wizards a year.
batch is adj. 1. Non-interactive. Hackers use this somewhat more loosely than the traditional technical definitions justify; in particular, switches on a normally interactive program that prepare it to receive non-interactive command input ar...
batch2 is switches. A `batch file' is a series of instructions written to be handed to an interactive program running in batch mode. 2. Performance of dreary tasks all at one sitting. "I finally sat down in batch mode and wrote out checks fo...
batch3 is electricity back on next week..." 3. Accumulation of a number of small tasks that can be lumped together for greater efficiency. "I'm batching up those letters to send sometime" "I'm batching up bottles to take to the recycling ce...
bathtub curve is n. Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the ...
bathtub curve2 is `tires out'. See also {burn-in period}, {infant mortality}.
baud is /bawd/ [simplified from its technical meaning] n. Bits per second. Hence kilobaud or Kbaud, thousands of bits per second. The technical meaning is `level transitions per second'; this coincides with bps only for two-level modulation w...
baud2 is are aware of these nuances but blithely ignore them.
baud barf is /bawd barf/ n. The garbage one gets on the monitor when using a modem connection with some protocol setting (esp. line speed) incorrect, or when someone picks up a voice extension on the same line, or when really bad line noise di...
baud barf2 is completely {random}, by the way; hackers with a lot of serial-line experience can usually tell whether the device at the other end is expecting a higher or lower speed than the terminal is set to. *Really* experienced ones can...
baz is /baz/ [Stanford corruption of {bar}] n. 1. The third metasyntactic variable, after {foo} and {bar} and before {quux} (or, occasionally, `qux'; or local idiosyncracies like `rag', `zowie', etc.). "Suppose we have three functions FOO,BAR...
baz2 is BAZ...." 2. interj. A term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often drawn out for 2 or 3 seconds, producing an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/. 3. Occasionally appended to {foo} to produce `foobaz'.
bboard is /bee'bord/ [contraction of `bulletin board'] n. 1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of {BBS} systems running on personal micros, less frequently of a USENET {newsgroup} (in fact, use of the term for a newsgroup generally ma...
bboard2 is BBS world or as a real old-timer predating USENET). 2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campus-wide electronic bulletin boards. 3. The term `physical bboard' is sometimes used to refer to a old-fashio...
bboard3 is it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge. In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or `market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, th...
bboard4 is name alone, as in (at CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general".
BBS is /B-B-S/ [acronym, `Bulletin Board System'] n. An electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into {topic group}s. Thousands of local ...
BBS2 is U.S., typically run by amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans of USENET and Internet or the big commercial timesharing bboards such as CompuServe and GEnie tend to consider local BBSes ...
BBS3 is but they serve a valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise be unable to exchange code at all.
beam is [from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"] vt. To transfer {softcopy} of a file electronically; most often in combining forms such as `beam me a copy' or `beam that over to his site'. Compare {blast}, {snarf}, {BLT}.
beanie key is [Mac users] n. See {command key}.
beep is n.,v. Syn. {feep}. This term seems to be preferred among micro hobbyists.
beige toaster is n. A Macintosh. See {toaster}; compare {Macintrash}, {maggotbox}.
bells and whistles is [by analogy with the toyboxes on theater organs] n. Features added to a program or system to make it more {flavorful} from a hacker's point of view, without necessarily adding to its utility for its primary function. Dis...
bells and whistles2 is to attract users. "Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add some bells and whistles." No one seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a whistle.
bells, whistles, and gongs is n. A standard elaborated form of {bells and whistles}; typically said with a pronounced and ironic accent on the `gongs'.
benchmark is [techspeak] n. An inaccurate measure of computer performance. "In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." Well-known ones include Whetstone, Dhrystone, Rhealstone (see {h}), the Gab...
benchmark2 is SPECmark suite, and LINPACK. See also {machoflops}, {MIPS}.
Berkeley Quality Software is adj. (often abbreviated `BQS') Term used in a pejorative sense to refer to software that was apparently created by rather spaced-out hackers late at night to solve some unique problem. It usually has nonexistent, ...
Berkeley Quality Software2 is been tested on at least two examples, and core dumps when anyone else attempts to use it. This term was frequently applied to early versions of the `dbx(1)' debugger. See also {Berzerkeley}.
berklix is /berk'liks/ n.,adj. [contraction of `Berkeley UNIX'] See {BSD}. Not used at Berkeley itself. May be more common among {suit}s attempting to sound like cognoscenti than among hackers, who usually just say `BSD'.
berserking is vi. A {MUD} term meaning to gain points *only* by killing other players and mobiles (non-player characters). Hence, a Berserker-Wizard is a player character that has achieved enough points to become a wizard, but only by killing ...
berserking2 is frowned upon because of its inherently antisocial nature, but some MUDs have a `berserker mode' in which a player becomes *permanently* berserk, can never flee from a fight, cannot use magic, gets no score for treasure, but do...
berserking3 is wizards can seriously damage your elf!"
Berzerkeley is /b*r-zer'klee/ [from `berserk', via the name of a now-deceased record label] n. Humorous distortion of `Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the {BSD} UNIX hackers. See {software bloat}, {Missed'em-five}...
Berzerkeley2 is use of this term in reference to the cultural and political peculiarities of UC Berkeley as a whole has been reported from as far back as the 1960s.
beta is /bay't*/, /be't*/ or (Commonwealth) /bee't*/ n. 1. In the {Real World}, software often goes through two stages of testing Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Software is said to be `in beta'. 2. Anything that is new and experimen...
beta2 is means that he is still testing for compatibility and reserving judgment. 3. Beta software is notoriously buggy, so `in beta' connotes flakiness. Historical note More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release (potentially unre...
beta3 is making it available to selected customers and users. This term derives from early 1960s terminology for product cycle checkpoints, first used at IBM but later standard throughout the industry. `Alpha Test' was the unit, module, or co...
beta4 is system test. These themselves came from earlier A- and B-tests for hardware. The A-test was a feasibility and manufacturability evaluation done before any commitment to design and development. The B-test was a demonstration that th...
beta5 is The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the B-test performed on early samples of the production design.
BFI is /B-F-I/ n. See {brute force and ignorance}. Also encountered in the variant `BFMI', `brute force and *massive* ignorance'.
bible is n. 1. One of a small number of fundamental source books such as {Knuth} and {K&R}. 2. The most detailed and authoritative reference for a particular language, operating system, or other complex software system.
BiCapitalization is n. The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as NeXT, {NeWS}, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many {mar...
BiCapitalization2 is really cute, even the 2,317th time they do it. Compare {studlycaps}.
BIFF is /bif/ [USENET] n. The most famous {pseudo}, and the prototypical {newbie}. Articles from BIFF are characterized by all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, `cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ HE"S...
BIFF2 is IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of {talk mode} abbreviations, a long {sig block} (sometimes even a {doubled sig}), and unbounded na"ivet'e. BIFF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20....
BIFF3 is appear to come from a variety of sites. However, {BITNET} seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that BIFF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by BIFF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address BIFF@BIT.NET.
biff is /bif/ vt. To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility `biff(1)', which was in turn named after the implementor's dog (it barked whenever the mailman came). No relation to {BIFF}.
Big Gray Wall is n. What faces a {VMS} user searching for documentation. A full VMS kit comes on a pallet, the documentation taking up around 15 feet of shelf space before the addition of layered products such as compilers, databases, multive...
Big Gray Wall2 is Recent (since VMS version 5) DEC documentation comes with gray binders; under VMS version 4 the binders were orange (`big orange wall'), and under version 3 they were blue. See {VMS}.
big iron is n. Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of {number-crunching} supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval; compare {heavy metal}, oppose {di...
Big Red Switch is [IBM] n. The power switch on a computer, esp. the `Emergency Pull' switch on an IBM {mainframe} or the power switch on an IBM PC where it really is large and red. "This !@%$% {bitty box} is hung again; time to hit the Big Re...
Big Red Switch2 is tune with the company's passion for {TLA}s, this is often acronymized as `BRS' (this has also become established on FidoNet and in the PC {clone} world). It is alleged that the emergency pull switch on an IBM 360/91 actuall...
Big Red Switch3 is power feed; the BRSes on more recent machines physically drop a block into place so that they can't be pushed back in. People get fired for pulling them, especially inappropriately (see also {molly-guard}). Compare {powe...
the Big Room is n. The extremely large room with the blue ceiling and intensely bright light (during the day) or black ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during the night) found outside all computer installations. "He can't come to the p...
big win is n. Serendipity. "Yes, those two physicists discovered high-temperature superconductivity in a batch of ceramic that had been prepared incorrectly according to their experimental schedule. Small mistake; big win!" See {win big}.
big-endian is [From Swift's `Gulliver's Travels' via the famous paper `On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace' by Danny Cohen, USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980] adj. 1. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numer...
big-endian2 is has the lowest address (the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most processors, including the IBM 370 family, the {PDP-10}, the Motorola microprocessor families, and most of the various RISC designs current in mid-1991, are big...
big-endian3 is {NUXI problem}. 2. An {{Internet address}} the wrong way round. Most of the world follows the Internet standard and writes email addresses starting with the name of the computer and ending up with the name of the country. I...
big-endian4 is decided to do it the other way round before the Internet domain standard was established; e.g., me@uk.ac.wigan.cs. Most gateway sites have {ad-hockery} in their mailers to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular,...
big-endian5 is (domain uk) or Czechoslovakia (domain cs).
bignum is /big'nuhm/ [orig. from MIT MacLISP] n. 1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision computer representation for very large integers. More generally, any very large number. "Have you ever looked at the United States Budget? There's bignums f...
bignum2 is numbers on the dice are called `bignums', especially a roll of double fives or double sixes (compare {moby}, sense 4). See also {El Camino Bignum}. Sense 1 may require some explanation. Most computer languages provide a kind of ...
bignum3 is integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must be smaller than than 2^{31} (2,147,483,648) or (on a losing {bitty box}) 2^{15} (32,768). If you want to work with numbers larger than that, you have to use floating-poin...
bignum4 is six or seven decimal places. Computer languages that provide bignums can perform exact calculations on very large numbers, such as 1000! (the factorial of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times ... times 2 times 1).
bigot is n. A person who is religiously attached to a particular computer, language, operating system, editor, or other tool (see {religious issues}). Usually found with a specifier; thus, `cray bigot', {ITS bigot}, `APL bigot', `VMS bigot', ...
bigot2 is distinguished from mere partisans or zealots by the fact that they refuse to learn alternatives even when the march of time and/or technology is threatening to obsolete the favored tool. It is said "You can tell a bigot, but you c...
bit is [from the mainstream meaning and `Binary digIT'] n. 1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information obtained by asking a yes-or-no question for which the two outcomes are equally probable. 2. [techspeak] A computation...
bit2 is values, such as true and false or 0 and 1. 3. A mental flag a reminder that something should be done eventually. "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't seen you for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.) 4. More ...
bit3 is of belief. "I have a bit set that says that you were the last guy to hack on EMACS." (Meaning "I think you were the last guy to hack on EMACS, and what I am about to say is predicated on this, so please stop me if this isn't true.")...
bit4 is way of indicating that you intend only a short interruption for a question that can presumably be answered yes or no. A bit is said to be `set' if its value is true or 1, and `reset' or `clear' if its value is false or 0. One spea...
bit5 is or `invert' a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. See also {flag}, {trit}, {mode bit}.
bit bang is n. Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit at the appropriate times. The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte. Input is more...
bit bang2 is and output at the same time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the {wannabee}s. Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers, presumably when UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros with ...
bit bang3 is instance of the {cycle of reincarnation}, this technique is now (1991) coming back into use on some RISC architectures because it consumes such an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes sense not to have a UA...
bit bashing is n. (alt. `bit diddling' or {bit twiddling}) Term used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of {bit}, {flag}, {nybble}, and other smaller-than-character-sized pieces of data; the...
bit bashing2 is encryption algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics programming (see {bitblt}), and assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real technical challenge...
bit bashing3 is decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs." See also {bit bang}, {mode bit}.
bit bucket is n. 1. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Discarded, lost, or destroyed data is said to have `gone to the bit buck...
bit bucket2 is {/dev/null}. Sometimes amplified as `the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky'. 2. The place where all lost mail and news messages eventually go. The selection is performed according to {Finagle's Law}; important mail is much more lik...
bit bucket3 is mail, which has an almost 100% probability of getting delivered. Routing to the bit bucket is automatically performed by mail-transfer agents, news systems, and the lower layers of the network. 3. The ideal location for all un...
bit bucket4 is article to the bit bucket." Such a request is guaranteed to overflow one's mailbox with flames. 4. Excuse for all mail that has not been sent. "I mailed you those figures last week; they must have ended in the bit bucket." Co...
bit bucket5 is in jest. It is based on the fanciful notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed but only misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term `bit box', about which the same legend was current; old-time ...
bit bucket6 is told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them `out of the bit box'. See also {chad box}. Another variant of this legend has it that, as a consequence of the `parity preservation law', the number ...
bit bucket7 is equal the number of 0 bits. Any imbalance results in bits filling up the bit bucket. A qualified computer technician can empty a full bit bucket as part of scheduled maintenance.
bit decay is n. See {bit rot}. People with a physics background tend to prefer this one for the analogy with particle decay. See also {computron}, {quantum bogodynamics}.
bit rot is n. Also {bit decay}. Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has changed'. The t...
bit rot2 is were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled. There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha particles generated by trace radionuclide...
bit rot3 is change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting circuitry to compensate ...
bit rot4 is hackers that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myth; see the {cosmic rays} entry for details. The term {software rot} is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit rot the notional cause.
bit twiddling is n. 1. (pejorative) An exercise in {tuning} in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code has become incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small modifica...
bit twiddling2 is goal. 3. Approx. syn. for {bit bashing}; esp. used for the act of frobbing the device control register of a peripheral in an attempt to get it back to a known state.
bit-paired keyboard is n. obs. (alt. `bit-shift keyboard') A non-standard keyboard layout that seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The ASR-33 was a mechanical de...
bit-paired keyboard2 is generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern that could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or the CTRL key was p...
bit-paired keyboard3 is more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was, the design had to group characters that shared the same basic bit pattern on one key. This is why the characters !"#$%&'() appear where they do on a Teletype (thankfu...
bit-paired keyboard4 is was *not* the weirdest variant of the {QWERTY} layout widely seen, by the way; that prize should probably go to one of several (differing) arrangements on IBM's even clunkier 026 and 029 card punches. When electroni...
bit-paired keyboard5 is there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product l...
bit-paired keyboard6 is alternatives became known as `bit-paired' and `typewriter-paired' keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical --- and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, th...
bit-paired keyboard7 is users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes wer...
bit-paired keyboard8 is `typewriter-paired' standard became universal, `bit-paired' hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.
bitblt is /bit'blit/ n. [from {BLT}, q.v.] 1. Any of a family of closely related algorithms for moving and copying rectangles of bits between main and display memory on a bit-mapped device, or between two areas of either main or display memory...
bitblt2 is the case of overlapping source and destination rectangles is what makes BitBlt tricky). 2. Synonym for {blit} or {BLT}. Both uses are borderline techspeak.
BITNET is /bit'net/ [acronym Because It's Time NETwork] n. Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see {network, the}). The BITNET hosts are a collection of IBM dinosaurs and VAXen (the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that com...
BITNET2 is images (see {eighty-column mind}); thus, they tend to mangle the headers and text of third-party traffic from the rest of the ASCII/RFC-822 world with annoying regularity. BITNET is also notorious as the apparent home of {BIFF}.
bits is n.pl. 1. Information. Examples "I need some bits about file formats." ("I need to know about file formats.") Compare {core dump}, sense 4. 2. Machine-readable representation of a document, specifically as contrasted with paper "I ...
bits2 is does anyone know where I can get the bits?". See {softcopy}, {source of all good bits} See also {bit}.
bitty box is /bit'ee boks/ n. 1. A computer sufficiently small, primitive, or incapable as to cause a hacker acute claustrophobia at the thought of developing software for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only persona...
bitty box2 is Sinclair, VIC-20, TRS-80, or IBM PC. 2. [Pejorative] More generally, the opposite of `real computer' (see {Get a real computer!}). See also {mess-dos}, {toaster}, and {toy}.
bixie is /bik'see/ n. Variant {emoticon}s used on BIX (the Byte Information eXchange). The {smiley} bixie is <@_@>, apparently intending to represent two cartoon eyes and a mouth. A few others have been reported.
black art is n. A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems area (compare {black magic}). VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their begin...
black art2 is art; as theory developed they became {deep magic}, and once standard textbooks had been written, became merely {heavy wizardry}. The huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading around new computer-related ...
black art3 is made both the term `black art' and what it describes less common than formerly. See also {voodoo programming}.
black hole is n. When a piece of email or netnews disappears mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a {bounce message}) it is commonly said to have `fallen into a black hole'. "I think there's a blac...
black hole2 is site foovax has been dropping a lot of stuff on the floor lately (see {drop on the floor}). The implied metaphor of email as interstellar travel is interesting in itself. Compare {bit bucket}.
black magic is n. A technique that works, though nobody really understands why. More obscure than {voodoo programming}, which may be done by cookbook. Compare also {black art}, {deep magic}, and {magic number} (sense 2).
blast is 1. vt.,n. Synonym for {BLT}, used esp. for large data sends over a network or comm line. Opposite of {snarf}. Usage uncommon. The variant `blat' has been reported. 2. vt. [HP/Apollo] Synonymous with {nuke} (sense 3). Sometimes th...
blast2 is Blast them (y/n)?' would appear in the command window upon logout.
blat is n. 1. Syn. {blast}, sense 1. 2. See {thud}.
bletch is /blech/ [from Yiddish/German `brechen', to vomit, poss. via comic-strip exclamation `blech'] interj. Term of disgust. Often used in "Ugh, bletch". Compare {barf}.
bletcherous is /blech'*-r*s/ adj. Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing. This word is seldom used of people. "This keyboard is bletcherous!" (Perhaps the keys don't work very well, or are misplaced.) See {losing}, {creti...
bletcherous2 is The term {bletcherous} applies to the esthetics of the thing so described; similarly for {cretinous}. By contrast, something that is `losing' or `bagbiting' may be failing to meet objective criteria. See also {bogus} and {r...
bletcherous3 is meaning than any of the above.
blinkenlights is /blink'*n-litz/ n. Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a {dinosaur}. Derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic sign in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms i...
blinkenlights2 is in its entirety as follows ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken ...
blinkenlights3 is bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das blinkenlichten. This silliness dates back at least as far as 1959 at Stanford Universit...
blinkenlights4 is early 1960s, when it was reported at London University's ATLAS computing site. There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with the word `blinkenlights'. In an amusing example of turnabout...
blinkenlights5 is their own versions of the blinkenlights poster in fractured English, one of which is reproduced here ATTENTION This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment. Fingergrabbi...
blinkenlights6 is computers is allowed for die experts only! So all the "lefthanders" stay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here working intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked andersw...
blinkenlights7 is astaunished the blinkenlights. See also {geef}.
blit is /blit/ vt. 1. To copy a large array of bits from one part of a computer's memory to another part, particularly when the memory is being used to determine what is shown on a display screen. "The storage allocator picks through the tabl...
blit2 is memory, and then blits it all back down again." See {bitblt}, {BLT}, {dd}, {cat}, {blast}, {snarf}. More generally, to perform some operation (such as toggling) on a large array of bits while moving them. 2. All-capitalized as `BL...
blit3 is designed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs, later commercialized as the AT&T 5620. (The folk etymology from `Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal' is incorrect.)
blitter is /blit'r/ n. A special-purpose chip or hardware system built to perform {blit} operations, esp. used for fast implementation of bit-mapped graphics. The Commodore Amiga and a few other micros have these, but in 1991 the trend is awa...
blitter2 is reincarnation}). Syn. {raster blaster}.
blivet is /bliv'*t/ [allegedly from a World War II military term meaning "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"] n. 1. An intractable problem. 2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be fixed or replaced if it breaks. 3. A tool that ha...
blivet2 is programmers that it has become an unmaintainable tissue of hacks. 4. An out-of-control but unkillable development effort. 5. An embarrassing bug that pops up during a customer demo. This term has other meanings in other technica...
blivet3 is hardware engineers of various kinds it seems to mean any random object of unknown purpose (similar to hackish use of {frob}). It has also been used to describe an amusing trick-the-eye drawing resembling a three-pronged fork that ...
blivet4 is until one realizes that the parts fit together in an impossible way.
block is [from process scheduling terminology in OS theory] 1. vi. To delay or sit idle while waiting for something. "We're blocking until everyone gets here." Compare {busy-wait}. 2. `block on' vt. To block, waiting for (something). "Lunc...
block transfer computations is n. From the television series "Dr. Who", in which it referred to computations so fiendishly subtle and complex that they could not be performed by machines. Used to refer to any task that should be expressible as...
blow an EPROM is /bloh *n ee'prom/ v. (alt. `blast an EPROM', `burn an EPROM') To program a read-only memory, e.g. for use with an embedded system. This term arises because the programming process for the Programmable Read-Only Memories (PROM...
blow an EPROM2 is Programmable Read-Only Memories (EPROMs) involved intentionally blowing tiny electrical fuses on the chip. Thus, one was said to `blow' (or `blast') a PROM, and the terminology carried over even though the write process on ...
blow away is vt. To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, generally by accident. "He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last night's netnews." Oppose {nuke}.
blow out is vi. Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as {crash and burn}. See {blow past}, {blow up}.
blow past is vt. To {blow out} despite a safeguard. "The server blew past the 5K reserve buffer."
blow up is vi. 1. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon overflow or at least go {nonlinear}. 2. Syn. {blow out}.
BLT is /B-L-T/, /bl*t/ or (rarely) /belt/ n.,vt. Synonym for {blit}. This is the original form of {blit} and the ancestor of {bitblt}. It referred to any large bit-field copy or move operation (one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operati...
BLT2 is and TOPS-10 was sardonically referred to as `The Big BLT'). The jargon usage has outlasted the {PDP-10} BLock Transfer instruction from which {BLT} derives; nowadays, the assembler mnemonic {BLT} almost always means `Branch if Less ...
Blue Book is n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard references on the page-layout and graphics-control language PostScript (`PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook', Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley 1985, QA76.73.P67P68, ISBN 0-201-...
Blue Book2 is known as the {Green Book} and {Red Book}. 2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on Smalltalk `Smalltalk-80 The Language and its Implementation', David Robson, Addison-Wesley 1983, QA76.8.S635G64, ISBN 0-201...
Blue Book3 is and red books). 3. Any of the 1988 standards issued by the CCITT's ninth plenary assembly. Until now, they have changed color each review cycle (1984 was {Red Book}, 1992 would be {Green Book}); however, it is rumored that th...
Blue Book4 is 1992. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also {{book titles}}.
Blue Glue is [IBM] n. IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly {losing} and {bletcherous} communications protocol widely favored at commercial shops that don't know any better. The official IBM definition is "that which binds b...
Blue Glue2 is loathing}. It may not be irrelevant that {Blue Glue} is the trade name of a 3M product that is commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the removable panel floors common in {dinosaur pens}. A correspondent at U. Minn....
Blue Glue3 is 80 bottles of the stuff hanging about, so they often refer to any messy work to be done as `using the blue glue'.
blue goo is n. Term for `police' {nanobot}s intended to prevent {gray goo}, denature hazardous waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back into the stratosphere, prevent halitosis, and promote truth, justice, and the American way, etc. See {{n...
BNF is /B-N-F/ n. 1. [techspeak] Acronym for `Backus-Naur Form', a metasyntactic notation used to specify the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. Widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere, s...
BNF2 is from other hackers. 2. In {{science-fiction fandom}}, BNF means `Big-Name Fan' (someone famous or notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out black-on-green BNF buttons at SF conventions; this confused the hacker contingent ter...
boa is [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 tim...
boa2 is cables for the 370 are limited to 200 feet because beyond that length the boas get dangerous --- and it is worth noting that one of the major cable makers uses the trademark `Anaconda'.
board is n. 1. In-context synonym for {bboard}; sometimes used even for USENET newsgroups. 2. An electronic circuit board (compare {card}).
boat anchor is n. 1. Like {doorstop} but more severe; implies that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. "That was a working motherboard once. One lightning strike later, instant boat anchor!" 2. A person who just takes up...
bogo-sort is /boh`goh-sort'/ n. (var. `stupid-sort') The archetypical perversely awful algorithm (as opposed to {bubble sort}, which is merely the generic *bad* algorithm). Bogo-sort is equivalent to repeatedly throwing a deck of cards in th...
bogo-sort2 is testing whether they are in order. It serves as a sort of canonical example of awfulness. Looking at a program and seeing a dumb algorithm, one might say "Oh, I see, this program uses bogo-sort." Compare {bogus}, {brute forc...
bogometer is /boh-gom'-*t-er/ n. See {bogosity}. Compare the `wankometer' described in the {wank} entry; see also {bogus}.
bogon is /boh'gon/ [by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons'; see the Bibliography] n. 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see {quantum bogodynamics}). For ...
bogon2 is again" means that it is broken or acting in an erratic or bogus fashion. 2. A query packet sent from a TCP/IP domain resolver to a root server, having the reply bit set instead of the query bit. 3. Any bogus or incorrectly formed ...
bogon3 is used to refer to any bogus thing, as in "I'd like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff bogon". 5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original usage, but has been ov...
bogon4 is also {bogosity}, {bogus}; compare {psyton}.
bogon filter is /boh'gon fil'tr/ n. Any device, software or hardware, that limits or suppresses the flow and/or emission of bogons. "Engineering hacked a bogon filter between the Cray and the VAXen, and now we're getting fewer dropped packets....
bogon flux is /boh'gon fluhks/ n. A measure of a supposed field of {bogosity} emitted by a speaker, measured by a {bogometer}; as a speaker starts to wander into increasing bogosity a listener might say "Warning, warning, bogon flux is rising"...
bogosity is /boh-go's*-tee/ n. 1. The degree to which something is {bogus}. At CMU, bogosity is measured with a {bogometer}; in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say "My bogometer just trigger...
bogosity2 is bogometer" means you just said or did something so outrageously bogus that it is off the scale, pinning the bogometer needle at the highest possible reading (one might also say "You just redlined my bogometer"). The agreed-upo...
bogosity3 is /mik`roh-len'*t/ (uL). The consensus is that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use. 2. The potential field generated by a {bogon flux}; see {quantum bogodynamics}. See also {bogon flux}, {bogon filter}, {bogus}...
bogosity4 is as a attack against noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a {tenured graduate student}. Doug had failed the student on an important exam for giving only "AI is bogus" as his answer to the questions. The slur is generally cons...
bogosity5 is gag nevertheless. Some of Doug's friends argue that *of course* a microLenat is bogus, since it is only one millionth of a Lenat. Others have suggested that the unit should be redesignated after the grad student, as the microRei...
bogotify is /boh-go't*-fi/ vt. To make or become bogus. A program that has been changed so many times as to become completely disorganized has become bogotified. If you tighten a nut too hard and strip the threads on the bolt, the bolt has b...
bogotify2 is it any more. This coinage led to the notional `autobogotiphobia' defined as `the fear of becoming bogotified'; but is not clear that the latter has ever been `live' jargon rather than a self-conscious joke in jargon about jargo...
bogue out is /bohg owt/ vi. To become bogus, suddenly and unexpectedly. "His talk was relatively sane until somebody asked him a trick question; then he bogued out and did nothing but {flame} afterwards." See also {bogosity}, {bogus}.
bogus is adj. 1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus." 2. Useless. "OPCON is a bogus program." 3. False. "Your arguments are bogus." 4. Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus." 5. Unbelievable. "You claim to have solved the halting pro...
bogus2 is bogus." 6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas." Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific problem. (This word seems to have...
bogus3 is {random} --- mostly the negative ones.) It is claimed that `bogus' was originally used in the hackish sense at Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary ...
bogus4 is word was first popularized (see {autobogotiphobia} under {bogotify}). The word spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. By the early 1980s it was also current in something like the hackish sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had...
bogus5 is Cambridge reports, by contrast, that these uses of `bogus' grate on British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically, `counterfeit', as in "a bogus 10-pound note".
Bohr bug is /bohr buhg/ [from quantum physics] n. A repeatable {bug}; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of {heisenbug}; see also {mandelbug}.
boink is /boynk/ [USENET ascribed there to the TV series "Cheers" and "Moonlighting"] 1. To have sex with; compare {bounce}, sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant `bonk' is more common. 2. After the origin...
boink2 is for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compare {@-...
bomb is 1. v. General synonym for {crash} (sense 1) except that it is not used as a noun; esp. used of software or OS failures. "Don't run Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll bomb." 2. n.,v. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a UNIX `pan...
bomb2 is of little black-powder bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the system has died. On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a decimal (or occasionally hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong, similar to the Ami...
bomb3 is {{MS-DOS}} machines tend to get {locked up} in this situation.
bondage-and-discipline language is A language (such as Pascal, Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of `right programming' even though said theory is demonstrably inadequ...
bondage-and-discipline language2 is general-purpose programming. Often abbreviated `B&D'; thus, one may speak of things "having the B&D nature". See {{Pascal}}; oppose {languages of choice}.
bonk/oif is /bonk/, /oyf/ interj. In the {MUD} community, it has become traditional to express pique or censure by `bonking' the offending person. There is a convention that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying `oif!' and a myth to the eff...
bonk/oif2 is bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for bonking and oifing. See also {talk mode}, {posing}.
book titles is There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in thi...
book titles2 is {Aluminum Book}, {Blue Book}, {Cinderella Book}, {Devil Book}, {Dragon Book}, {Green Book}, {Orange Book}, {Pink-Shirt Book}, {Purple Book}, {Red Book}, {Silver Book}, {White Book}, {Wizard Book}, {Yellow Book}, and {bible}.b...
book titles3 is v.,n. To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon. The derivative `reboot' implies that...
book titles4 is that the boot is a {bounce} intended to clear some state of {wedgitude}. This is sometimes used of human thought processes, as in the following exchange "You've lost me." "OK, reboot. Here's the theory...." This term is als...
book titles5 is power-off condition) and `warm boot' (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash). Another variant `soft boot', reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of oth...
book titles6 is the {mess-dos} emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running." Opposed to this there is `hard boot', which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the...
book titles7 is hard-boot this losing Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." Historical note this term derives from `bootstrap loader', a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This...
book titles8 is were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), t...
book titles9 is turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computer `pulled itself up by its bootstraps' to a useful operating state. Nowadays th...
book titles10 is and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the `boot block'. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it.
bottom-up implementation is n. Hackish opposite of the techspeak term `top-down design'. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of...
bottom-up implementation2 is to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to *build* things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of ...
bounce is v. 1. [perhaps from the image of a thrown ball bouncing off a wall] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to `bounce'. See also {bounce message}. 2. [Stanford] To pl...
bounce2 is Power Lab} building used by the Stanford AI Lab in the 1970s, there was a volleyball court on the front lawn. From 5 P.M. to 7 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5 the computer would b...
bounce3 is voice would cry, "Now hear this bounce, bounce!" followed by Brian McCune loudly bouncing a volleyball on the floor outside the offices of known volleyballers. 3. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob. from the expression `bounci...
bounce4 is psychosexually loaded "Bounce on me too, Tigger!" from the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books. Compare {boink}. 4. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily among {VMS} users. 5. [IBM] To {po...
bounce message is [UNIX] n. Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay {email} to the intended {{Internet address}} recipient or the next link in a {bang path} (see {bounce}). Reasons might include a nonexistent or missp...
bounce message2 is Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see {sorcerer's apprentice mode}. The term `bounce mail' is also common.
box is 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...
box2 is qualification but within an SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor or FEP /F-E-P/. An FEP is a small computer necessary to enable an IBM {mainframe} to communicate beyond the limits of the {dinosaur p...
box3 is cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down "Looks like the {box} has fallen over." (See {fall over}.) See also {IBM}, {fear and loathing}, {fepped out}, {Blue Glue}.
boxed comments is n. Comments (explanatory notes attached to program instructions) that occupy several lines by themselves; so called because in assembler and C code they are often surrounded by a box in a style something like this Common va...
boxed comments2 is column 2 or add a matching row of asterisks closing the right side of the box. The sparest variant omits all but the comment delimiters themselves; the `box' is implied. Oppose {winged comments}.
boxen is /bok'sn/ [by analogy with {VAXen}] pl.n. Fanciful plural of {box} often encountered in the phrase `UNIX boxen', used to describe commodity {{UNIX}} hardware. The connotation is that any two UNIX boxen are interchangeable.
boxology is /bok-sol'*-jee/ n. Syn. {ASCII art}. This term implies a more restricted domain, that of box-and-arrow drawings. "His report has a lot of boxology in it." Compare {macrology}.
bozotic is /boh-zoh'tik/ or /boh-zo'tik/ [from the name of a TV clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald] adj. Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous. Compare {wonky}, {de...
bozotic2 is in slang, but the mainstream adjectival form would be `bozo-like' or (in New England) `bozoish'.
BQS is /B-Q-S/ adj. Syn. {Berkeley Quality Software}.
brain dump is n. The act of telling someone everything one knows about a particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to let a new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous to an operating system {core dump}...
brain dump2 is before an exit. "You'll have to give me a brain dump on FOOBAR before you start your new job at HackerCorp." See {core dump} (sense 4). At Sun, this is also known as `TOI' (transfer of information).
brain-damaged is 1. [generalization of `Honeywell Brain Damage' (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Honeywell {{Multics}}] adj. Obviously wrong; {cretinous}; {demented}. There is an implication that th...
brain-damaged2 is brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its failure to work is due to poor design rather than some accident. "Only six mon...
brain-damaged3 is brain-damaged!" 2. [esp. in the Mac world] May refer to free demonstration software that has been deliberately crippled in some way so as not to compete with the commercial product it is intended to sell. Syn. {crippleware...
brain-dead is adj. Brain-damaged in the extreme. It tends to imply terminal design failure rather than malfunction or simple stupidity. "This comm program doesn't know how to send a break --- how brain-dead!"
braino is /bray'no/ n. Syn. for {thinko}.
branch to Fishkill is [IBM from the location of one of the corporation's facilities] n. Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See {jump off into never-never land}, {hyperspace}.
brand brand brand is n. Humorous catch-phrase from {BartleMUD}s, in which players were described carrying a list of objects, the most common of which would usually be a brand. Often used as a joke in {talk mode} as in "Fred the wizard is here...
brand brand brand2 is kettle broadsword flamethrower". A brand is a torch, of course; one burns up a lot of those exploring dungeons. Prob. influenced by the famous Monty Python "Spam" skit.
break is 1. vt. To cause to be broken (in any sense). "Your latest patch to the editor broke the paragraph commands." 2. v. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may debugged. The place where it stops is a `breakpoint'. 3. [techs...
break2 is of line high) over a serial comm line. 4. [UNIX] vi. To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally, break (sense 3) or delete does this. 5. `break break' may be said to int...
break3 is verb doubling).
breath-of-life packet is [XEROX PARC] n. An Ethernet packet that contained bootstrap (see {boot}) code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the `breath of life' into any computer on the network that had happened to crash. ...
breath-of-life packet2 is would wait for such a packet after a catastrophic error.
breedle is n. See {feep}.
bring X to its knees is v. To present a machine, operating system, piece of software, or algorithm with a load so extreme or {pathological} that it grinds to a halt. "To bring a MicroVAX to its knees, try twenty users running {vi} --- or four...
brittle is adj. Said of software that is functional but easily broken by changes in operating environment or configuration, or by any minor tweak to the software itself. Also, any system that responds inappropriately and disastrously to expec...
brittle2 is that is usually totally scrambled by a power failure is said to be brittle. This term is often used to describe the results of a research effort that were never intended to be robust, but it can be applied to commercially develope...
brittle3 is more often than it ought to. Oppose {robust}.
broadcast storm is n. An incorrect packet broadcast on a network that causes most hosts to respond all at once, typically with wrong answers that start the process over again. See {network meltdown}.
broken is adj. 1. Not working properly (of programs). 2. Behaving strangely; especially (when used of people) exhibiting extreme depression.
broken arrow is [IBM] n. The error code displayed on line 25 of a 3270 terminal (or a PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of protocol violations and "unexpected" error conditions (including connection to a {down} computer). On a PC, simula...
broken arrow2 is characters overstruck. In true {luser} fashion, the original documentation of these codes (visible on every 3270 terminal, and necessary for debugging network problems) was confined to an IBM customer engineering manual. N...
broken arrow3 is know that `broken arrow' is also military jargon for an accident involving nuclear weapons....
broket is /broh'k*t/ or /broh'ket`/ [by analogy with `bracket' a `broken bracket'] n. Either of the characters `<' and `>', when used as paired enclosing delimiters. This word originated as a contraction of the phrase `broken bracket', that ...
broket2 is (At MIT, and apparently in the {Real World} as well, these are usually called {angle brackets}.)
Brooks's Law is prov. "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" --- a result of the fact that the advantage from splitting work among N programmers is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications ...
Brooks's Law2 is merging their work is O(N^2) (that is, proportional to the square of N). The quote is from Fred Brooks, a manager of IBM's OS/360 project and author of `The Mythical Man-Month' (Addison-Wesley, 1975, ISBN 0-201-00650-2), an ...
Brooks's Law3 is The myth in question has been most tersely expressed as "Programmer time is fungible" and Brooks established conclusively that it is not. Hackers have never forgotten his advice; too often, {management} does. See also {cr...
BRS is /B-R-S/ n. Syn. {Big Red Switch}. This abbreviation is fairly common on-line.
brute force is adj. Describes a primitive programming style, one in which the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his or her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and apply...
brute force2 is directly to large ones. The {canonical} example of a brute-force algorithm is associated with the `traveling salesman problem' (TSP), a classical NP-hard problem Suppose a person is in, say, Boston, and wishes to drive to N o...
brute force3 is visit them in order to minimize the distance travelled? The brute-force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly ...
brute force4 is obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For very small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N = 15, there are alr...
brute force5 is consider, and for N = 1000 --- well, see {bignum}). See also {NP-}. A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list...
brute force6 is first number off the front. Whether brute-force programming should be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem isn't too big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the pr...
brute force7 is `intelligent' algorithm. Alternatively, a more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement. Ken Thompson, co-inventor of UNIX, is reported to hav...
brute force8 is brute force". He probably intended this as a {ha ha only serious}, but the original UNIX kernel's preference for simple, robust, and portable algorithms over {brittle} `smart' ones does seem to have been a significant factor...
brute force9 is tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and delicate esthetic judgment.
brute force and ignorance is n. A popular design technique at many software houses --- {brute force} coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methodologies te...
brute force and ignorance2 is early {larval stage} programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI "Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly from BFI." Compare {bogosity}.
BSD is /B-S-D/ n. [acronym for `Berkeley System Distribution'] a family of {{UNIX}} versions for the DEC {VAX} and PDP-11 developed by Bill Joy and others at {Berzerkeley} starting around 1980, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP networ...
BSD2 is The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and the commercial versions derived from them (SunOS, ULTRIX, and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the UNIX world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986, and are stil...
bubble sort is n. Techspeak for a particular sorting technique in which pairs of adjacent values in the list to be sorted are compared and interchanged if they are out of order; thus, list entries `bubble upward' in the list until they bump in...
bubble sort2 is is not very good relative to other methods and is the one typically stumbled on by {na"ive} and untutored programmers, hackers consider it the {canonical} example of a na"ive algorithm. The canonical example of a really *bad...
bubble sort3 is might be used out of ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or willful perversity.
bucky bits is /buh'kee bits/ n. 1. obs. The bits produced by the CONTROL and META shift keys on a SAIL keyboard, resulting in a 9-bit keyboard character set. The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended this with TOP and separate left and right ...
bucky bits2 is character set; later, LISP Machines added such keys as SUPER, HYPER, and GREEK (see {space-cadet keyboard}). 2. By extension, bits associated with `extra' shift keys on any keyboard, e.g., the ALT on an IBM PC or command and ...
bucky bits3 is that `bucky bits' were named for Buckminster Fuller during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Actually, `Bucky' was Niklaus Wirth's nickname when *he* was at Stanford; he first suggested the idea of an EDIT key to set...
bucky bits4 is character. This was used in a number of editors written at Stanford or in its environs (TV-EDIT and NLS being the best-known). The term spread to MIT and CMU early and is now in general use. See {double bucky}, {quadruple b...
buffer overflow is n. What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding area) than it can handle. This may be due to a mismatch in the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see {overrun}), or because the...
buffer overflow2 is data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed. For example, in a text-processing tool that {crunch}es a line at a time, a short line buffer can result in {lossage} as input from a long line overflows the ...
buffer overflow3 is defensive programming would check for overflow on each character and stop accepting data when the buffer is full up. The term is used of and by humans in a metaphorical sense. "What time did I agree to meet you? My buffer...
buffer overflow4 is phone my buffer is going to overflow." See also {spam}, {overrun screw}.
bug is n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of {feature}. Examples "There's a bug in the editor it writes things out backwards." "The system crashed because of a har...
bug2 is few bugs" (i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems). Historical note Some have said this term came from telephone company usage, in which "bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines, but this appe...
bug3 is Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing {COBOL}) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a persistent {glitch} in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from between t...
bug4 is subsequently promulgated {bug} in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in...
bug5 is Naval Surface Warfare Center. The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the `Annals of the History of Computing', Vol. 3, No. 3 (July 1981), pp. 285--286. The text of the log entry (f...
bug6 is Panel F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found". This wording seems to establish that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific sense. Indeed, the use of `bug' to mean an industrial defect was al...
bug7 is and `bug' in the sense of an disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! In the first edition of Samuel Johnson's dictionary one meaning of `bug' is "A frightful object; a walking spectre"; this is traced to `bugbear', a Welsh term for...
bug8 is complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games. In any case, in jargon the word almost never refers to insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually hap...
bug9 is "What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it." "That's the bug." [There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to the Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A correspondent who thought t...
bug10 is there. While investigating this, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it --- and that the present curator of the History of American Technology Museum d...
bug11 is a worthwhile exhibit. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug may have fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! --- ESR]
bug-compatible is adj. Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with {fossil}s or {misfeature}s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separ...
bug-compatible2 is choice of / as an option character in 1.0."
bug-for-bug compatible is n. Same as {bug-compatible}, with the additional implication that much tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.
buglix is /buhg'liks/ n. Pejorative term referring to DEC's ULTRIX operating system in its earlier *severely* buggy versions. Still used to describe ULTRIX, but without venom. Compare {HP-SUX}.
bulletproof is adj. Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely {robust}; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition. This is a rare and valued quality. Syn. {armor-plated}.
bum is 1. vt. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more instructions out of that code." "I spent half the night bumming the interrupt code." 2. To squeeze out excess; to...
bum2 is whatever it was removed from (without changing function; this distinguishes the process from a {featurectomy}). 3. n. A small change to an algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes t...
bum3 is uncommon, largely superseded by v. {tune} (and n. {tweak}, {hack}), though none of these exactly capture sense 2. All these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent dialects of English `bum' is a rude synonym for...
bump is vt. Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator. Used esp. of counter variables, pointers, and index dummies in `for', `while', and `do-while' loops.
burble is [from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"] v. Like {flame}, but connotes that the source is truly clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep contempt. "There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he got ...
buried treasure is n. A surprising piece of code found in some program. While usually not wrong, it tends to vary from {crufty} to {bletcherous}, and has lain undiscovered only because it was functionally correct, however horrible it is. Use...
buried treasure2 is anything *but* treasure. Buried treasure almost always needs to be dug up and removed. "I just found that the scheduler sorts its queue using {bubble sort}! Buried treasure!"
burn-in period is n. 1. A factory test designed to catch systems with {marginal} components before they get out the door; the theory is that burn-in will protect customers by outwaiting the steepest part of the {bathtub curve} (see {infant m...
burn-in period2 is length in which a person using a computer is so intensely involved in his project that he forgets basic needs such as food, drink, sleep, etc. Warning Excessive burn-in can lead to burn-out. See {hack mode}, {larval stag...
burst page is n. Syn. {banner}, sense 1.
busy-wait is vi. Used of human behavior, conveys that the subject is busy waiting for someone or something, intends to move instantly as soon as it shows up, and thus cannot do anything else at the moment. "Can't talk now, I'm busy-waiting ti...
busy-wait2 is `busy-wait' means to wait on an event by {spin}ning through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for the event on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler and continuing execution on another part of the task. T...
busy-wait3 is time-sharing systems where a busy-waiting program may {hog} the processor.
buzz is vi. 1. Of a program, to run with no indication of progress and perhaps without guarantee of ever finishing; esp. said of programs thought to be executing tight loops of code. A program that is buzzing appears to be {catatonic}, but yo...
buzz2 is buzzing loop may eventually end of its own accord. "The program buzzes for about 10 seconds trying to sort all the names into order." See {spin}; see also {grovel}. 2. [ETA Systems] To test a wire or printed circuit trace for cont...
buzz3 is Some wire faults will pass DC tests but fail a buzz test. 3. To process an array or list in sequence, doing the same thing to each element. "This loop buzzes through the tz array looking for a terminator type."
BWQ is /B-W-Q/ [IBM acronym, `Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional to {bogosity}. See {TLA}.
by hand is adv. Said of an operation (especially a repetitive, trivial, and/or tedious one) that ought to be performed automatically by the computer, but which a hacker instead has to step tediously through. "My mailer doesn't have a command ...
by hand2 is replying to, so I have to do it by hand." This does not necessarily mean the speaker has to retype a copy of the message; it might refer to, say, dropping into a {subshell} from the mailer, making a copy of one's mailbox file, r...
by hand3 is and bottom of the message in question, deleting the rest of the file, inserting `>' characters on each line, writing the file, leaving the editor, returning to the mailer, reading the file in, and later remembering to delete the ...
byte is /bit/ [techspeak] n. A unit of memory or data equal to the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines. Some older architectures used `byte' for quantities of...
byte2 is `bytes' that were actually bitfields of 1 to 36 bits! These usages are now obsolete, and even 9-bit bytes have become rare in the general trend toward power-of-2 word sizes. Historical note The term originated in 1956 during the earl...
byte3 is originally it was described as 1 to 6 bits (typical I/O equipment of the period used 6-bit chunks of information). The move to an 8-bit byte happened in late 1956, and this size was later adopted and promulgated as a standard by th...
byte4 is mutating the word `bite' so it would not be accidentally misspelled as {bit}. See also {nybble}.
bytesexual is /bit`sek'shu-*l/ adj. Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or pass data in either {big-endian} or {little-endian} format (depending, presumably, on a {mode bit} somewhere). See also {NUXI problem}.*C n. 1. The third ...
bytesexual2 is 1000011. 3. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s and immediately used to reimplement {{UNIX}}. So called because many features derived from an earlier compiler named `B' in comme...
bytesexual3 is Stroustrup settled the question by designing C++, there was a humorous debate over whether C's successor should be named `D' or `P'. C became immensely popular outside Bell Labs after about 1980 and is now the dominant langua...
bytesexual4 is programming. See also {languages of choice}, {indent style}. C is often described, with a mixture of fondness and disdain varying according to the speaker, as "a language that combines all the elegance and power of assembly la...
bytesexual5 is maintainability of assembly language".
calculator is [Cambridge] n. Syn. for {bitty box}.
can is vt. To abort a job on a time-sharing system. Used esp. when the person doing the deed is an operator, as in "canned from the {{console}}". Frequently used in an imperative sense, as in "Can that print job, the LPT just popped a sprock...
can2 is that the ASCII character with mnemonic CAN (0011000) was used as a kill-job character on some early OSes.
canonical is [historically, `according to religious law'] adj. The usual or standard state or manner of something. This word has a somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics. Two formulas such as 9 + x and x + 9 are said to be equivalent...
canonical2 is second one is in `canonical form' because it is written in the usual way, with the highest power of x first. Usually there are fixed rules you can use to decide whether something is in canonical form. The jargon meaning, a re...
canonical3 is present loading in computer-science culture largely through its prominence in Alonzo Church's work in computation theory and mathematical logic (see {Knights of the Lambda Calculus}). Compare {vanilla}. This word has an inter...
canonical4 is not use the adjective `canonical' in any of the senses defined above with any regularity; they do however use the nouns `canon' and `canonicity' (not *canonicalness or *canonicality). The `canon' of a given author is the complete...
canonical5 is usage is familiar to Sherlock Holmes fans as well as to literary scholars). `*The* canon' is the body of works in a given field (e.g., works of literature, or of art, or of music) deemed worthwhile for students to study and for ...
canonical6 is non-techspeak academic usages derive ultimately from the historical meaning, specifically the classification of the books of the Bible into two groups by Christian theologians. The `canonical' books were the ones widely accepted...
canonical7 is authority. The `deuterocanonical' books (literally `secondarily canonical'; also known as the `Apochrypha') were held to be of lesser authority --- indeed they have been held in such low esteem that to this day they are omitte...
canonical8 is this term with a playfulness that makes an ironic contrast with its historical meaning. A true story One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the use of jargon. Over his loud objections, GLS and RMS m...
canonical9 is in his presence, and eventually it began to sink in. Finally, in one conversation, he used the word `canonical' in jargon-like fashion without thinking. Steele "Aha! We've finally got you talking jargon too!" Stallman "What...
canonical10 is `canonical' in the canonical way." Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is implicitly defined as the way *hackers* normally expect things to be. Thus, a hacker may claim with a straight face that `according to ...
card is n. 1. An electronic printed-circuit board (see also {tall card}, {short card}. 2. obs. Syn. {{punched card}}.
card walloper is n. An EDP programmer who grinds out batch programs that do stupid things like print people's paychecks. Compare {code grinder}. See also {{punched card}}, {eighty-column mind}.
careware is /keir'weir/ n. {Shareware} for which either the author suggests that some payment be made to a nominated charity or a levy directed to charity is included on top of the distribution charge. Syn. {charityware}; compare {cripplewa...
cargo cult programming is n. A style of (incompetent) programming dominated by ritual inclusion of code or program structures that serve no real purpose. A cargo cult programmer will usually explain the extra code as a way of working around s...
cargo cult programming2 is neither the bug nor the reason the code apparently avoided the bug was ever fully understood (compare {shotgun debugging}, {voodoo programming}). The term `cargo cult' is a reference to aboriginal religions that gr...
cargo cult programming3 is The practices of these cults center on building elaborate mockups of airplanes and military style landing strips in the hope of bringing the return of the god-like airplanes that brought such marvelous cargo during t...
cargo cult programming4 is Richard Feynman's characterization of certain practices as "cargo cult science" in his book `Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman' (W. W. Norton & Co, New York 1985, ISBN 0-393-01921-7).
case and paste is [from `cut and paste'] n. 1. The addition of a new {feature} to an existing system by selecting the code from an existing feature and pasting it in with minor changes. Common in telephony circles because most operations in a...
case and paste2 is statements. Leads to {software bloat}. In some circles of EMACS users this is called `programming by Meta-W', because Meta-W is the EMACS command for copying a block of text to a kill buffer in preparation to pasting it in ...
case and paste3 is implying that the programmer is acting mindlessly rather than thinking carefully about what is required to integrate the code for two similar cases.
casters-up mode is [IBM] n. Yet another synonym for `broken' or `down'.
casting the runes is n. What a {guru} does when you ask him or her to run a particular program and type at it because it never works for anyone else; esp. used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from what J. Random Luser...
casting the runes2 is {examining the entrails}; also see the AI koan about Tom Knight in appendix A.
cat is [from `catenate' via {{UNIX}} `cat(1)'] vt. 1. [techspeak] To spew an entire file to the screen or some other output sink without pause. 2. By extension, to dump large amounts of data at an unprepared target or with no intention of bro...
cat2 is Rare outside UNIX sites. See also {dd}, {BLT}. Among UNIX fans, `cat(1)' is considered an excellent example of user-interface design, because it outputs the file contents without such verbosity as spacing or headers between the fil...
cat3 is to consist of lines of text, but works with any sort of data. Among UNIX-haters, `cat(1)' is considered the {canonical} example of *bad* user-interface design. This because it is more often used to {blast} a file to standard output ...
cat4 is `cat' for the former operation is just as unintuitive as, say, LISP's {cdr}. Of such oppositions are {holy wars} made....
catatonic is adj. Describes a condition of suspended animation in which something is so {wedged} or {hung} that it makes no response. If you are typing on a terminal and suddenly the computer doesn't even echo the letters back to the screen a...
catatonic2 is it to do, then the computer is suffering from catatonia (possibly because it has crashed). "There I was in the middle of a winning game of {nethack} and it went catatonic on me! Aaargh!" Compare {buzz}.
cdr is /ku'dr/ or /kuh'dr/ [from LISP] vt. To skip past the first item from a list of things (generalized from the LISP operation on binary tree structures, which returns a list consisting of all but the first element of its argument). In the...
cdr2 is elements "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage silly. See also {loop through}. Historical note The instruction format of the IBM 7090 that hosted the original LISP implementation featured two 15-bit fields called the `address' and...
cdr3 is originally `Contents of Decrement part of Register'. Similarly, `car' stood for `Contents of Address part of Register'. The cdr and car operations have since become bases for formation of compound metaphors in non-LISP contexts. GL...
cdr4 is in which strings were represented as linked lists; the get-character and skip-character operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR.
chad is /chad/ n. 1. The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called {selvage} and {perf}. 2. obs. The confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this was al...
chad2 is `keypunch droppings'. Historical note One correspondent believes `chad' (sense 2) derives from the Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab folded back, rathe...
chad3 is clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be `chad'.
chad box is n. {Iron Age} card punches contained boxes inside them, about the size of a lunchbox (or in some models a large wastebasket), that held the {chad} (sense 2). You had to open the covers of the card punch periodically and empty the ...
chad box2 is the equivalent device in the CPU enclosure, which was typically across the room in another great gray-and-blue box.
chain is [orig. from BASIC's `CHAIN' statement] vi. To hand off execution to a child or successor without going through the {OS} command interpreter that invoked it. The state of the parent program is lost and there is no returning to it. Th...
chain2 is memory-limited micros and is still widely supported for backward compatibility, the jargon usage is semi-obsolescent; in particular, most UNIX programmers will think of this as an {exec}. Oppose the more modern {subshell}.
char is /keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ n. Shorthand for `character'. Esp. used by C programmers, as `char' is C's typename for character data.
charityware is /char'it-ee-weir`/ n. Syn. {careware}.
chase pointers is 1. vi. To go through multiple levels of indirection, as in traversing a linked list or graph structure. Used esp. by programmers in C, where explicit pointers are a very common data type. This is techspeak, but it remains ja...
chase pointers2 is chasing pointers. Bob said you could tell me who to talk to about...." See {dangling pointer} and {snap}. 2. [Cambridge] `pointer chase' or `pointer hunt' The process of going through a dump (interactively or on a large ...
chase pointers3 is following dynamic data-structures. Used only in a debugging context.
chemist is [Cambridge] n. Someone who wastes computer time on {number-crunching} when you'd far rather the machine were doing something more productive, such as working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running {life} p...
chemist2 is actually studies chemistry.
Chernobyl chicken is n. See {laser chicken}.
Chernobyl packet is /cher-noh'b*l pak'*t/ n. A network packet that induces {network meltdown} (the result of a {broadcast storm}), in memory of the 1987 nuclear accident at Chernobyl in the Ukraine. The typical case of this is an IP Ethernet d...
Chernobyl packet2 is both source and destination Ether and IP address set as the respective broadcast addresses for the subnetworks being gated between. Compare {Christmas tree packet}.
chicken head is [Commodore] n. The Commodore Business Machines logo, which strongly resembles a poultry part. Rendered in ASCII as `C='. With the arguable exception of the Amiga (see {amoeba}), Commodore's machines are notoriously crocky lit...
chicken head2 is Thus, this usage may owe something to Philip K. Dick's novel `Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?' (the basis for the movie `Blade Runner'), in which a `chickenhead' is a mutant with below-average intelligence.
chiclet keyboard is n. A keyboard with small rectangular or lozenge-shaped rubber or plastic keys that look like pieces of chewing gum. (Chiclets is the brand name of a variety of chewing gum that does in fact resemble the keys of chiclet key...
chiclet keyboard2 is IBM PCjr keyboard. Vendors unanimously liked these because they were cheap, and a lot of early portable and laptop products got launched using them. Customers rejected the idea with almost equal unanimity, and chiclets a...
chine nual is /sheen'yu-*l/ [MIT] n.,obs. The Lisp Machine Manual, so called because the title was wrapped around the cover so only those letters showed on the front.
Chinese Army technique is n. Syn. {Mongolian Hordes technique}.
choke is v. To reject input, often ungracefully. "Nuls make System V's `lpr(1)' choke." "I tried building an {EMACS} binary to use {X}, but `cpp(1)' choked on all those `#define's." See {barf}, {gag}, {vi}.
chomp is vi. To {lose}; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. See {bagbiter}. A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the four fingers t...
chomp2 is tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means `chomp chomp' (see Verb Doubling ...
chomp3 is Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is equivalent to saying "You chomper!" If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a hu...
chomp4 is You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it.
chomper is n. Someone or something that is chomping; a loser. See {loser}, {bagbiter}, {chomp}.
Christmas tree is n. A kind of RS-232 line tester or breakout box featuring rows of blinking red and green LEDs suggestive of Christmas lights.
Christmas tree packet is n. A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use. See {kamikaze packet}, {Chernobyl packet}. (The term doubtless derives from a fanciful image of each little option bit being represented by a ...
chrome is [from automotive slang via wargaming] n. Showy features added to attract users but contributing little or nothing to the power of a system. "The 3D icons in Motif are just chrome, but they certainly are *pretty* chrome!" Distinguis...
chrome2 is that the latter are usually added to gratify developers' own desires for featurefulness. Often used as a term of contempt.
chug is vi. To run slowly; to {grind} or {grovel}. "The disk is chugging like crazy."
Church of the SubGenius is n. A mutant offshoot of {Discordianism} launched in 1981 as a spoof of fundamentalist Christianity by the `Reverend' Ivan Stang, a brilliant satirist with a gift for promotion. Popular among hackers as a rich source...
Church of the SubGenius2 is "Bob" the divine drilling-equipment salesman, the Benevolent Space Xists, and the Stark Fist of Removal. Much SubGenius theory is concerned with the acquisition of the mystical substance or quality of `slack'.
Cinderella Book is [CMU] n. `Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages, and Computation', by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman, (Addison-Wesley, 1979). So called because the cover depicts a girl (putatively Cinderella) sitting in front of a R...
Cinderella Book2 is coming out of it. The back cover depicts the girl with the device in shambles after she has pulled on the rope. See also {{book titles}}.
CI$ is // n. Hackerism for `CIS', CompuServe Information Service. The dollar sign refers to CompuServe's rather steep line charges. Often used in {sig block}s just before a CompuServe address. Syn. {Compu$erve}.
Classic C is /klas'ik C/ [a play on `Coke Classic'] n. The C programming language as defined in the first edition of {K&R}, with some small additions. It is also known as `K&R C'. The name came into use while C was being standardized by the ...
Classic C2 is This is sometimes applied elsewhere thus, `X Classic', where X = Star Trek (referring to the original TV series) or X = PC (referring to IBM's ISA-bus machines as opposed to the PS/2 series). This construction is especially us...
Classic C3 is versions are considered serious losers relative to the older ones.
clean is 1. adj. Used of hardware or software designs, implies `elegance in the small', that is, a design or implementation that may not hold any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive and relatively easy to comprehend...
clean2 is or {crufty}. 2. v. To remove unneeded or undesired files in a effort to reduce clutter "I'm cleaning up my account." "I cleaned up the garbage and now have 100 Meg free on that partition."
CLM is /C-L-M/ [Sun `Career Limiting Move'] 1. n. An action endangering one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one's job "His Halloween costume was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for `best CLM'." ...
CLM2 is discovered by a customer and obviously missed earlier because of poor testing "That's a CLM bug!"
clobber is vt. To overwrite, usually unintentionally "I walked off the end of the array and clobbered the stack." Compare {mung}, {scribble}, {trash}, and {smash the stack}.
clocks is n. Processor logic cycles, so called because each generally corresponds to one clock pulse in the processor's timing. The relative execution times of instructions on a machine are usually discussed in clocks rather than absolute frac...
clocks2 is is that clock speeds for various models of the machine may increase as technology improves, and it is usually the relative times one is interested in when discussing the instruction set. Compare {cycle}.
clone is n. 1. An exact duplicate "Our product is a clone of their product." Implies a legal reimplementation from documentation or by reverse-engineering. Also connotes lower price. 2. A shoddy, spurious copy "Their product is a clone of...
clone2 is likely violating copyright, patent, or trade secret protections "Your product is a clone of my product." This use implies legal action is pending. 4. A `PC clone'; a PC-BUS/ISA or EISA-compatible 80x86-based microcomputer (this u...
clone3 is These invariably have much more bang for the buck than the IBM archetypes they resemble. 5. In the construction `UNIX clone' An OS designed to deliver a UNIX-lookalike environment without UNIX license fees, or with additional `mis...
clone4 is real-time programming. 6. v. To make an exact copy of something. "Let me clone that" might mean "I want to borrow that paper so I can make a photocopy" or "Let me get a copy of that file before you {mung} it".
clover key is [Mac users] n. See {command key}.
clustergeeking is /kluh'st*r-gee`king/ [CMU] n. Spending more time at a computer cluster doing CS homework than most people spend breathing.
COBOL is /koh'bol/ [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] n. (Synonymous with {evil}.) A weak, verbose, and flabby language used by {card walloper}s to do boring mindless things on {dinosaur} mainframes. Hackers believe all COBOL programmers ...
COBOL2 is self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror. See also {fear and loathing}, {software rot}.
COBOL fingers is /koh'bol fing'grz/ n. Reported from Sweden, a (hypothetical) disease one might get from coding in COBOL. The language requires code verbose beyond all reason; thus it is alleged that programming too much in COBOL causes one's...
COBOL fingers2 is endless typing. "I refuse to type in all that source code again; it would give me COBOL fingers!"
code grinder is n. 1. A {suit}-wearing minion of the sort hired in legion strength by banks and insurance companies to implement payroll packages in RPG and other such unspeakable horrors. In his native habitat, the code grinder often removes...
code grinder2 is consisting of button-down shirt (starch optional) and a tie. In times of dire stress, the sleeves (if long) may be rolled up and the tie loosened about half an inch. It seldom helps. The {code grinder}'s milieu is about as ...
code grinder3 is touch a computer; the term connotes pity. See {Real World}, {suit}. 2. Used of or to a hacker, a really serious slur on the person's creative ability; connotes a design style characterized by primitive technique, rule-boun...
code grinder4 is imagination. Compare {card walloper}; contrast {hacker}, {real programmer}.
code police is [by analogy with George Orwell's `thought police'] n. A mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst into one's office and arrest one for violating programming style rules. May be used either seriously, to unde...
code police2 is violation is dangerous, or ironically, to suggest that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by anal-retentive {weenie}s. "Dike out that goto or the code police will get you!" The ironic usage is perhaps more comm...
codewalker is n. A program component that traverses other programs for a living. Compilers have codewalkers in their front ends; so do cross-reference generators and some database front ends. Other utility programs that try to do too much wi...
codewalker2 is As in "This new `vgrind' feature would require a codewalker to implement."
coefficient of X is n. Hackish speech makes rather heavy use of pseudo-mathematical metaphors. Four particularly important ones involve the terms `coefficient', `factor', `index', and `quotient'. They are often loosely applied to things you ...
coefficient of X2 is there are subtle distinctions among them that convey information about the way the speaker mentally models whatever he or she is describing. `Foo factor' and `foo quotient' tend to describe something for which the issue ...
coefficient of X3 is example is {fudge factor}. It's not important how much you're fudging; the term simply acknowledges that some fudging is needed. You might talk of liking a movie for its silliness factor. Quotient tends to imply that the ...
coefficient of X4 is "I would have won except for my luck quotient." This could also be "I would have won except for the luck factor", but using *quotient* emphasizes that it was bad luck overpowering good luck (or someone else's good luck ov...
coefficient of X5 is `coefficient of foo' both tend to imply that foo is, if not strictly measurable, at least something that can be larger or smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or person as having a `high bogosity index', whereas you ...
coefficient of X6 is bogosity factor'. `Foo index' suggests that foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the mundane cost-of-living index; `coefficient of foo' suggests that foo is a fundamental quantity, as in a coefficient of fricti...
coefficient of X7 is one of personal preference; e.g., some people might feel that bogosity is a fundamental attribute and thus say `coefficient of bogosity', whereas others might feel it is a combination of factors and thus say `bogosity inde...
cokebottle is /kohk'bot-l/ n. Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it it isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the `control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained rig...
cokebottle2 is commands at MIT. After the demise of the {space-cadet keyboard}, `cokebottle' faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
condom2 is drive mechanisms attempt to access the disk --- and can even fatally frustrate insertion. 2. The protective cladding on a {light pipe}.
connector conspiracy is [probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10 (one model of the {PDP-10}), none of whose connectors matched anything else] n. The tendency of manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors o...
connector conspiracy2 is that don't fit together with the old stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or expensive interface devices. The KL-10 Massbus connector was actually *patented* by DEC, which reputedly refused to license ...
connector conspiracy3 is parties out of competition for the lucrative Massbus peripherals market. This is a source of never-ending frustration for the diehards who maintain older PDP-10 or VAX systems. Their CPUs work fine, but they are st...
connector conspiracy4 is drives with low capacity and high power requirements. In these latter days of open-systems computing this term has fallen somewhat into disuse, to be replaced by the observation that "Standards are great! There are ...
cons is /konz/ or /kons/ [from LISP] 1. vt. To add a new element to a specified list, esp. at the top. "OK, cons picking a replacement for the console TTY onto the agenda." 2. `cons up' vt. To synthesize from smaller pieces "to cons up an ex...
cons2 is fundamental operation for building structures. It takes any two objects and returns a `dot-pair' or two-branched tree with one object hanging from each branch. Because the result of a cons is an object, it can be used to build bin...
cons3 is think of it as a sort of universal constructor, and that is where the jargon meanings spring from.
considered harmful is adj. Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 `Communications of the ACM', "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first salvo in the structured programming wars. Amusingly, the ACM considered the resulting a...
considered harmful2 is policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against a coding practice. In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form "X considered Y". ...
considered harmful3 is over with the realization that both sides were wrong, but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the `considered silly' found at various places in this lexicon is related).
console is n. 1. The operator's station of a {mainframe}. In times past, this was a privileged location that conveyed godlike powers to anyone with fingers on its keys. Under UNIX and other modern timesharing OSes, such privileges are guarde...
console2 is just the {tty} the system was booted from. Some of the mystique remains, however, and it is traditional for sysadmins to post urgent messages to all users from the console (on UNIX, /dev/console). 2. On microcomputer UNIX boxes, ...
console3 is character-only terminals talking to a serial port). Typically only the console can do real graphics or run {X}. See also {CTY}.
console jockey is n. See {terminal junkie}.
content-free is [by analogy with techspeak `context-free'] adj. Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge. Though this adjective is sometimes applied to {flamage}, it more usually connotes derision for communication styl...
content-free2 is centered on concerns irrelevant to the subject ostensibly at hand. Perhaps most used with reference to speeches by company presidents and other professional manipulators. "Content-free? Uh...that's anything printed on glossy...
content-free3 is "He gave a talk on the implications of electronic networks for postmodernism and the fin-de-siecle aesthetic. It was content-free."
control-C is vi. 1. "Stop whatever you are doing." From the interrupt character used on many operating systems to abort a running program. Considered silly. 2. interj. Among BSD UNIX hackers, the canonical humorous response to "Give me a br...
control-O is vi. "Stop talking." From the character used on some operating systems to abort output but allow the program to keep on running. Generally means that you are not interested in hearing anything more from that person, at least on t...
control-O2 is who is flaming. Considered silly.
control-Q is vi. "Resume." From the ASCII XON character used to undo a previous control-S (in fact it is also pronounced XON /X-on/).
control-S is vi. "Stop talking for a second." From the ASCII XOFF character (this is also pronounced XOFF /X-of/). Control-S differs from {control-O} in that the person is asked to stop talking (perhaps because you are on the phone) but will...
control-S2 is listen to him --- as opposed to control-O, which has more of the meaning of "Shut up." Considered silly.
Conway's Law is prov. The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the software team will be congruent; originally stated as "If you have four groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler". This was or...
Conway's Law2 is early proto-hacker who wrote an assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. The name `SAVE' didn't stand for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and listings because they all had SAVE written on them.
cookbook is [from amateur electronics and radio] n. A book of small code segments that the reader can use to do various {magic} things in programs. One current example is the `PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook' by Adobe Systems, Inc ...
cookbook2 is has recipes for things like wrapping text around arbitrary curves and making 3D fonts. Cookbooks, slavishly followed, can lead one into {voodoo programming}, but are useful for hackers trying to {monkey up} small programs in unk...
cookbook3 is of phrasebooks in human languages.
cookie is n. A handle, transaction ID, or other token of agreement between cooperating programs. "I give him a packet, he gives me back a cookie." The claim check you get from a dry-cleaning shop is a perfect mundane example of a cookie; the...
cookie2 is later transaction to this one (so you get the same clothes back). Compare {magic cookie}; see also {fortune cookie}.
cookie bear is n. Syn. {cookie monster}.
cookie file is n. A collection of {fortune cookie}s in a format that facilitates retrieval by a fortune program. There are several different ones in public distribution, and site admins often assemble their own from various sources including ...
cookie monster is [from "Sesame Street"] n. Any of a family of early (1970s) hacks reported on {{TOPS-10}}, {{ITS}}, {{Multics}}, and elsewhere that would lock up either the victim's terminal (on a time-sharing machine) or the {{console}} (on ...
cookie monster2 is "I WANT A COOKIE". The required responses ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through "HAVE A COOKIE" and upward. See also {wabbit}.
copper is n. Conventional electron-carrying network cable with a core conductor of copper --- or aluminum! Opposed to {light pipe} or, say, a short-range microwave link.
copy protection is n. A class of clever methods for preventing incompetent pirates from stealing software and legitimate customers from using it. Considered silly.
copybroke is /ko'pee-brohk/ adj. [play on `copyright'] Used to describe an instance of a copy-protected program that has been `broken'; that is, a copy with the copy-protection scheme disabled. Syn. {copywronged}.
copyleft is /kop'ee-left/ [play on `copyright'] n. 1. The copyright notice (`General Public License') carried by {GNU} {EMACS} and other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse and reproduction rights to all comers (but see also {Gen...
copyleft2 is copyright notice intended to achieve similar aims.
copywronged is /ko'pee-rongd/ [play on `copyright'] adj. Syn. for {copybroke}.
core is n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived ...
core2 is example, means `in memory' (as opposed to `on disk'), and both {core dump} and the `core image' or `core file' produced by one are terms in favor. Commonwealth hackish prefers {store}.
core dump is n. [common {Iron Age} jargon, preserved by UNIX] 1. [techspeak] A copy of the contents of {core}, produced when a process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error. 2. By extension, used for humans passing out, vomiting, or r...
core dump2 is All over the floor. What a mess." "He heard about X and dumped core." 3. Occasionally used for a human rambling on pointlessly at great length; esp. in apology "Sorry, I dumped core on you". 4. A recapitulation of knowledge...
core dump3 is one knows about a topic, esp. in a lecture or answer to an exam question. "Short, concise answers are better than core dumps" (from the instructions to an exam at Columbia; syn. {brain dump}). See {core}.
core leak is n. Syn. {memory leak}.
Core Wars is n. A game between `assembler' programs in a simulated machine, where the objective is to kill your opponent's program by overwriting it. Popularized by A. K. Dewdney's column in `Scientific American' magazine, this was actually ...
Core Wars2 is and Dennis Ritchie in the early 1960s (their original game was called `Darwin' and ran on a PDP-1 at Bell Labs). See {core}.
corge is /korj/ [originally, the name of a cat] n. Yet another meta-syntactic variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the {GOSMACS} documentation. See {grault}.
cosmic rays is n. Notionally, the cause of {bit rot}. However, this is a semi-independent usage that may be invoked as a humorous way to {handwave} away any minor {randomness} that doesn't seem worth the bother of investigating. "Hey, Eric -...
cosmic rays2 is {tube}, where did that come from?" "Cosmic rays, I guess." Compare {sunspots}, {phase of the moon}. The British seem to prefer the usage `cosmic showers'; `alpha particles' is also heard, because stray alpha particles passin...
cosmic rays3 is errors (this becomes increasingly more likely as memory sizes and densities increase). Factual note Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not (except occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not explain ran...
cosmic rays4 is hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. The hypothesis was that if cosmic r...
cosmic rays5 is a statistically significant difference between the error rates on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha particle emissio...
cosmic rays6 is uranium) in the encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives (they are uniformly distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it beca...
cosmic rays7 is to withstand these hits.
cough and die is v. Syn. {barf}. Connotes that the program is throwing its hands up by design rather than because of a bug or oversight. "The parser saw a control-A in its input where it was looking for a printable, so it coughed and died."
cowboy is [Sun, from William Gibson's {cyberpunk} SF] n. Synonym for {hacker}. It is reported that at Sun this word is often said with reverence.
CP/M is /C-P-M/ n. [Control Program for Microcomputers] An early microcomputer {OS} written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080- and Z80-based machines, very popular in the late 1970s but virtually wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM ...
CP/M2 is company blew its chance to write the OS for the IBM PC because Kildall decided to spend a day IBM's reps wanted to meet with him enjoying the perfect flying weather in his private plane. Many of CP/M's features and conventions stro...
CP/M3 is systems such as {{TOPS-10}}, OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11. See {{MS-DOS}}, {operating system}.
CPU Wars is /C-P-U worz/ n. A 1979 large-format comic by Chas Andres chronicling the attempts of the brainwashed androids of IPM (Impossible to Program Machines) to conquer and destroy the peaceful denizens of HEC (Human Engineered Computers)....
CPU Wars2 is many references to {ADVENT} and the immortal line "Eat flaming death, minicomputer mongrels!" (uttered, of course, by an IPM stormtrooper). It is alleged that the author subsequently received a letter of appreciation on IBM com...
CPU Wars3 is J. Watson Research Laboratories (then, as now, one of the few islands of true hackerdom in the IBM archipelago). The lower loop of the B in the IBM logo, it is said, had been carefully whited out. See {eat flaming death}.
cracker is n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined ca. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of {hacker} (q.v., sense 8). An earlier attempt to establish `worm' in this sense around 1981--82 on USENET was largely a fa...
crank is [from automotive slang] vt. Verb used to describe the performance of a machine, especially sustained performance. "This box cranks (or, cranks at) about 6 {megaflops}, with a burst mode of twice that on vectorized operations."
crash is 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the {system} (q.v., sense 1), sometimes of magnetic disk drives. "Three {luser}s lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the read/write he...
crash2 is and scraping off the oxide may also be referred to as a `head crash', whereas the term `system crash' usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other software was at fault. 2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the s...
crash3 is OS!" See {down}. Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the crash (usually a person or a program, or both). "Those idiots playing {SPACEWAR} crashed the system." 3. vi. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a l...
crash and burn is vi.,n. A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase scene in the movie "Bullitt" and many subsequent imitators. Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backpla...
crash and burn2 is The construction `crash-and-burn machine' is reported for a computer used exclusively for alpha or {beta} testing, or reproducing bugs (i.e., not for development). The implication is that it wouldn't be such a disaster if...
crash and burn3 is would be inconvenienced.
crawling horror is n. Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site. Like {dusty deck} or {gonkulator}, but connotes that the thing described is not just an irritation...
crawling horror2 is "Mostly we code new stuff in C, but they pay us to maintain one big FORTRAN II application from nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling horror...." Compare {WOMBAT}.
cray is /kray/ n. 1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line of supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer at all. 3. The {canonical} {number-crunching} machine. The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cr...
cray2 is co-founder of the company. Numerous vivid legends surround him, some true and some admittedly invented by Cray Research brass to shape their corporate culture and image.
cray instability is n. A shortcoming of a program or algorithm that manifests itself only when a large problem is being run on a powerful machine (see {cray}). Generally more subtle than bugs that can be detected in smaller problems running o...
crayola is /kray-oh'l*/ n. A super-mini or -micro computer that provides some reasonable percentage of supercomputer performance for an unreasonably low price. Might also be a {killer micro}.
crayon is n. 1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically, it implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and almost certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a UNIX backgrou...
crayon2 is A {computron} (sense 2) that participates only in {number-crunching}. 3. A unit of computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1. There is a standard joke about this that derives from an old Crayola crayon promotional gim...
creationism is n. The (false) belief that large, innovative designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has ...
creationism2 is only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population --- and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong. Unfortunat...
creationism3 is planning models beloved of {management}, they are generally ignored.
creeping elegance is n. Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become {elegant} past the point of diminishing return. This often happens at the expense of the less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed ...
creeping elegance2 is {creeping featurism}, {second-system effect}, {tense}.
creeping featurism is /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ n. 1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more {chrome} and {feature}s onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed. See also {feeping crea...
creeping featurism2 is {BSD} UNIX has always been creeping featurism." 2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become even more complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had this feature ...
creeping featurism3 is a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone ... and then another ... and another.... ...
creeping featurism4 is like a cancer. Usually this term is used to describe computer programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesign...
creeping featuritis is /kree'ping fee'-chr-i`t*s/ n. Variant of {creeping featurism}, with its own spoonerization `feeping creaturitis'. Some people like to reserve this form for the disease as it actually manifests in software or hardware, a...
creeping featuritis2 is designers' minds. (After all, -ism means `condition' or `pursuit of', whereas -itis usually means `inflammation of'.)
cretin is /kret'n/ or /kree'tn/ n. Congenital {loser}; an obnoxious person; someone who can't do anything right. It has been observed that many American hackers tend to favor the British pronunciation /kre'tn/ over standard American /kree'tn/...
cretin2 is insidious phonetic influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus.
cretinous is /kret'n-*s/ or /kreet'n-*s/ adj. Wrong; stupid; non-functional; very poorly designed. Also used pejoratively of people. See {dread high-bit disease} for an example. Approximate synonyms {bletcherous}, `bagbiting' (see {bagbite...
crippleware is n. 1. Software that has some important functionality deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a working version. 2. [Cambridge] {Guiltware} that exhorts you to donate to some charity (compare {careware})...
crippleware2 is can be upgraded to a more expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper).
critical mass is n. In physics, the minimum amount of fissionable material required to sustain a chain reaction. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one plus {epsilon} bugs. When s...
critical mass2 is be discarded and rewritten.
crlf is /ker'l*f/, sometimes /kru'l*f/ or /C-R-L-F/ n. (often capitalized as `CRLF') A carriage return (CR) followed by a line feed (LF). More loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the end of one line of text to the beginning of the next...
crlf2 is {{UNIX}} influence this usage has become less common (UNIX uses a bare line feed as its `CRLF').
crock is [from the obvious mainstream scatologism] n. 1. An awkward feature or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. Using small integers to represent error codes without the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for exa...
crock2 is for a process that dies due to {segfault}). 2. A technique that works acceptably, but which is quite prone to failure if disturbed in the least, for example depending on the machine opcodes having particular bit patterns so that y...
crock3 is tightly woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. See {kluge}, {brittle}. Also in the adjectives `crockish' and `crocky', and the nouns `crockishness' and `crockitude'.
cross-post is [USENET] vi. To post a single article simultaneously to several newsgroups. Distinguished from posting the article repeatedly, once to each newsgroup, which causes people to see it multiple times (this is very bad form). Gratui...
cross-post2 is line directing responses to a single followup group is frowned upon, as it tends to cause {followup} articles to go to inappropriate newsgroups when people respond to only one part of the original posting.
crudware is /kruhd'weir/ n. Pejorative term for the hundreds of megabytes of low-quality {freeware} circulated by user's groups and BBS systems in the micro-hobbyist world. "Yet *another* set of disk catalog utilities for {{MS-DOS}}? What cr...
cruft is /kruhft/ [back-formation from {crufty}] 1. n. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your bed is cruft; the TMRC Dictionary correctly noted that attacking it with a broom only produces more. 2. n. The results of shoddy...
cruft2 is pun on `hand craft'] To write assembler code for something normally (and better) done by a compiler (see {hand-hacking}). 4. n. Excess; superfluous junk. Esp. used of redundant or superseded code.
cruft together is vt. (also `cruft up') To throw together something ugly but temporarily workable. Like vt. {kluge up}, but more pejorative. "There isn't any program now to reverse all the lines of a file, but I can probably cruft one togeth...
cruft together2 is together}, {hack up}, {kluge up}, {crufty}.
cruftsmanship is /kruhfts'm*n-ship / n. [from {cruft}] The antithesis of craftsmanship.
crufty is /kruhf'tee/ [origin unknown; poss. from `crusty' or `cruddy'] adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex. The {canonical} example is "This is standard old crufty DEC software". In fact, one fanciful theory of the origin of `crufty...
crufty2 is `crusty' applied to DEC software so old that the `s' characters were tall and skinny, looking more like `f' characters. 2. Unpleasant, especially to the touch, often with encrusted junk. Like spilled coffee smeared with peanut b...
crufty3 is (sometimes spelled `cruftie') n. A small crufty object (see {frob}); often one that doesn't fit well into the scheme of things. "A LISP property list is a good place to store crufties (or, collectively, {random} cruft)."
crumb is n. Two binary digits; a {quad}. Larger than a {bit}, smaller than a {nybble}. Considered silly. Syn. {tayste}.
crunch is 1. vi. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated way. Connotes an essentially trivial operation that is nonetheless painful to perform. The pain may be due to the triviality's being embedded in a loop from 1 to 1,000,0...
crunch2 is {number-crunching}." 2. vt. To reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that produces bit configurations completely unrelated to the original data, such as by a Huffman code. (The file ends up looking like a paper documen...
crunch3 is wad.) Since such compression usually takes more computations than simpler methods such as run-length encoding, the term is doubly appropriate. (This meaning is usually used in the construction `file crunch(ing)' to distinguish i...
crunch4 is 3. n. The character `#'. Used at XEROX and CMU, among other places. See {{ASCII}}. 4. vt. To squeeze program source into a minimum-size representation that will still compile or execute. The term came into being specifically for ...
crunch5 is crunched BASIC source in order to make it run more quickly (it was a wholly interpretive BASIC, so the number of characters mattered). {Obfuscated C Contest} entries are often crunched; see the first example under that entry.
cruncha cruncha cruncha is /kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch* kruhn'ch*/ interj. An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine bogged down in a serious {grovel}. Also describes a notional sound made by groveling hardware. See {wugga wugga}, {grind} (se...
cryppie is /krip'ee/ n. A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic software or hardware.
CTSS is /C-T-S-S/ n. Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early (1963) experiment in the design of interactive time-sharing operating systems, ancestral to {{Multics}}, {{UNIX}}, and {{ITS}}. The name {{ITS}} (Incompatible Time-sharing System)...
CTSS2 is and to express some basic differences in philosophy about the way I/O services should be presented to user programs.
CTY is /sit'ee/ or /C-T-Y/ n. [MIT] The terminal physically associated with a computer's system {{console}}. The term is a contraction of `Console {tty}', that is, `Console TeleTYpe'. This {{ITS}}- and {{TOPS-10}}-associated term has become l...
CTY2 is refer to the CTY as `the console'.
cube is n. 1. [short for `cubicle'] A module in the open-plan offices used at many programming shops. "I've got the manuals in my cube." 2. A NeXT machine (which resembles a matte-black cube).
cubing is [parallel with `tubing'] vi. 1. Hacking on an IPSC (Intel Personal SuperComputer) hypercube. "Louella's gone cubing *again*!!" 2. Hacking Rubik's Cube or related puzzles, either physically or mathematically. 3. An indescribable fo...
cursor dipped in X is n. There are a couple of metaphors in English of the form `pen dipped in X' (perhaps the most common values of X are `acid', `bile', and `vitriol'). These map over neatly to this hackish usage (the cursor being what move...
cursor dipped in X2 is composing on-line). "Talk about a {nastygram}! He must've had his cursor dipped in acid when he wrote that one!"
cuspy is /kuhs'pee/ [WPI from the DEC acronym CUSP, for `Commonly Used System Program', i.e., a utility program used by many people] adj. 1. (of a program) Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and interfaces ...
cuspy2 is [NYU] Said of an attractive woman, especially one regarded as available. Implies a certain curvaceousness.
cut a tape is [poss. fr. mainstream `cut a check' or from the recording industry's `cut a record'] vi. To write a software or document distribution on magnetic tape for shipment. Has nothing to do with physically cutting the medium! Though t...
cut a tape2 is speaks of analogously `cutting a disk' or anything else in this sense.
cybercrud is /si'ber-kruhd/ [coined by Ted Nelson] n. Obfuscatory tech-talk. Verbiage with a high {MEGO} factor. The computer equivalent of bureaucratese.
cyberpunk is /si'ber-puhnk/ [orig. by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor Gardner Dozois] n.,adj. A subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel `Neuromancer' (though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's `True Na...
cyberpunk2 is Brunner's 1975 novel `The Shockwave Rider'). Gibson's near-total ignorance of computers and the present-day hacker culture enabled him to speculate about the role of computers and hackers in the future in ways hackers have since...
cyberpunk3 is tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived but innovative "Max Headroom" TV series. See {cyberspace}, {ice}, {go flatline}.
cyberspace is /si'ber-spays/ n. 1. Notional `information-space' loaded with visual cues and navigable with brain-computer interfaces called `cyberspace decks'; a characteristic prop of {cyberpunk} SF. At the time of this writing (mid-1991), ...
cyberspace2 is reality} interfaces modeled explicitly on Gibsonian cyberspace are already under way, using more conventional devices such as glove sensors and binocular TV headsets. Few hackers are prepared to deny outright the possibility ...
cyberspace3 is network (see {network, the}). 2. Occasionally, the metaphoric location of the mind of a person in {hack mode}. Some hackers report experiencing strong eidetic imagery when in hack mode; interestingly, independent reports fro...
cyberspace4 is common features to the experience. In particular, the dominant colors of this subjective `cyberspace' are often gray and silver, and the imagery often involves constellations of marching dots, elaborate shifting patterns of lin...
cycle is 1. n. The basic unit of computation. What every hacker wants more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper describes himself as a "cycle junkie"). One can describe an instruction as taking so many `clock cycles'. Often the computer can access i...
cycle2 is one speaks also of `memory cycles'. These are technical meanings of {cycle}. The jargon meaning comes from the observation that there are only so many cycles per second, and when you are sharing a computer the cycles get divided ...
cycle3 is computer spends working on your program rather than someone else's, the faster your program will run. That's why every hacker wants more cycles so he can spend less time waiting for the computer to respond. 2. By extension, a notio...
cycle4 is emphasizing that lots of things compete for the typical hacker's think time. "I refused to get involved with the Rubik's Cube back when it was big. Knew I'd burn too many cycles on it if I let myself." 3. vt. Syn. {bounce}, {120 r...
cycle5 is the machine again, that serial port's still hung."
cycle crunch is n. A situation where the number of people trying to use the computer simultaneously has reached the point where no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and the system has probably begun to {thrash}. This ...
cycle crunch2 is applied to timesharing. Usually the only solution is to buy more computer. Happily, this has rapidly become easier in recent years, so much so that the very term `cycle crunch' now has a faintly archaic flavor; most hackers ...
cycle crunch3 is opposed to traditional timesharing systems.
cycle drought is n. A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a {cycle crunch}, but it could also occur because part of the computer is temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go around. "The {high moby} is {down}, so we're running with...
cycle drought2 is There will be a cycle drought until it's fixed."
cycle of reincarnation is [coined by Ivan Sutherland ca. 1970] n. Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral evo...
cycle of reincarnation2 is its job, then somebody notices that it is inefficient to support two asymmetrical processors in the architecture and folds the function back into the main CPU, at which point the cycle begins again. Several iteratio...
cycle of reincarnation3 is graphics-processor design, and at least one or two in communications and floating-point processors. Also known as `the Wheel of Life', `the Wheel of Samsara', and other variations of the basic Hindu/Buddhist theolog...
cycle server is n. A powerful machine that exists primarily for running large {batch} jobs. Implies that interactive tasks such as editing are done on other machines on the network, such as workstations.*D.C. Power Lab n. The former site of {...
cycle server2 is funny because the obvious connection to electrical engineering was nonexistent --- the lab was named for a Donald C. Power. Compare {Marginal Hacks}.
daemon is /day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ [from the mythological meaning, later rationalized as the acronym `Disk And Execution MONitor'] n. A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea is t...
daemon2 is not be aware that a daemon is lurking (though often a program will commit an action only because it knows that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, under {{ITS}} writing a file on the {LPT} spooler's directory would in...
daemon3 is print the file. The advantage is that programs wanting (in this example) files printed need not compete for access to the {LPT}. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons a...
daemon4 is and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals. Daemon and {demon} are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. The term `daemon' was introduced to computing by {CTSS} people (who pronounce...
daemon5 is ITS called a {dragon}. Although the meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think this glossary reflects current (1991) usage.
dangling pointer is n. A reference that doesn't actually lead anywhere (in C and some other languages, a pointer that doesn't actually point at anything valid). Usually this is because it formerly pointed to something that has moved or disapp...
dangling pointer2 is of its techspeak meaning; for example, a local phone number for a person who has since moved to the other coast is a dangling pointer.
Datamation is /day`t*-may'sh*n/ n. A magazine that many hackers assume all {suit}s read. Used to question an unbelieved quote, as in "Did you read that in `Datamation?'" It used to publish something hackishly funny every once in a while, like...
Datamation2 is but it has since become much more exclusively {suit}-oriented and boring.
day mode is n. See {phase} (sense 1). Used of people only.
dd is /dee-dee/ [UNIX from IBM {JCL}] vt. Equivalent to {cat} or {BLT}. This was originally the name of a UNIX copy command with special options suitable for block-oriented devices. Often used in heavy-handed system maintenance, as in "Let's...
dd2 is the boot PROM to load it back on to a new disk". The UNIX `dd(1)' was designed with a weird, distinctly non-UNIXy keyword option syntax reminiscent of IBM System/360 JCL (which had a similar DD command); though the command filled a n...
dd3 is The jargon usage is now very rare outside UNIX sites and now nearly obsolete even there, as `dd(1)' has been {deprecated} for a long time (though it has no exact replacement). Replaced by {BLT} or simple English `copy'.
DDT is /D-D-T/ n. 1. Generic term for a program that assists in debugging other programs by showing individual machine instructions in a readable symbolic form and letting the user change them. In this sense the term DDT is now archaic, havin...
DDT2 is names of individual programs like `dbx', `adb', `gdb', or `sdb'. 2. [ITS] Under MIT's fabled {{ITS}} operating system, DDT (running under the alias HACTRN) was also used as the {shell} or top level command language used to execute o...
DDT3 is specific DDTs (sense 1) supported on early DEC hardware. The DEC PDP-10 Reference Handbook (1969) contained a footnote on the first page of the documentation for DDT which illuminates the origin of the term Historical footnote DDT...
DDT4 is computer in 1961. At that time DDT stood for "DEC Debugging Tape". Since then, the idea of an on-line debugging program has propagated throughout the computer industry. DDT programs are now available for all DEC computers. Sin...
DDT5 is used, the more descriptive name "Dynamic Debugging Technique" has been adopted, retaining the DDT acronym. Confusion between DDT-10 and another well known pesticide, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (C14-H9-Cl5) should be minim...
DDT6 is apparently mutually exclusive, class of bugs. Sadly, this quotation was removed from later editions of the handbook after the {suit}s took over and DEC became much more `businesslike'.
de-rezz is /dee-rez'/ [from `de-resolve' via the movie "Tron"] (also `derez') 1. vi. To disappear or dissolve; the image that goes with it is of an object breaking up into raster lines and static and then dissolving. Occasionally used of a pe...
de-rezz2 is mentally rather than physically. Usage extremely silly, also rare. This verb was actually invented as *fictional* hacker jargon, and adopted in a spirit of irony by real hackers years after the fact. 2. vt. On a Macintosh, many ...
de-rezz3 is are managed in small segments of the program file known as `resources'. The standard resource compiler is Rez. The standard resource decompiler is DeRez. Thus, decompiling a resource is `derezzing'. Usage very common.
dead code is n. Routines that can never be accessed because all calls to them have been removed, or code that cannot be reached because it is guarded by a control structure that provably must always transfer control somewhere else. The presen...
dead code2 is errors due to alterations in the program or significant changes in the assumptions and environment of the program (see also {software rot}); a good compiler should report dead code so a maintainer can think about what it means. ...
DEADBEEF is /ded-beef/ n. The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory (decimal -21524111) under a number of IBM environments, including the RS/6000. As in "Your program is DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted, flushed from memo...
DEADBEEF2 is boundary, of course, you have BEEFDEAD.
deadlock is n. 1. [techspeak] A situation wherein two or more processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for one of the others to do something. A common example is a program communicating to a server, which may find itself waitin...
deadlock2 is anything more to it, while the server is similarly waiting for more input from the controlling program before outputting anything. (It is reported that this particular flavor of deadlock is sometimes called a `starvation deadlo...
deadlock3 is properly used for situations where a program can never run simply because it never gets high enough priority. Another common flavor is `constipation', where each process is trying to send stuff to the other but all buffers are ...
deadlock4 is See {deadly embrace}. 2. Also used of deadlock-like interactions between humans, as when two people meet in a narrow corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from side t...
deadlock5 is they always both move the same way at the same time.
deadly embrace is n. Same as {deadlock}, though usually used only when exactly 2 processes are involved. This is the more popular term in Europe, while {deadlock} predominates in the United States.
Death Star is [from the movie "Star Wars"] 1. The AT&T corporate logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and bears an uncanny resemblance to the `Death Star' in the movie. This usage is particularly common among partisans of {BSD} UNIX,...
Death Star2 is inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. Copies still circulate of a poster printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD streaking away from a broken AT&T logo wreathed in flames. 2. AT&T's internal maga...
Death Star3 is incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top left is dark instead of light --- a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images.
DEC Wars is n. A 1983 {USENET} posting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr spoofing the "Star Wars" movies in hackish terms. Some years later, ESR (disappointed by Hastings and Tarr's failure to exploit a great premise more thoroughly) posted a 3...
DEC Wars2 is WARS"; the two are often confused.
DEChead is /dek'hed/ n. 1. A DEC {field servoid}. Not flattering. 2. [from `deadhead'] A Grateful Dead fan working at DEC.
deckle is /dek'l/ [from dec- and {nickle}] n. Two {nickle}s; 10 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM.
deep hack mode is n. See {hack mode}.
deep magic is [poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] n. An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one not generally published and available to hackers at large (compare {black art}); one that could only have been co...
deep magic2 is optimization techniques and many aspects of {OS} design used to be {deep magic}; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are. Compare {heavy wizardry}. Esp. found in comments of the form "De...
deep space is n. 1. Describes the notional location of any program that has gone {off the trolley}. Esp. used of programs that just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some output is expected. "Uh oh. I should have gott...
deep space2 is in deep space somewhere." Compare {buzz}, {catatonic}, {hyperspace}. 2. The metaphorical location of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some esoteric form of {bogosity} that he or she no longer responds coherent...
defenestration is [from the traditional Czechoslovak method of assassinating prime ministers, via SF fandom] n. 1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that was *awful*!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" 2. The act of...
defenestration2 is better response time from a full-screen program. This comes from the dictionary meaning of `defenestrate', which is to throw something out a window. 3. The act of discarding something under the assumption that it will im...
defenestration3 is left." "Well, why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core dumps?" 4. [proposed] The requirement to support a command-line interface. "It has to run on a VT100." "Curses! I've been defenestrated!"
defined as is adj. In the role of, usually in an organization-chart sense. "Pete is currently defined as bug prioritizer." Compare {logical}.
dehose is /dee-hohz/ vt. To clear a {hosed} condition.
delint is /dee-lint/ v. To modify code to remove problems detected when {lint}ing.
delta is n. 1. [techspeak] A quantitative change, especially a small or incremental one (this use is general in physics and engineering). "I just doubled the speed of my program!" "What was the delta on program size?" "About 30 percent." (...
delta2 is increased its size by only 30 percent.) 2. [UNIX] A {diff}, especially a {diff} stored under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System) or RCS (Revision Control System). 3. n. A small quantity, but ...
delta3 is {delta} and {epsilon} stems from the traditional use of these letters in mathematics for very small numerical quantities, particularly in `epsilon-delta' proofs in limit theory (as in the differential calculus). The term {delta} i...
delta4 is mentioned, to mean a quantity that is slightly bigger than {epsilon} but still very small. "The cost isn't epsilon, but it's delta" means that the cost isn't totally negligible, but it is nevertheless very small. Common construct...
delta5 is epsilon of ---' that is, close to and even closer to.
demented is adj. Yet another term of disgust used to describe a program. The connotation in this case is that the program works as designed, but the design is bad. Said, for example, of a program that generates large numbers of meaningless e...
demented2 is brink of imminent collapse. Compare {wonky}, {bozotic}.
demigod is n. A hacker with years of experience, a national reputation, and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the ...
demigod2 is hacker community and have helped shape it. Major demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors of {{UNIX}} and {C}) and Richard M. Stallman (inventor of {EMACS}). In their hearts of hearts, most hackers dream of ...
demigod3 is more than one major software project has been driven to completion by the author's veiled hopes of apotheosis. See also {net.god}, {true-hacker}.
demo is /de'moh/ [short for `demonstration'] 1. v. To demonstrate a product or prototype. A far more effective way of inducing bugs to manifest than any number of {test} runs, especially when important people are watching. 2. n. The act of d...
demo mode is [Sun] n. 1. The state of being {heads down} in order to finish code in time for a {demo}, usually due yesterday. 2. A mode in which video games sit there by themselves running through a portion of the game, also known as `attract ...
demo mode2 is they use as a screen saver, or may go through a demo mode on startup (for example, the Microsoft Windows opening screen --- which lets you impress your neighbors without actually having to put up with {Microsloth Windows}).
demon is n. 1. [MIT] A portion of a program that is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. See {daemon}. The distinction is that demons are usually processes within a program, while daemons are ...
demon2 is system. Demons are particularly common in AI programs. For example, a knowledge-manipulation program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which de...
demon3 is and would create additional pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons as the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Mean...
demon4 is whatever its primary task was. 2. [outside MIT] Often used equivalently to {daemon} --- especially in the {{UNIX}} world, where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic.
depeditate is /dee-ped'*-tayt/ [by (faulty) analogy with `decapitate'] vt. Humorously, to cut off the feet of. When one is using some computer-aided typesetting tools, careless placement of text blocks within a page or above a rule can resul...
depeditate2 is letters are said to have been depeditated.
deprecated is adj. Said of a program or feature that is considered obsolescent and in the process of being phased out, usually in favor of a specified replacement. Deprecated features can, unfortunately, linger on for many years.
deserves to lose is adj. Said of someone who willfully does the {Wrong Thing}; humorously, if one uses a feature known to be {marginal}. What is meant is that one deserves the consequences of one's {losing} actions. "Boy, anyone who tries to...
deserves to lose2 is ({{ITS}} fans used to say this of {{UNIX}}; many still do.) See also {screw}, {chomp}, {bagbiter}.
desk check is n.,v. To {grovel} over hardcopy of source code, mentally simulating the control flow; a method of catching bugs. No longer common practice in this age of on-screen editing, fast compiles, and sophisticated debuggers --- though so...
desk check2 is Compare {eyeball search}, {vdiff}, {vgrep}.
Devil Book is n. `The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD UNIX Operating System', by Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Michael J. Karels, and John S. Quarterman (Addison-Wesley Publishers, 1989) --- the standard reference book on ...
Devil Book2 is because the cover has a picture depicting a little devil (a visual play on {daemon}) in sneakers, holding a pitchfork (referring to one of the characteristic features of UNIX, the {fork(2)} system call).
devo is /dee'voh/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A person in a development group. See also {doco} and {mango}.
dickless workstation is n. Extremely pejorative hackerism for `diskless workstation', a class of botches including the Sun 3/50 and other machines designed exclusively to network with an expensive central disk server. These combine all the di...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
double bucky is adj. Using both the CTRL and META keys. "The command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F." This term originated on the Stanford extended-ASCII keyboard, and was later taken up by users of the {space-cadet keyboard} at MIT. A...
double bucky2 is {bucky bits} (control and meta shifting keys) were nice, but there weren't enough of them; you could type only 512 different characters on a Stanford keyboard. An obvious way to address this was simply to add more shifting ...
double bucky3 is keyboard with that many shifting keys is hard on touch-typists, who don't like to move their hands away from the home position on the keyboard. It was half-seriously suggested that the extra shifting keys be implemented as pe...
double bucky4 is much like playing a full pipe organ. This idea is mentioned in a parody of a very fine song by Jeffrey Moss called "Rubber Duckie", which was published in `The Sesame Street Songbook' (Simon and Schuster 1971, ISBN 671-21036-...
double bucky5 is 1978, in celebration of the Stanford keyboard See also {meta bit}, {cokebottle}, and {quadruple bucky}.
double DECkers is n. Used to describe married couples in which both partners work for Digital Equipment Corporation.
doubled sig is [USENET] n. A {sig block} that has been included twice in a {USENET} article or, less commonly, in an electronic mail message. An article or message with a doubled sig can be caused by improperly configured software. More ofte...
doubled sig2 is experience in electronic communication. See {BIFF}, {pseudo}.
down is 1. adj. Not operating. "The up escalator is down" is considered a humorous thing to say, and "The elevator is down" always means "The elevator isn't working" and never refers to what floor the elevator is on. With respect to computer...
down2 is mainstream; the extension to other kinds of machine is still hackish. 2. `go down' vi. To stop functioning; usually said of the {system}. The message from the {console} that every hacker hates to hear from the operator is "The sys...
down3 is down', `bring down' vt. To deactivate purposely, usually for repair work or {PM}. "I'm taking the system down to work on that bug in the tape drive." Occasionally one hears the word `down' by itself used as a verb in this vt. sens...
download is vt. To transfer data or (esp.) code from a larger `host' system (esp. a {mainframe}) over a digital comm link to a smaller `client' system, esp. a microcomputer or specialized peripheral. Oppose {upload}. However, note that groun...
download2 is rule for this term. Space-to-earth transmission is always download and the reverse upload regardless of the relative size of the computers involved. So far the in-space machines have invariably been smaller; thus the upload/down...
DP is /D-P/ n. 1. Data Processing. Listed here because, according to hackers, use of the term marks one immediately as a {suit}. See {DPer}. 2. Common abbrev for {Dissociated Press}.
DPB is /d*-pib'/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt. To plop something down in the middle. Usage silly. "DPB yourself into that couch there." The connotation would be that the couch is full except for one slot just big enough for you to ...
DPB2 is the name of a PDP-10 instruction that inserts some bits into the middle of some other bits. This usage has been kept alive by the Common LISP function of the same name.
DPer is /dee-pee-er/ n. Data Processor. Hackers are absolutely amazed that {suit}s use this term self-referentially. "*Computers* process data, not people!" See {DP}.
dragon is n. [MIT] A program similar to a {daemon}, except that it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to perform various secondary tasks. A typical example would be an accounting program, which keeps track of who is logg...
dragon2 is etc. Under ITS, many terminals displayed a list of people logged in, where they were, what they were running, etc., along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy, or the Enterprise), which was generated by the `name d...
dragon3 is and most other OSes this would be called a `background demon' or {daemon}. The best-known UNIX example of a dragon is `cron(1)'. At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a `phantom'.
Dragon Book is n. The classic text `Compilers Principles, Techniques and Tools', by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi, and Jeffrey D. Ullman (Addison-Wesley 1986; ISBN 0-201-10088-6), so called because of the cover design featuring a dragon labeled `c...
Dragon Book2 is bearing the lance `LALR parser generator' among his other trappings. This one is more specifically known as the `Red Dragon Book' (1986); an earlier edition, sans Sethi and titled `Principles Of Compiler Design' (Alfred V. A...
Dragon Book3 is ISBN 0-201-00022-9), was the `Green Dragon Book' (1977). (Also `New Dragon Book', `Old Dragon Book'.) The horsed knight and the Green Dragon were warily eying each other at a distance; now the knight is typing (wearing gaun...
Dragon Book4 is representation of the Red Dragon's head while the rest of the beast extends back in normal space. See also {{book titles}}.
drain is [IBM] v. Syn. for {flush} (sense 2). Has a connotation of finality about it; one speaks of draining a device before taking it offline.
dread high-bit disease is n. A condition endemic to PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME) minicomputers that results in all the characters having their high (0x80) bit ON rather than OFF. This of course makes transporting files to other systems much more diff...
dread high-bit disease2 is devices. It is reported that PRIME adopted the reversed-8-bit convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine. This probably qualifies as one of the most {cretinous} design tradeoffs ever made. Se...
dread high-bit disease3 is (including the Atari 800) have exhibited similar brain damage.
DRECNET is /drek'net/ [from Yiddish/German `dreck', meaning dirt] n. Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the {VMS} community. So called because DEC helped write the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly o...
DRECNET2 is violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also {connector conspiracy}.
driver is n. 1. The {main loop} of an event-processing program; the code that gets commands and dispatches them for execution. 2. [techspeak] In `device driver', code designed to handle a particular peripheral device such as a magnetic disk or...
driver2 is `driver' also means a program that translates some device-independent or other common format to something a real device can actually understand.
droid is n. A person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee) exhibiting most of the following characteristics (a) na"ive trust in the wisdom of the parent organization or `the system'; (b) a propensity to believe obvious n...
droid2 is computers!); blind faith; (c) a rule-governed mentality, one unwilling or unable to look beyond the `letter of the law' in exceptional situations; and (d) no interest in fixing that which is broken; an "It's not my job, man" attitu...
droid3 is supermarket checkout assistant and bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government employees. The implication is that the rules and official procedures constitute software that the droid is executing. This become...
droid4 is properly debugged. The term `droid mentality' is also used to describe the mindset behind this behavior. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}; see {-oid}.
drool-proof paper is n. Documentation that has been obsessively {dumbed down}, to the point where only a {cretin} could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the `drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been `written on drool-proof pape...
drool-proof paper2 is from Apple's LaserWriter manual "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame."
drop on the floor is vt. To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnew...
drop on the floor2 is {black hole}, {bit bucket}.
drop-ins is [prob. by analogy with {drop-outs}] n. Spurious characters appearing on a terminal or console as a result of line noise or a system malfunction of some sort. Esp. used when these are interspersed with one's own typed input. Compa...
drop-outs is n. 1. A variety of `power glitch' (see {glitch}); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains. 2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (this can happen under UNIX when a bad connectio...
drop-outs2 is spurious character interrupts). 3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See {glitch}, {fried}.
drugged is adj. (also `on drugs') 1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward {brain-damaged}. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint (but see appendix B). 2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance.
drunk mouse syndrome is n. A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse. Can usu...
drunk mouse syndrome2 is and plugging it back again. Another recommended fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees. At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, most people kept a can of copier cleaner (isopropyl alcohol) at their desks. ...
drunk mouse syndrome3 is up enough {cruft} to be unreliable, the mouse was doused in cleaner, which restored it for a while. However, this operation left a fine residue that accelerated the accumulation of cruft, so the dousings became more a...
drunk mouse syndrome4 is declared `alcoholic' and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a CFC ultrasonic bath.
dumbass attack is /duhm'as *-tak'/ [Purdue] n. Notional cause of a novice's mistake made by the experienced, especially one made while running as root under UNIX, e.g., typing `rm -r *' or `mkfs' on a mounted file system. Compare {adger}.
dumbed down is adj. Simplified, with a strong connotation of *over*simplified. Often, a {marketroid} will insist that the interfaces and documentation of software be dumbed down after the designer has burned untold gallons of midnight oil mak...
dump is n. 1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem or the state of a system, especially one routed to the slowest available output device (compare {core dump}), and most especially one consisting of hex or octal {ru...
dump2 is memory, mass storage, or some file. In {elder days}, debugging was generally done by `groveling over' a dump (see {grovel}); increasing use of high-level languages and interactive debuggers has made this uncommon, and the term `dump'...
dump3 is backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing installations.
dup killer is /d[y]oop kill'r/ [FidoNet] n. Software that is supposed to detect and delete duplicates of a message that may have reached the FidoNet system via different routes.
dup loop is /d[y]oop loop/ (also `dupe loop') [FidoNet] n. An incorrectly configured system or network gateway may propagate duplicate messages on one or more {echo}es, with different identification information that renders {dup killer}s ine...
dup loop2 is eventually reaches a system through which it has already passed (with the original identification information), all systems passed on the way back to that system are said to be involved in a {dup loop}.
dusty deck is n. Old software (especially applications) which one is obliged to remain compatible with (or to maintain). The term implies that the software in question is a holdover from card-punch days. Used esp. when referring to old scien...
dusty deck2 is of which was written in FORTRAN and very poorly documented but is believed to be too expensive to replace. See {fossil}.
DWIM is /dwim/ [acronym, `Do What I Mean'] 1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus input was provided. 2. n.,obs. The BBNLISP/INTERLISP function that attempted to accomplish this feat by correcting many ...
DWIM2 is Occasionally, an interjection hurled at a balky computer, esp. when one senses one might be tripping over legalisms (see {legalese}). Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and spelling errors, so it was somewhat id...
DWIM3 is make hash of anyone else's typos if they were stylistically different. This led a number of victims of DWIM to claim the acronym stood for `Damn Warren's Infernal Machine!'. In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to t...
DWIM4 is One day another hacker there typed `delete *$' to free up some disk space. (The editor there named backup files by appending `$' to the original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files left over from old editing sess...
DWIM5 is editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported `*$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'.' It then started to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it with a {Vulcan nerve pinch} after only a half dozen ...
DWIM6 is said he had been sorely tempted to go to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his workstation, and then type `delete *$' twice. DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program; it is a...
DWIM7 is instruction the ideal computer would have. Back when proofs of program correctness were in vogue, there were also jokes about `DWIMC' (Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thin...
dynner is /din'r/ 32 bits, by analogy with {nybble} and {{byte}}. Usage rare and extremely silly. See also {playte}, {tayste}, {crumb}.*earthquake [IBM] n. The ultimate real-world shock test for computer hardware. Hackish sources at IBM deny th...
dynner2 is initiated by the company to test quality-assurance procedures at its California plants.
Easter egg is n. 1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code. 2. A message, graphic, or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in res...
Easter egg2 is or keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits. One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond to the command `make love' with `not war?'. Many personal computers have much ...
Easter egg3 is lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire development team.
Easter egging is [IBM] n. The act of replacing unrelated parts more or less at random in hopes that a malfunction will go away. Hackers consider this the normal operating mode of {field circus} techs and do not love them for it. Compare {sho...
eat flaming death is imp. A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposed to derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or s...
eat flaming death2 is reported that the Firesign Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown expressi...
EBCDIC is /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see`dik/, or /eb'k*-dik/ [acronym, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] n. An alleged character set used on IBM {dinosaur}s. It exists in at least six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such de...
EBCDIC2 is and the absence of several ASCII punctuation characters fairly important for modern computer languages (exactly which characters are absent varies according to which version of EBCDIC you're looking at). IBM adapted EBCDIC from {...
EBCDIC3 is promulgated it as a customer-control tactic (see {connector conspiracy}), spurning the already established ASCII standard. Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own description of the EBCDIC variants and how ...
EBCDIC4 is classified top-secret, burn-before-reading. Hackers blanch at the very *name* of EBCDIC and consider it a manifestation of purest {evil}. See also {fear and loathing}.
echo is [FidoNet] n. A {topic group} on {FidoNet}'s echomail system. Compare {newsgroup}.
eighty-column mind is [IBM] n. The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the transition from {punched card} to tape was traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people, including (according to an o...
eighty-column mind2 is `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1422 and 1602 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called "The Last Bug", the climactic lin...
eighty-column mind3 is the console Of hunger and thirst. Next day he was buried, Face down, 9-edge first. The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base and its thinking. See {IBM}, {fear ...
El Camino Bignum is /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ n. The road mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and many portions of which are still intact. Naviga...
El Camino Bignum2 is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines {logical} north and south even though it isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers. The...
El Camino Bignum3 is /ray-ahl'/) means `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'. In the FORTRAN language, a `real' quantity is a number typically precise to 7 significant digits, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger floating-poi...
El Camino Bignum4 is significant digits (other languages have similar `real' types). When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on `real', he started calling it `El Camino ...
El Camino Bignum5 is told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it `El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck. (See {bignum}.)
elder days is n. The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly, pre-1980); the era of the {PDP-10}, {TECO}, {{ITS}}, and the ARPANET. This term has been rather consciously adopted from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic `The Lord of the Rings'. Compare ...
elegant is [from mathematical usage] adj. Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than `clever', `winning', or even {cuspy}.
elephantine is adj. Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous {hog}s (owing perhaps to poor design founded on {brute force and ignorance}) and exceedingly {hairy} in source form. An elephantine program may be functional and even f...
elephantine2 is in bed with an elephant) it's tough to have around all the same (and, like a pachyderm, difficult to maintain). In extreme cases, hackers have been known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive proboscatory mime at the...
elephantine3 is semi-humorous. Compare `has the elephant nature' and the somewhat more pejorative {monstrosity}. See also {second-system effect} and {baroque}.
elevator controller is n. Another archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like {toaster} (which superseded it). During one period (1983--84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C standardization committee) this was the canonical exa...
elevator controller2 is computation environment. "You can't require `printf(3)' to be part of the default runtime library --- what if you're targeting an elevator controller?" Elevator controllers became important rhetorical weapons on both ...
ELIZA effect is /*-li'z* *-fekt'/ [AI community] n. The tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience. For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol `+' that makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's j...
ELIZA effect2 is Using `+' or `plus' to mean addition in a computer language is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect. This term comes from the famous ELIZA program, which simulated a Rogerian psychoanalyst by rephrasing many of the patient's ...
ELIZA effect3 is patient. It worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key words into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however, that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally caught up in dealing w...
ELIZA effect4 is tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer never put there. The ELIZA effect is a {Good Thing} when writing a programming language, but it can blind you to serious shortcomings when analyzing an Artificial Inte...
elvish is n. 1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the `Book of Kells'. Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in `The Lord of The Rings' as an orthography for his fictional ...
elvish2 is both visually and phonetically elegant) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be interested by artificial languages in general). It is traditional for graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to support a Fean...
elvish3 is also {elder days}. 2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface produced by a graphics device. 3. The typeface mundanely called `B"ocklin', an art-decoish display font.
EMACS is /ee'maks/ [from Editing MACroS] n. The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a program editor with an entire LISP system inside it. It was originally written by Richard Stallman in {TECO} under {{ITS}} at the MIT AI lab, but the most wide...
EMACS2 is includes facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and receive mail; many hackers spend up to 80% of their {tube time} inside it. Some versions running under window managers iconify as an overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps...
EMACS3 is not (yet) include. Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too heavyweight and {baroque} for their taste, and expand the name as `Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its heavy reliance on keystrokes decorated with {bucky bits}. Other s...
EMACS4 is Constantly Swapping', `Eventually `malloc()'s All Computer Storage', and `EMACS Makes A Computer Slow' (see {{recursive acronym}}). See also {vi}.
email is /ee'mayl/ 1. n. Electronic mail automatically passed through computer networks and/or via modems over common-carrier lines. Contrast {snail-mail}, {paper-net}, {voice-net}. See {network address}. 2. vt. To send electronic mail. O...
email2 is listed in the OED; it means "embossed (with a raised pattern) or arranged in a net work". A use from 1480 is given. The word is derived from French `emmailleure', network.
emoticon is /ee-moh'ti-kon/ n. An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in email or news. Hundreds have been proposed, but only a few are in common use. These include (These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head si...
emoticon2 is by far the most frequently encountered. Hyphenless forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX; see also {bixie}. On {USENET}, `smiley' is often used as a generic term synonymous with {emoticon}, as well as specificall...
emoticon3 is that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on the CMU {bboard} systems around 1980. He later wrote "I wish I had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date for posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting...
emoticon4 is world's communication channels." [GLS confirms that he remembers this original posting]. Note for the {newbie} Overuse of the smiley is a mark of loserhood! More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that you've gone ov...
empire is n. Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago. There are five or six multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication, and one single-player version implemented for...
empire2 is available as MS-DOS freeware. All are notoriously addictive.
engine is n. 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some function but can't be used without some kind of {front end}. Today we have, especially, `print engine' the guts of a laser printer. 2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one ...
engine2 is a `database engine'. The hackish senses of `engine' are actually close to its original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity'). This sense had not been comple...
engine3 is power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which explains why he named the stored-program computer that he designed in 1844 the `Analytical Engine'.
English is 1. n.,obs. The source code for a program, which may be in any language, as opposed to the linkable or executable binary produced from it by a compiler. The idea behind the term is that to a real hacker, a program written in his fav...
English2 is readable as English. Usage used mostly by old-time hackers, though recognizable in context. 2. The official name of the database language used by the Pick Operating System, actually a sort of crufty interpreted BASIC with delusio...
English3 is {marketroid}s to say "Yes, and you can program our computers in English!" to ignorant {suit}s without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.
enhancement is n. {Marketroid}-speak for a bug {fix}. This abuse of language is a popular and time-tested way to turn incompetence into increased revenue. A hacker being ironic would instead call the fix a {feature} --- or perhaps save some ...
ENQ is /enkw/ or /enk/ [from the ASCII mnemonic ENQuire for 0000101] An on-line convention for querying someone's availability. After opening a {talk mode} connection to someone apparently in heavy hack mode, one might type `SYN SYN ENQ?' (the...
ENQ2 is bytes), and expect a return of {ACK} or {NAK} depending on whether or not the person felt interruptible. Compare {ping}, {finger}, and the usage of `FOO?' listed under {talk mode}.
EOF is /E-O-F/ [acronym, `End Of File'] n. 1. [techspeak] Refers esp. to whatever {out-of-band} value is returned by C's sequential character-input functions (and their equivalents in other environments) when end of file has been reached. Thi...
EOF2 is V6 UNIX, but was originally 0. 2. Used by extension in non-computer contexts when a human is doing something that can be modeled as a sequential read and can't go further. "Yeah, I looked for a list of 360 mnemonics to post as a jo...
EOF3 is had was a {JCL} manual." See also {EOL}.
EOL is /E-O-L/ [End Of Line] n. Syn. for {newline}, derived perhaps from the original CDC6600 Pascal. Now rare, but widely recognized and occasionally used for brevity. Used in the example entry under {BNF}. See also {EOF}.
EOU is /E-O-U/ n. The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control character (End Of User) that could make an ASR-33 Teletype explode on receipt. This parodied the numerous obscure delimiter and control characters left in ASCII from the days when it ...
EOU2 is teletypes than computers (e.g., FS, GS, RS, US, EM, SUB, ETX, and esp. EOT). It is worth remembering that ASR-33s were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a lot of clattering parts; the notion that one might explode was nowhere near a...
EOU3 is sitting in front of a {tube} or flatscreen today.
epoch is [UNIX prob. from astronomical timekeeping] n. The time and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and timestamp values. Under most UNIX versions the epoch is 000000 GMT, January 1, 1970. System time is measured in se...
epoch2 is problems may ensue when the clock wraps around (see {wrap around}), which is not necessarily a rare event; on systems counting 10 ticks per second, a signed 32-bit count of ticks is good only for 6.8 years. The 1-tick-per-second c...
epoch3 is 2038, assuming word lengths don't increase by then. See also {wall time}.
epsilon is [see {delta}] 1. n. A small quantity of anything. "The cost is epsilon." 2. adj. Very small, negligible; less than {marginal}. "We can get this feature for epsilon cost." 3. `within epsilon of' close enough to be indistinguishabl...
epsilon2 is closer than being `within delta of'. "That's not what I asked for, but it's within epsilon of what I wanted." Alternatively, it may mean not close enough, but very little is required to get it there "My program is within epsilo...
epsilon squared is n. A quantity even smaller than {epsilon}, as small in comparison to epsilon as epsilon is to something normal; completely negligible. If you buy a supercomputer for a million dollars, the cost of the thousand-dollar termin...
epsilon squared2 is of the ten-dollar cable to connect them is epsilon squared. Compare {lost in the underflow}, {lost in the noise}.
the era is Syn. {epoch}. Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous, but `era' usually connotes a span of time rather than a point in time. The {epoch} usage is recommended.
Eric Conspiracy is n. A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuv...
Eric Conspiracy2 is more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way. Well-known examples include Eric Allman (he of the `Allman style' described under ...
Eric Conspiracy3 is NNTP); your editor has heard from about fourteen others by email, and the organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one site.
Eris is /e'ris/ n. The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion, and Things You Know Not Of; her name was latinized to Discordia and she was worshiped by that name in Rome. Not a very friendly deity in the Classical original, she was reinve...
Eris2 is creative anarchy starting in 1959 by the adherents of {Discordianism} and has since been a semi-serious subject of veneration in several `fringe' cultures, including hackerdom. See {Discordianism}, {Church of the SubGenius}.
erotics is /ee-ro'tiks/ n. [Helsinki University of Technology, Finland] n. English-language university slang for electronics. Often used by hackers in Helsinki, maybe because good electronics excites them and makes them warm.
essentials is n. Things necessary to maintain a productive and secure hacking environment. "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, a 20-megahertz 80386 box with 8 meg of core and a 300-megabyte disk supporting full UNIX with source and X windows and...
essentials2 is Internet site, and thou."
evil is adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the {cretinous}/{losing}/{brain-damaged} series, `e...
evil2 is design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We thought about adding a {Blue Glue} inter...
evil3 is "{TECO} is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos." Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as /eeee'vil/.
exa- is /ek's*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.
examining the entrails is n. The process of {grovel}ling through a core dump or hex image in the attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down. Compare {runes}, {incantation}, {black art}, {desk check}.
EXCH is /eks'ch*/ or /eksch/ vt. To exchange two things, each for the other; to swap places. If you point to two people sitting down and say "Exch!", you are asking them to trade places. EXCH, meaning EXCHange, was originally the name of a P...
EXCH2 is contents of a register and a memory location. Many newer hackers tend to be thinking instead of the PostScript exchange operator (which is usually written in lowercase).
excl is /eks'kl/ n. Abbreviation for `exclamation point'. See {bang}, {shriek}, {{ASCII}}.
EXE is /eks'ee/ or /eek'see/ or /E-X-E/ n. An executable binary file. Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS, VMS, and TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files. This usage is also occasionally found among UNIX programmers even thoug...
exec is /eg-zek'/ vt.,n. 1. [UNIX from `execute'] Synonym for {chain}, derives from the `exec(2)' call. 2. [from `executive'] obs. The command interpreter for an {OS} (see {shell}); term esp. used around mainframes, and prob. derived from ...
exec2 is systems. 3. At IBM, the equivalent of a shell command file (among VM/CMS users). The mainstream `exec' as an abbreviation for (human) executive is *not* used. To a hacker, an `exec' is a always a program, never a person.
left as an exercise is [from technical books] Used to complete a proof when one doesn't mind a {handwave}, or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is "The proof (or the rest) is left as an exercise for the reader." This comment *has* o...
left as an exercise2 is research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences.
eyeball search is n. To look for something in a mass of code or data with one's own native optical sensors, as opposed to using some sort of pattern matching software like {grep} or any other automated search tool. Also called a {vgrep}; comp...
eyeball search2 is `fabricate'] v. 1. To produce chips from a design that may have been created by someone at another company. Fabbing chips based on the designs of others is the activity of a {silicon foundry}. To a hacker, `fab' is practica...
eyeball search3 is line' the production system (lithography, diffusion, etching, etc.) for chips at a chip manufacturer. Different `fab lines' are run with different process parameters, die sizes, or technologies, or simply to provide more ...
face time is n. Time spent interacting with somebody face-to-face (as opposed to via electronic links). "Oh, yeah, I spent some face time with him at the last Usenix."
factor is n. See {coefficient}.
fall over is [IBM] vi. Yet another synonym for {crash} or {lose}. `Fall over hard' equates to {crash and burn}.
fall through is v. (n. `fallthrough', var. `fall-through') 1. To exit a loop by exhaustion, i.e., by having fulfilled its exit condition rather than via a break or exception condition that exits from the middle of it. This usage appears to be...
fall through2 is 1950s. 2. To fail a test that would have passed control to a subroutine or some other distant portion of code. 3. In C, `fall-through' occurs when the flow of execution in a switch statement reaches a `case' label other than ...
fall through3 is passing a point where one would normally expect to find a `break'. A trivial example The variant spelling `/* FALL THRU */' is also common. The effect of this code is to `do_green()' when color is `GREEN', `do_red()' when c...
fall through4 is other than `PINK', and (and this is the important part) `do_pink()' *and then* `do_red()' when color is `PINK'. Fall-through is {considered harmful} by some, though there are contexts (such as the coding of state machines) ...
fall through5 is considered good practice to include a comment highlighting the fall-through where one would normally expect a break.
fandango on core is [UNIX/C hackers, from the Mexican dance] n. In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a {core dump}, or corrupts the `malloc(3)' {arena} in such a way as to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said ...
fandango on core2 is low-end personal machines without an MMU, this can corrupt the OS itself, causing massive lossage. Other frenetic dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha, or watusi, may be substituted. See {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}...
FAQ list is /F-A-Q list/ [USENET] n. A compendium of accumulated lore, posted periodically to high-volume newsgroups in an attempt to forestall Frequently Asked Questions. This lexicon itself serves as a good example of a collection of one ki...
FAQ list2 is regular posting. Examples "What is the proper type of NULL?" and "What's that funny name for the `#' character?" are both Frequently Asked Questions. Several extant FAQ lists do (or should) make reference to the Jargon File (t...
FAQL is /fa'kl/ n. Syn. {FAQ list}.
farming is [Adelaide University, Australia] n. What the heads of a disk drive are said to do when they plow little furrows in the magnetic media. Associated with a {crash}. Typically used as follows "Oh no, the machine has just crashed; I ho...
fascist is adj. 1. Said of a computer system with excessive or annoying security barriers, usage limits, or access policies. The implication is that said policies are preventing hackers from getting interesting work done. The variant `fascis...
fascist2 is poss. by analogy with `touristic' (see {tourist}). 2. In the design of languages and other software tools, `the fascist alternative' is the most restrictive and structured way of capturing a particular function; the implication ...
fascist3 is simplify the implementation or provide tighter error checking. Compare {bondage-and-discipline language}, but that term is global rather than local.
faulty is adj. Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as {bletcherous}, {losing}, q.v., but the connotation is much milder.
fd leak is /ef dee leek/ n. A kind of programming bug analogous to a {core leak}, in which a program fails to close file descriptors (`fd's) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out of them. See {leak}.
fear and loathing is [from Hunter Thompson] n. A state inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards that are totally {brain-damaged} but ubiquitous --- Intel 8086s, or {COBOL}, or {{EBCDIC}}, or any {IBM} m...
fear and loathing2 is RS/6000). "Ack! They want PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and loathing time!"
feature is n. 1. A good property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it was intended or not is immaterial. 2. An intended property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it is good or not is immaterial (but if bad, it is also a {misfeatur...
feature2 is in particular, one that is purposely inconsistent because it works better that way --- such an inconsistency is therefore a {feature} and not a {bug}. This kind of feature is sometimes called a {miswart}; see that entry for a cl...
feature3 is is gratuitous or unnecessary, though perhaps also impressive or cute. For example, one feature of Common LISP's `format' function is the ability to print numbers in two different Roman-numeral formats (see {bells, whistles, and g...
feature4 is put in to help someone else but that happens to be in your way. 6. A bug that has been documented. To call something a feature sometimes means the author of the program did not consider the particular case, and that the program r...
feature5 is strictly incorrect. A standard joke is that a bug can be turned into a {feature} simply by documenting it (then theoretically no one can complain about it because it's in the manual), or even by simply declaring it to be good. "T...
feature6 is common catchphrase. See also {feetch feetch}, {creeping featurism}, {wart}, {green lightning}. The relationship among bugs, features, misfeatures, warts, and miswarts might be clarified by the following hypothetical exchange b...
feature7 is seat doesn't recline." B "That's not a bug, that's a feature. There is an emergency exit door built around the window behind you, and the route has to be kept clear." A "Oh. Then it's a misfeature; they should have increased th...
feature8 is if they'd increased spacing in only one section it would have been a wart --- they would've had to make nonstandard-length ceiling panels to fit over the displaced seats." A "A miswart, actually. If they increased spacing throug...
feature9 is of the profit margin. So unequal spacing would actually be the Right Thing." B "Indeed." {Undocumented feature} is a common, allegedly humorous euphemism for a {bug}.
feature creature is [poss. fr. slang `creature feature' for a horror movie] n. One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision, or {taste}. See also {feeping creaturism}, {creeping featuris...
feature shock is [from Alvin Toffler's book title `Future Shock'] n. A user's (or programmer's!) confusion when confronted with a package that has too many features and poor introductory material.
featurectomy is /fee`ch*r-ek't*-mee/ n. The act of removing a feature from a program. Featurectomies come in two flavors, the `righteous' and the `reluctant'. Righteous featurectomies are performed because the remover believes the program wo...
featurectomy2 is there is already an equivalent and better way to achieve the same end. (This is not quite the same thing as removing a {misfeature}.) Reluctant featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external constraint such as code si...
feep is /feep/ 1. n. The soft electronic `bell' sound of a display terminal (except for a VT-52); a beep (in fact, the microcomputer world seems to prefer {beep}). 2. vi. To cause the display to make a feep sound. ASR-33s (the original TTYs)...
feep2 is that ring. Alternate forms {beep}, `bleep', or just about anything suitably onomatopoeic. (Jeff MacNelly, in his comic strip "Shoe", uses the word `eep' for sounds made by computer terminals and video games; this is perhaps the cl...
feep3 is `breedle' was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly soft (they sound more like the musical equivalent of a raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close approximation, imagine the sound of a Star Trek commu...
feep4 is `feeper' on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also {ding}.
feeper is /fee'pr/ n. The device in a terminal or workstation (usually a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the {feep} sound.
feeping creature is [from {feeping creaturism}] n. An unnecessary feature; a bit of {chrome} that, in the speaker's judgment, is the camel's nose for a whole horde of new features.
feeping creaturism is /fee'ping kree`ch*r-izm/ n. A deliberate spoonerism for {creeping featurism}, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn't really well defined, but it so...
feeping creaturism2 is heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.
feetch feetch is /feech feech/ interj. If someone tells you about some new improvement to a program, you might respond "Feetch, feetch!" The meaning of this depends critically on vocal inflection. With enthusiasm, it means something like "Bo...
feetch feetch2 is Grudgingly or with obvious doubt, it means "I don't know; it sounds like just one more unnecessary and complicated thing". With a tone of resignation, it means, "Well, I'd rather keep it simple, but I suppose it has to be do...
fence is n. 1. A sequence of one or more distinguished ({out-of-band}) characters (or other data items), used to delimit a piece of data intended to be treated as a unit (the computer-science literature calls this a `sentinel'). The NUL (AS...
fence2 is in C is a fence. Hex FF is probably the most common fence character after NUL. See {zigamorph}. 2. [among users of optimizing compilers] Any technique, usually exploiting knowledge about the compiler, that blocks certain optimiza...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
glark is /glark/ vt. To figure something out from context. "The System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from context." Interestingly, the word was originally `glork'; the context was "This gubblick contain...
glark2 is the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic] from context" (David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in his "Metamagical Themas" column in the January 1981 `Scientific American'). It is conjectured that hackish usage mutated the ve...
glark3 is established jargon term. Compare {grok}, {zen}.
glass is [IBM] n. Synonym for {silicon}.
glass tty is /glas T-T-Y/ or /glas ti'tee/ n. A terminal that has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both lik...
glass tty2 is display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early `dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control). See {tube}, {tty}. See appendix A for an interesting true story...
glassfet is /glas'fet/ [by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for `Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor'] n. Syn. {firebottle}, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.
glitch is /glich/ [from German `glitschen' to slip, via Yiddish `glitshen', to slide or skid] 1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in electric service...
glitch2 is This is of grave concern because it usually crashes all the computers. In jargon, though, a hacker who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he or she intended to complete it might say, "Sorry, I just glitched". 2....
glitch3 is [Stanford] To scroll a display screen, esp. several lines at a time. {{WAITS}} terminals used to do this in order to avoid continuous scrolling, which is distracting to the eye. 4. obs. Same as {magic cookie}, sense 2. All the...
glitch4 is technical meaning the term has to hardware people. If the inputs of a circuit change, and the outputs change to some {random} value for some very brief time before they settle down to the correct value, then that is called a glit...
glitch5 is depending on what the circuit is connected to. This term is techspeak, found in electronics texts.
glob is /glob/, *not* /glohb/ [UNIX] vt.,n. To expand special characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called `globbing'). The UNIX conventions for filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive tha...
glob2 is English, especially in email or news on technical topics. Those commonly encountered include the following * wildcard for any string (see also {UN*X}) ? wildcard for any character (generally read this way only...
glob3 is a word) [] delimits a wildcard matching any of the enclosed characters {} alternation of comma-separated alternatives; thus, `foo{baz,qux}' would be read as `foobaz' or `fooqux' Some examples "He said hi...
glob4 is "I don't read talk.politics.*" (any of the talk.politics subgroups on {USENET}). Other examples are given under the entry for {X}. Compare {regexp}. Historical note The jargon usage derives from `glob', the name of a subprogram th...
glob5 is versions of the UNIX shell.
glork is /glork/ 1. interj. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of 2 hours of editing and finds that the system has just crashed. 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See {foo}. ...
glork2 is used reflexively. "My program just glorked itself." See also {glark}.
glue is n. Generic term for any interface logic or protocol that connects two component blocks. For example, {Blue Glue} is IBM's SNA protocol, and hardware designers call anything used to connect large VLSI's or circuit blocks `glue logic'.
gnarly is /nar'lee/ adj. Both {obscure} and {hairy} in the sense of complex. "{Yow}! --- the tuned assembler implementation of BitBlt is really gnarly!" From a similar but less specific usage in surfer slang.
GNU is /gnoo/, *not* /noo/ 1. [acronym `GNU's Not UNIX!', see {{recursive acronym}}] A UNIX-workalike development effort of the Free Software Foundation headed by Richard Stallman (rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu). GNU EMACS and the GNU C compiler, two to...
GNU2 is very popular in hackerdom and elsewhere. The GNU project was designed partly to proselytize for RMS's position that information is community property and all software source should be shared. One of its slogans is "Help stamp out s...
GNU3 is controversial (because it implicitly denies any right of designers to own, assign, and sell the results of their labors), many hackers who disagree with RMS have nevertheless cooperated to produce large amounts of high-quality softwa...
GNU4 is Software Foundation's imprimatur. See {EMACS}, {copyleft}, {General Public Virus}. 2. Noted UNIX hacker John Gilmore (gnu@toad.com), founder of USENET's anarchic alt.* hierarchy.
GNUMACS is /gnoo'maks/ [contraction of `GNU EMACS'] Often-heard abbreviated name for the {GNU} project's flagship tool, {EMACS}. Used esp. in contrast with {GOSMACS}.
go flatline is [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] vi., also adjectival `flatlined'. 1. To die, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly. In hacker parlance, this is used of machines only, human death being c...
go flatline2 is employ jargon-jokes. 2. To go completely quiescent; said of machines undergoing controlled shutdown. "You can suffer file damage if you shut down UNIX but power off before the system has gone flatline." 3. Of a video tube, t...
go flatline3 is sees is a bright horizontal line bisecting the screen.
go root is [UNIX] vi. To temporarily enter {root mode} in order to perform a privileged operation. This use is deprecated in Australia, where v. `root' refers to animal sex.
go-faster stripes is [UK] Syn. {chrome}.
gobble is vt. To consume or to obtain. The phrase `gobble up' tends to imply `consume', while `gobble down' tends to imply `obtain'. "The output spy gobbles characters out of a {tty} output buffer." "I guess I'll gobble down a copy of the doc...
Godzillagram is /god-zil'*-gram/ n. [from Japan's national hero] 1. A network packet that in theory is a broadcast to every machine in the universe. The typical case of this is an IP datagram whose destination IP address is [255.255.255.255]....
Godzillagram2 is enough to attempt to implement this! 2. A network packet of maximum size. An IP Godzillagram has 65,536 octets.
golden is adj. [prob. from folklore's `golden egg'] When used to describe a magnetic medium (e.g., `golden disk', `golden tape'), describes one containing a tested, up-to-spec, ready-to-ship software version. Compare {platinum-iridium}.
golf-ball printer is n. The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The `golf ball' was a round object bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on four...
golf-ball printer2 is font by swapping in a different golf ball. This was the technology that enabled APL to use a non-EBCDIC, non-ASCII, and in fact completely non-standard character set. This put it 10 years ahead of its time --- where it ...
golf-ball printer3 is character displays gave way to programmable bit-mapped devices with the flexibility to support other character sets.
gonk is /gonk/ vt.,n. 1. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition. It is alleged that in German the term is (mythically) `gonken'; in Spanish the verb becomes `gonkar'. "You're gonking me. That story you ju...
gonk2 is for example, "Du gonkst mir" (You're pulling my leg). See also {gonkulator}. 2. [British] To grab some sleep at an odd time; compare {gronk out}.
gonkulator is /gon'kyoo-lay-tr/ [from the old "Hogan's Heroes" TV series] n. A pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no useful purpose. Usually used to describe one's least favorite piece of computer hardware. See {gonk}.
gonzo is /gon'zoh/ [from Hunter S. Thompson] adj. Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. used of collections of source code, source files, or individual functions. Has some of the connotations of {moby} and {hairy}, but with...
Good Thing is n.,adj. Often capitalized; always pronounced as if capitalized. 1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice "The Trailblazer's 19.2Kbaud PEP mode with on-the-fly Lempel-Ziv compression is a Good Thing for sites...
Good Thing2 is possibly have any ill side-effects and may save considerable grief later "Removing the self-modifying code from that shared library would be a Good Thing." 3. When said of software tools or libraries, as in "YACC is a Good Th...
Good Thing3 is drastically reduced a programmer's work load. Oppose {Bad Thing}.
gorilla arm is n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those {spiffy} touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't ...
gorilla arm2 is their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized; hence `gorilla arm'. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "...
gorilla arm3 is "How is this going to fly in *real* use?".
gorp is /gorp/ [CMU perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old Raisins and Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like {foo} and {bar}.
GOSMACS is /goz'maks/ [contraction of `Gosling EMACS'] n. The first {EMACS}-in-C implementation, predating but now largely eclipsed by {GNUMACS}. Originally freeware; a commercial version is now modestly popular as `UniPress EMACS'. The auth...
Gosperism is /gos'p*r-izm/ A hack, invention, or saying by arch-hacker R. William (Bill) Gosper. This notion merits its own term because there are so many of them. Many of the entries in {HAKMEM} are Gosperisms; see also {life}.
gotcha is n. A {misfeature} of a system, especially a programming language or environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it behaves in an unexpected way. For example, a classic gotcha in {C} is the fact that `if (a=b) {code;}' ...
gotcha2 is correct. It puts the value of `b' into `a' and then executes `code' if `a' is non-zero. What the programmer probably meant was `if (a==b) {code;}', which executes `code' if `a' and `b' are equal.
GPL is /G-P-L/ n. Abbrev. for `General Public License' in widespread use; see {copyleft}.
GPV is /G-P-V/ n. Abbrev. for {General Public Virus} in widespread use.
grault is /grawlt/ n. Yet another meta-syntactic variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the {GOSMACS} documentation. See {corge}.
gray goo is n. A hypothetical substance composed of {sagan}s of sub-micron-sized self-replicating robots programmed to make copies of themselves out of whatever is available. The image that goes with the term is one of the entire biosphere of...
gray goo2 is goo. This is the simplest of the {{nanotechnology}} disaster scenarios, easily refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental abundances. Compare {blue goo}.
Great Renaming is n. The {flag day} on which all of the non-local groups on the {USENET} had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme.
Great Runes is n. Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See also {runes}, {smash case}, {fold case}. Decades ago, back in the days when it was the sole supplier of long-distance hardcopy ...
Great Runes2 is Corporation was faced with a major design choice. To shorten code lengths and cut complexity in the printing mechanism, it had been decided that teletypes would use a monocase font, either ALL UPPER or all lower. The question...
Great Runes3 is conducted on readability under various conditions of bad ribbon, worn print hammers, etc. Lowercase won; it is less dense and has more distinctive letterforms, and is thus much easier to read both under ideal conditions and wh...
Great Runes4 is obscured. The results were filtered up through {management}. The chairman of Teletype killed the proposal because it failed one incredibly important criterion "It would be impossible to spell the name of the Deity correctly....
Great Runes5 is folklore has it) superstition triumphed over utility. Teletypes were the major input devices on most early computers, and terminal manufacturers looking for corners to cut naturally followed suit until well into the 1970s. T...
Great Runes6 is Runes for thirty years.
great-wall is [from SF fandom] vi.,n. A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style and shared. There is a common heuristic about the amount of food to order, expressed as "Get N - 1 entrees"; the val...
great-wall2 is the group, can be inferred from context (see {N}). See {{oriental food}}, {ravs}, {stir-fried random}.
Green Book is n. 1. One of the three standard PostScript references `PostScript Language Program Design', bylined `Adobe Systems' (Addison-Wesley, 1988; QA76.73.P67P66 ISBN; 0-201-14396-8); see also {Red Book}, {Blue Book}). 2. Informal name ...
Green Book2 is SmallTalk `Smalltalk-80 Bits of History, Words of Advice', by Glenn Krasner (Addison-Wesley, 1983; QA76.8.S635S58; ISBN 0-201-11669-3) (this, too, is associated with blue and red books). 3. The `X/Open Compatibility Guide'. ...
Green Book3 is environment that is a proper superset of POSIX/SVID; also includes descriptions of a standard utility toolkit, systems administrations features, and the like. This grimoire is taken with particular seriousness in Europe. See {...
Green Book4 is Operating Systems Interface standard has been dubbed "The Ugly Green Book". 5. Any of the 1992 standards which will be issued by the CCITT's tenth plenary assembly. Until now, these have changed color each review cycle (1984 w...
Green Book5 is is rumored that this convention is going to be dropped before 1992. These include, among other things, the X.400 email standard and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also {{book titles}}.
green bytes is n. 1. Meta-information embedded in a file, such as the length of the file or its name; as opposed to keeping such information in a separate description file or record. The term comes from an IBM user's group meeting (ca. 1962) ...
green bytes2 is debated and the diagram of the file on the blackboard had the `green bytes' drawn in green. 2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing format. "A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes describing th...
green bytes3 is {out-of-band}, {zigamorph}, {fence} (sense 1).
green card is n. [after the `IBM System/360 Reference Data' card] This is used for any summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not green. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of assembly language. "I'll g...
green card2 is addressing mode for that instruction." Some green cards are actually booklets. The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An anecdote from IBM refers to a scen...
green card3 is room at Yorktown in 1978. A luser overheard one of the programmers ask another "Do you have a green card?" The other grunted and passed the first a thick yellow booklet. At this point the luser turned a delicate shade of ol...
green card4 is return. See also {card}.
green lightning is [IBM] n. 1. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals while a new symbol set is being downloaded. This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as some genius within IBM suggested it would let th...
green lightning2 is That, it certainly does. Later microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were actually *programmed* to produce green lightning! 2. [proposed] Any bug perverted into an alleged feature by adroit rationalization or ...
green lightning3 is the 88000 architecture `compatibility logic', but I call it green lightning". See also {feature}.
green machine is n. A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the o...
Green's Theorem is [TMRC] prov. For any story, in any group of people there will be at least one person who has not heard the story. [The name of this theorem is a play on a fundamental theorem in calculus. --- ESR]
grep is /grep/ [from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p , where re stands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it, via {{UNIX}} `grep(1)'] vt. To rapidly scan a file or f...
grep2 is pattern. By extension, to look for something by pattern. "Grep the bulletin board for the system backup schedule, would you?" See also {vgrep}.
grind is vt. 1. [MIT and Berkeley] To format code, especially LISP code, by indenting lines so that it looks pretty. This usage was associated with the MacLISP community and is now rare; {prettyprint} was and is the generic term for such op...
grind2 is version of a document from the nroff, troff, TeX, or Scribe source. The BSD program `vgrind(1)' grinds code for printing on a Versatec bitmapped printer. 3. To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not necessarily) if performing ...
grind3 is Similar to {crunch} or {grovel}. Grinding has a connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a disk, network, etc. See also {hog}. 4. To make the whole system slow. "Troff really grinds a PDP-11." 5. `grin...
grind crank is n. A mythical accessory to a terminal. A crank on the side of a monitor, which when operated makes a zizzing noise and causes the computer to run faster. Usually one does not refer to a grind crank out loud, but merely makes t...
grind crank2 is {grind} and {wugga wugga}. Historical note At least one real machine actually had a grind crank --- the R1, a research machine built toward the end of the days of the great vacuum tube computers, in 1959. R1 (also known as `...
grind crank3 is as `The Rice University Computer' (TRUC)) had a single-step/free-run switch for use when debugging programs. Since single-stepping through a large program was rather tedious, there was also a crank with a cam and gear arrang...
grind crank4 is button. This allowed one to `crank' through a lot of code, then slow down to single-step for a bit when you got near the code of interest, poke at some registers using the console typewriter, and then keep on cranking.
gritch is /grich/ 1. n. A complaint (often caused by a {glitch}). 2. vi. To complain. Often verb-doubled "Gritch gritch". 3. A synonym for {glitch} (as verb or noun).
grok is /grok/, var. /grohk/ [from the novel `Stranger in a Strange Land', by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally `to drink' and metaphorically `to be one with'] vt. 1. To understand, usually in a global sense. Co...
grok2 is Contrast {zen}, similar supernal understanding as a single brief flash. See also {glark}. 2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding. "Almost all C compilers grok the `void' type these days."
gronk is /gronk/ [popularized by Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." but the word apparently predates that] vt. 1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More severe than `to {frob}'. 2. [TMRC] To cut, sever, smash, or similarl...
gronk2 is diskette drives. In particular, the microfloppies on a Commodore Amiga go "grink, gronk".
gronk out is vi. To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep. "I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow."
gronked is adj. 1. Broken. "The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the system down." 2. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired or (less commonly) sick. "I've been chasing that bug for 17 hours now and I am thoroughly gronked!"...
gronked2 is same as {gronk} used of hardware, but connotes depression or mental/emotional problems in people.
grovel is vi. 1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used transitively with `over' or `through'. "The file scavenger has been groveling through the file directories for 10 minutes now." Compare {grind} and {crunch}. Em...
grovel2 is examine minutely or in complete detail. "The compiler grovels over the entire source program before beginning to translate it." "I grovelled through all the documentation, but I still couldn't find the command I wanted."
grunge is /gruhnj/ n. 1. That which is grungy, or that which makes it so. 2. [Cambridge] Code which is inaccessible due to changes in other parts of the program. The preferred term in North America is {dead code}.
gubbish is /guhb'*sh/ [a portmanteau of `garbage' and `rubbish'?] n. Garbage; crap; nonsense. "What is all this gubbish?" The opposite portmanteau `rubbage' is also reported.
guiltware is /gilt'weir/ n. 1. A piece of {freeware} decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs...
gumby is /guhm'bee/ [from a class of Monty Python characters, poss. themselves named after the 1960s claymation character] n. An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in `gumby maneuver' or `pull a gumby'.
gun is [ITS from the `GUN' command] vt. To forcibly terminate a program or job (computer, not career). "Some idiot left a background process running soaking up half the cycles, so I gunned it." Compare {can}.
gunch is /guhnch/ [TMRC] vt. To push, prod, or poke at a device that has almost produced the desired result. Implies a threat to {mung}.
gurfle is /ger'fl/ interj. An expression of shocked disbelief. "He said we have to recode this thing in FORTRAN by next week. Gurfle!" Compare {weeble}.
guru is n. 1. [UNIX] An expert. Implies not only {wizard} skill but also a history of being a knowledge resource for others. Less often, used (with a qualifier) for other experts on other systems, as in `VMS guru'. See {source of all good b...
guru2 is UNIX. When the system crashes, a cryptic message "GURU MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY" appears, indicating what the problem was. An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Generally a {guru} event must be followed by a ...
guru3 is A method of `marking' common words, i.e., calling attention to the fact that they are being used in a nonstandard, ironic, or humorous way. Originated in the fannish catchphrase "Bheer is the One True Ghod!" from decades ago. H-inf...
guru4 is into the 1960s counterculture via underground comix, and into early hackerdom either from the counterculture or from SF fandom (the three overlapped heavily at the time). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature of...
guru5 is etc.); this is prob. patterning on the original Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but influenced by the fannish/counterculture h infix.
ha ha only serious is [from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, `Ha Ha Only Kidding'] A phrase (often seen abbreviated as HHOS) that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse. Applied especially to parodies, absurdities, and ironic...
ha ha only serious2 is to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths that are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. This lexicon contains many examples of ha-ha-only-serious in both form and content. Indeed, the entirety of h...
ha ha only serious3 is ha-ha-only-serious by hackers themselves; to take it either too lightly or too seriously marks a person as an outsider, a {wannabee}, or in {larval stage}. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen mast...
hack is 1. n. Originally, a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed. 3. vt. To bear emotionally or physically. "I can...
hack2 is something (typically a program). In an immediate sense "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In a general (time-extended) sense "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." More generally, "I hack `foo'" is roughly equivalent...
hack3 is "I hack solid-state physics." 5. vt. To pull a prank on. See sense 2 and {hacker} (sense 5). 6. vi. To interact with a computer in a playful and exploratory rather than goal-directed way. "Whatcha up to?" "Oh, just hacking." 7...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
IBM is /I-B-M/ Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-{infinite} number of even less complimentary expansions, including `International Business Ma...
IBM2 is illustrate the considerable antipathy most hackers have long felt toward the `industry leader' (see {fear and loathing}). What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't so much that they are underpowered and over...
IBM3 is but that the designs are incredibly archaic, {crufty}, and {elephantine} ... and you can't *fix* them --- source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found the...
IBM4 is family this may have begun to change --- but then, we thought that when the PC-RT came out, too. In the spirit of universal peace and brotherhood, this lexicon now includes a number of entries attributed to `IBM'; these derive from s...
IBM5 is circulated within IBM's own beleaguered hacker underground.
IBM discount is n. A price increase. Outside IBM, this derives from the common perception that IBM products are generally overpriced (see {clone}); inside, it is said to spring from a belief that large numbers of IBM employees living in an ar...
ice is [coined by USENETter Tom Maddox, popularized by William Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels acronym for `Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's novels, software that responds to intrusion by attempting to literal...
ice2 is program designed for cracking security on a system. Neither term is in serious use yet as of mid-1991, but many hackers find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in the future.
ifdef out is /if'def owt/ v. Syn. for {condition out}, specific to {C}.
ill-behaved is adj. 1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method that tends to blow up because of accumulated roundoff error or poor convergence properties. 2. Software that bypasses the defined {OS} interfaces to do t...
ill-behaved2 is itself, often in a way that depends on the hardware of the machine it is running on or which is nonportable or incompatible with other pieces of software. In the IBM PC/MS-DOS world, there is a folk theorem (nearly true) to th...
ill-behaved3 is and performance penalties in the OS interface) all interesting applications are ill-behaved. See also {bare metal}. Oppose {well-behaved}, compare {PC-ism}. See {mess-dos}.
IMHO is // [from SF fandom via USENET; acronym for `In My Humble Opinion'] "IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as mistyping something in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect errors --- and they look too Pascalish anyhow." Also se...
IMHO2 is Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion).
in the extreme is adj. A preferred superlative suffix for many hackish terms. See, for example, `obscure in the extreme' under {obscure}, and compare {highly}.
incantation is n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented t...
incantation2 is compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment, but if you {mutter} the right incantation they will be forced into text space."
include is vt. [USENET] 1. To duplicate a portion (or whole) of another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in a reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response. See the the discussion of inclusion styles under...
include2 is `#include <disclaimer.h>' has appeared in {sig block}s to refer to a notional `standard disclaimer file'.
include war is n. Excessive multi-leveled including within a discussion {thread}, a practice that tends to annoy readers. In a forum with high-traffic newsgroups, such as USENET, this can lead to {flame}s and the urge to start a {kill file}.
indent style is [C programmers] n. The rules one uses to indent code in a readable fashion; a subject of {holy wars}. There are four major C indent styles, described below; all have the aim of making it easier for the reader to visually track...
indent style2 is significant variable is the placement of `{' and `}' with respect to the statement(s) they enclose and the guard or controlling statement (`if', `else', `for', `while', or `do') on the block, if any. `K&R style' --- Named ...
indent style3 is examples in {K&R} are formatted this way. Also called `kernel style' because the UNIX kernel is written in it, and the `One True Brace Style' (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. The basic indent shown here is eight spaces (or o...
indent style4 is seen, but are much less common. if (cond) { <body> } `Allman style' --- Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who wrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called `BSD style'). Resembles n...
indent style5 is indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four is just as common (esp. in C++ code). if (cond) { <body> } `Whitesmiths style' --- popularized by the examples that came with Whitesmiths C, an earl...
indent style6 is level shown here is eight spaces, but four is occasionally seen. if (cond) { <body> } `GNU style' --- Used throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software Foundation code, and just about nowher...
indent style7 is level, with `{' and `}' halfway between the outer and inner indent levels. if (cond) { <body> } Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the most common, with about equal mind shares. ...
indent style8 is now much less common (the opening brace tends to get lost against the right paren of the guard part in an `if' or `while', which is a {Bad Thing}). Defenders of 1TBS argue that any putative gain in readability is less importa...
indent style9 is vertical space, which enables one to see more code on one's screen at once. Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of {holy wars}.
index is n. See {coefficient}.
infant mortality is n. It is common lore among hackers that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since power-up (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O d...
infant mortality2 is components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as `infant mortality' problems ...
infant mortality3 is syndrome'). See {bathtub curve}, {burn-in period}.
infinite is adj. Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very loosely as in "This program produces infinite garbage." "He is an infinite loser." The word most likely to follow `infinite', though, is {hair} (it has been pointed...
infinite2 is of infinite hair). These uses are abuses of the word's mathematical meaning. The term `semi-infinite', denoting an immoderately large amount of some resource, is also heard. "This compiler is taking a semi-infinite amount of ...
infinite loop is n. One that never terminates (that is, the machine {spin}s or {buzz}es forever; the usual symptom is {catatonia}). There is a standard joke that has been made about each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast machine "The Cr...
infinite loop2 is loop in under 2 seconds!"
infinity is n. 1. The largest value that can be represented in a particular type of variable (register, memory location, data type, whatever). 2. `minus infinity' The smallest such value, not necessarily or even usually the simple negation of...
infinity2 is arithmetic, infinity is 2^{N-1} - 1 but minus infinity is - (2^{N-1}), not -(2^{N-1} - 1). Note also that this is different from "time T equals minus infinity", which is closer to a mathematician's usage of infinity.
insanely great is adj. [Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD UNIX people via Bill Joy] Something so incredibly {elegant} that it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of {hacker}-natures.
INTERCAL is /in't*r-kal/ [said by the authors to stand for `Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym'] n. A computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyon in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer langua...
INTERCAL2 is written language, being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL Reference Manual will make the style of the language clear It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehen...
INTERCAL3 is one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is DO 1 <- #0$#256 any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the sim...
INTERCAL4 is look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct. INTERCAL has many other p...
INTERCAL5 is more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. The language has been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently enjoying an unprecedented le...
INTERCAL6 is alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the study and ... appreciation of the language on USENET.
interesting is adj. In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of `annoying', or `difficult', or both. Hackers relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out of the ancient Chinese curse "May you live in interest...
Internet address is n. 1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is a {sitename}, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including periods itself. Contrast with {bang path}; see also {netw...
Internet address2 is Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and PD software written since 1980 or so. See also {bang path}, {domainist}. 2. More loosely, any ...
Internet address3 is this includes {bang path} addresses and some internal corporate and government networks. Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed...
Internet address4 is com commercial organizations edu educational institutions gov U.S. government civilian sites mil U.S. military sites Note that most of the sites in the com and edu domains are in...
Internet address5 is the U.S. outside the functional domains su sites in the Soviet Union (see {kremvax}). uk sites in the United Kingdom Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally w...
Internet address6 is abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for academic sites and a co domain for commercial ones. Other top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways.
interrupt is 1. [techspeak] n. On a computer, an event that interrupts normal processing and temporarily diverts flow-of-control through an "interrupt handler" routine. See also {trap}. 2. interj. A request for attention from a hacker. Oft...
interrupt2 is seen Joe recently?" See {priority interrupt}. 3. Under MS-DOS, the term `interrupt' is nearly synonymous with `system call', because the OS and BIOS routines are both called using the INT instruction (see {{interrupt list, th...
interrupt3 is bypass the OS (going directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get reasonable performance.
interrupt list, the is [MS-DOS] n. The list of all known software interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM PCs and compatibles, maintained and made available for free redistribution by Ralf Brown (ralf@cs.cmu.edu). As of ear...
interrupts locked out is When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might well observe "She must have interrupts locked out". The synonym `interrupts disabled' is...
interrupts locked out2 is have one's interrupt mask bit set" or "interrupts masked out" is also heard. See also {spl}.
iron is 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 ...
Iron Age is n. In the history of computing, 1961--1971 --- the formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when {big iron} {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. These began with the delivery of the first PDP-1, coincided with the dominance of ...
Iron Age2 is introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also {Stone Age}; compare {elder days}.
iron box is [UNIX/Internet] n. A special environment set up to trap a {cracker} logging in over remote connections long enough to be traced. May include a modified {shell} restricting the hacker's movements in unobvious ways, and `bait' files...
iron box2 is on. See also {back door}, {firewall machine}, {Venus flytrap}, and Clifford Stoll's account in `The Cuckoo's Egg' of how he made and used one (see the Bibliography). Compare {padded cell}.
ironmonger is [IBM] n. Derogatory. A hardware specialist. Compare {sandbender}, {polygon pusher}.
ITS is /I-T-S/ n. 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential but highly idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab. Much AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to hav...
ITS2 is instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort. ITS pioneered many important innovations, including transparent file sharing between machines and terminal-independent I/O. After about 1982, most actual work was shifted to new...
ITS3 is essentially as a hobby and service to the hacker community. The shutdown of the lab's last ITS machine in May 1990 marked the end of an era and sent old-time hackers into mourning nationwide (see {high moby}). The Royal Institute of ...
ITS4 is `live' ITS site at its computer museum (right next to the only TOPS-10 system still on the Internet), so ITS is still alleged to hold the record for OS in longest continuous use (however, {{WAITS}} is a credible rival for this palm). ...
ITS5 is operating-system perfection worshiped by a bizarre, fervent retro-cult of old-time hackers and ex-users (see {troglodyte}, sense 2). ITS worshipers manage somehow to continue believing that an OS maintained by assembly-language hand...
ITS6 is 6-character filenames in one directory per account remains superior to today's state of commercial art (their venom against UNIX is particularly intense). See also {holy wars}, {Weenix}.
IWBNI is // [acronym] `It Would Be Nice If'. Compare {WIBNI}.
IYFEG is // [USENET] Abbreviation for `Insert Your Favorite Ethnic Group'. Used as a meta-name when telling racist jokes on the net to avoid offending anyone. See {JEDR}.*J. Random /J rand'm/ n. [generalized from {J. Random Hacker}] Arbitrar...
IYFEG2 is often prefixed to a noun to make a name out of it. It means roughly `some particular' or `any specific one'. "Would you let J. Random Loser marry your daughter?" The most common uses are `J. Random Hacker', `J. Random Loser', an...
IYFEG3 is be allowed to {gun} down other people?"), but it can be used simply as an elaborate version of {random} in any sense.
J. Random Hacker is [MIT] /J rand'm hak'r/ n. A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd. See {random}, {Suzie COBOL}. This may originally have been inspired or influenced by `J. Fred Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee...
jaggies is /jag'eez/ n. The `stairstep' effect observable when an edge (esp. a linear edge of very shallow or steep slope) is rendered on a pixel device (as opposed to a vector display).
JCL is /J-C-L/ n. 1. IBM's supremely {rude} Job Control Language. JCL is the script language used to control the execution of programs in IBM's batch systems. JCL has a very {fascist} syntax, and some versions will, for example, {barf} if tw...
JCL2 is programmers confronted with JCL simply copy a working file (or card deck), changing the file names. Someone who actually understands and generates unique JCL is regarded with the mixed respect one gives to someone who memorizes the ...
JCL3 is itself sometimes sing "Who's the breeder of the crud that mangles you and me? I-B-M, J-C-L, M-o-u-s-e" to the tune of the "Mickey Mouse Club" theme to express their opinion of the beast. 2. A comparative for any very {rude} softwar...
JCL4 is as bad as JCL." As with {COBOL}, JCL is often used as an archetype of ugliness even by those who haven't experienced it. See also {IBM}, {fear and loathing}.
JEDR is // n. Synonymous with {IYFEG}. At one time, people in the USENET newsgroup rec.humor.funny tended to use `JEDR' instead of {IYFEG} or `<ethnic>'; this stemmed from a public attempt to suppress the group once made by a loser with initi...
JEDR2 is joke posted there. (The practice was {retcon}ned by the expanding these initials as `Joke Ethnic/Denomination/Race'.) After much sound and fury JEDR faded away; this term appears to be doing likewise. JEDR's only permanent effect...
JEDR3 is `sensitivity' arguments for censorship so thoroughly that more recent attempts to raise them have met with immediate and near-universal rejection.
JFCL is /jif'kl/, /jaf'kl/, /j*-fi'kl/ vt., obs. (alt. `jfcl') To cancel or annul something. "Why don't you jfcl that out?" The fastest do-nothing instruction on older models of the PDP-10 happened to be JFCL, which stands for "Jump if Flag ...
JFCL2 is something useful, but is a very fast no-operation if no flag is specified. Geoff Goodfellow, one of the jargon-1 co-authors, has long had JFCL on the license plate of his BMW. Usage rare except among old-time PDP-10 hackers.
jiffy is n. 1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on the computer (see {tick}). Often one AC cycle time (1/60 second in the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently 1/100 sec has become common. "The swapper runs ...
jiffy2 is memory management routine is executed once for every 6 ticks of the clock, or about ten times a second. 2. Confusingly, the term is sometimes also used for a 1-millisecond {wall time} interval. 3. Indeterminate time from a few secon...
jiffy3 is certainly not now and possibly never. This is a bit contrary to the more widespread use of the word. Oppose {nano}. See also {Real Soon Now}.
job security is n. When some piece of code is written in a particularly {obscure} fashion, and no good reason (such as time or space optimization) can be discovered, it is often said that the programmer was attempting to increase his job secur...
job security2 is for maintenance). This sour joke seldom has to be said in full; if two hackers are looking over some code together and one points at a section and says "job security", the other one may just nod.
jock is n. 1. A programmer who is characterized by large and somewhat brute-force programs. See {brute force}. 2. When modified by another noun, describes a specialist in some particular computing area. The compounds `compiler jock' and `sy...
jock2 is examples of this.
joe code is /joh' kohd`/ n. 1. Code that is overly {tense} and unmaintainable. "{Perl} may be a handy program, but if you look at the source, it's complete joe code." 2. Badly written, possibly buggy code. Correspondents wishing to remain ...
joe code2 is the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed that usage has drifted slightly; the original sobriquet `Joe code' was intended in sense 1.
JR[LN] is /J-R-L/, /J-R-N/ n. The names JRL and JRN were sometimes used as example names when discussing a kind of user ID used under {{TOPS-10}}; they were understood to be the initials of (fictitious) programmers named `J. Random Loser' and ...
JR[LN]2 is example, if one said "To log in, type log one comma jay are en" (that is, "log 1,JRN"), the listener would have understood that he should use his own computer ID in place of `JRN'.
JRST is /jerst/ [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] v.,obs. To suddenly change subjects, with no intention of returning to the previous topic. Usage rather rare except among PDP-10 diehards, and considered silly. See also {AOS}.
juggling eggs is vi. Keeping a lot of {state} in your head while modifying a program. "Don't bother me now, I'm juggling eggs", means that an interrupt is likely to result in the program's being scrambled. In the classic first-contact SF nov...
juggling eggs2 is and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes a very difficult task by saying "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity." That is a very hackish use of language. See also {hack mode}.
jump off into never-never land is [from J. M. Barrie's `Peter Pan'] v. Same as {branch to Fishkill}, but more common in technical cultures associated with non-IBM computers that use the term `jump' rather than `branch'. Compare {hyperspace}.*...
jump off into never-never land2 is used both as a spoken word and a written suffix (like {meg} and {gig} for megabyte and gigabyte). See {{quantifiers}}.
K&R is [Kernighan and Ritchie] n. Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie's book `The C Programming Language', esp. the classic and influential first edition (Prentice-Hall 1978; ISBN 0-113-110163-3). Syn. {White Book}, {Old Testament}. See also ...
kahuna is /k*-hoo'nuh/ [IBM from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] n. Synonym for {wizard}, {guru}.
kamikaze packet is n. The `official' jargon for what is more commonly called a {Christmas tree packet}. RFC-1025, `TCP and IP Bake Off' says 10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze" packet (AKA nastygram, christmas tree...
kamikaze packet2 is is, correctly handle a segment with the maximum combination of features at once (e.g., a SYN URG PUSH FIN segment with options and data). See also {Chernobyl packet}.
kangaroo code is n. Syn. {spaghetti code}.
ken is /ken/ n. 1. [UNIX] Ken Thompson, principal inventor of UNIX. In the early days he used to hand-cut distribution tapes, often with a note that read "Love, ken". Old-timers still use his first name (sometimes uncapitalized, because it's...
ken2 is third-person reference; it is widely understood (on USENET, in particular) that without a last name `Ken' refers only to Ken Thompson. Similarly, Dennis without last name means Dennis Ritchie (and he is often known as dmr). See als...
ken3 is This was originated by the Software Support group at Symbolics because the two greatest flamers in the user community were both named Ken.
kgbvax is /K-G-B'vaks/ n. See {kremvax}.
kill file is [USENET] n. (alt. `KILL file') Per-user file(s) used by some {USENET} reading programs (originally Larry Wall's `rn(1)') to discard summarily (without presenting for reading) articles matching some particularly uninteresting (or u...
kill file2 is other header lines. Thus to add a person (or subject) to one's kill file is to arrange for that person to be ignored by one's newsreader in future. By extension, it may be used for a decision to ignore the person or subject in ...
killer micro is [popularized by Eugene Brooks] n. A microprocessor-based machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or supercomputer performance turf. Often heard in "No one will survive the attack of the killer micros!", the battle cry of th...
killer micro2 is architectures. The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is doubtless reinforced by the movie title "Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes" (one of the {canonical} examples of so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). ...
killer micro3 is micros have gone on the offensive not just individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively parallel computers).
killer poke is n. A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid values (see {poke}) in a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks on {bitty box}es without hardware memory manag...
killer poke2 is that can overload and trash analog electronics in the monitor. See also {HCF}.
kilo- is [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.
KIPS is /kips/ [acronym, by analogy with {MIPS} using {K}] n. Thousands (*not* 1024s) of Instructions Per Second. Usage rare.
KISS Principle is /kis' prin'si-pl/ n. "Keep It Simple, Stupid". A maxim often invoked when discussing design to fend off {creeping featurism} and control development complexity. Possibly related to the {marketroid} maxim on sales presentati...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
like kicking dead whales down the beach2 is kicking dead whales down the beach." See also {fear and loathing}
like nailing jelly to a tree is adj. Used to describe a task thought to be impossible, esp. one in which the difficulty arises from poor specification or inherent slipperiness in the problem domain. "Trying to display the `prettiest' arrangeme...
like nailing jelly to a tree2 is graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because nobody's sure what `prettiest' means algorithmically."
line eater, the is [USENET] n. 1. A bug in some now-obsolete versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ bytes of the article text. The bug was triggered by having the text of the article start with a space or tab. This bu...
line eater, the2 is creature called the `line eater', and postings often included a dummy line of `line eater food'. Ironically, line eater `food' not beginning with a space or tab wasn't actually eaten, since the bug was avoided; but if ther...
line eater, the3 is line eater would eat the food *and* the beginning of the text it was supposed to be protecting. The practice of `sacrificing to the line eater' continued for some time after the bug had been {nailed to the wall}, and is ...
line eater, the4 is is still (in mid-1991) occasionally reported to be lurking in some mail-to-netnews gateways. 2. See {NSA line eater}.
line starve is [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this). On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. "To print `X squared', you just output `X', ...
line starve2 is starve causes the `2' to appear on the line above the `X', and the line feed gets back to the original line.) 2. n. A character (or character sequence) that causes a terminal to perform this action. Unlike `line feed', `line ...
line starve3 is terminology. Even among hackers it is considered a bit silly. 3. [proposed] A sequence such as \c (used in System V echo, as well as nroff/troff) that suppresses a {newline} or other character(s) that would normally be emitte...
link farm is [UNIX] n. A directory tree that contains many links to files in a master directory tree of files. Link farms save space when (for example) one is maintaining several nearly identical copies of the same source tree, e.g., when the...
link farm2 is object files. "Let's freeze the source and then rebuild the FROBOZZ-3 and FROBOZZ-4 link farms." Link farms may also be used to get around restrictions on the number of `-I' (include-file directory) arguments on older C prepr...
link-dead is [MUD] adj. Said of a {MUD} character who has frozen in place because of a dropped Internet connection.
lint is [from UNIX's `lint(1)', named perhaps for the bits of fluff it picks from programs] 1. vt. To examine a program closely for style, language usage, and portability problems, esp. if in C, esp. if via use of automated analysis tools, mos...
lint2 is used. This term used to be restricted to use of `lint(1)' itself, but (judging by references on USENET) it has become a shorthand for {desk check} at some non-UNIX shops, even in languages other than C. Also as v. {delint}. 2. n...
lint3 is draft has too much lint".
lion food is [IBM] n. Middle management or HQ staff (by extension, administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agreed to meet after 2 months. When the...
lion food2 is overweight. The thin one says "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me --- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The ...
lion food3 is office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!"Lions Book n. `Source Code and Commentary on UNIX level 6', by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire source listing of the UNIX Version 6 kernel...
lion food4 is discussing the algorithms. These were circulated internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 1976--77, and were for years after the *only* detailed kernel documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs. Becau...
lion food5 is secret status on the kernel, the Lions book was never formally published and was only supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees. In spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the early UNIX ...
LISP is [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from `Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] n. The name of AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and ...
LISP2 is vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other {HLL} still in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants a...
LISP3 is LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL among hackers until the early 1980s, LISP now shares the throne with {C}. See {languages of choice}. All LISP functions and programs are expressions that return values; this, together with the high memory...
LISP4 is Perlis's famous quip (itself a take on an Oscar Wilde quote) that "LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing". One significant application for LISP has been as a proof by example that most newer languages...
LISP5 is unnecessary {crock}s. When the {Right Thing} has already been done once, there is no justification for {bogosity} in newer languages.
literature, the is n. Computer-science journals and other publications, vaguely gestured at to answer a question that the speaker believes is {trivial}. Thus, one might answer an annoying question by saying "It's in the literature." Oppose ...
little-endian is adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, bytes at lower addresses have lower significance (the word is stored `little-end-first'). The PDP-11 and VAX families of computers and Intel ...
little-endian2 is and networking hardware are little-endian. See {big-endian}, {middle-endian}, {NUXI problem}. The term is sometimes used to describe the ordering of units other than bytes; most often these are bits within a byte.
live data is n. 1. Data that is written to be interpreted and takes over program flow when triggered by some un-obvious operation, such as viewing it. One use of such hacks is to break security. For example, some smart terminals have command...
live data2 is program keys; this can be used to write live data that, when listed to the terminal, infects it with a security-breaking {virus} that is triggered the next time a hapless user strikes that key. For another, there are some well...
live data3 is send arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed. 2. In C code, data that includes pointers to function {hook}s (executable code). 3. An object, such as a {trampoline}, that is constructed on the fly by ...
live data4 is code. 4. Actual real-world data, as opposed to `test data'. For example, "I think I have the record deletion module finished." "Have you tried it out on live data?" It usually carries the connotation that live data is more frag...
live data5 is things will happen. So a possible alternate response to the above claim might be "Well, make sure it works perfectly before we throw live data at it." The implication here is that record deletion is something pretty significant...
live data6 is running amok on live data would cause great harm and probably require restoring from backups.
Live Free Or Die! is imp. 1. The state motto of New Hampshire, which appears on that state's automobile license plates. 2. A slogan associated with UNIX in the romantic days when UNIX aficionados saw themselves as a tiny, beleaguered undergro...
Live Free Or Die!2 is industry. The "free" referred specifically to freedom from the {fascist} design philosophies and crufty misfeatures common on commercial operating systems. Armando Stettner, one of the early UNIX developers, used to giv...
Live Free Or Die!3 is under a large UNIX, all in New Hampshire colors of green and white. These are now valued collector's items.
livelock is /liv'lok/ n. A situation in which some critical stage of a task is unable to finish because its clients perpetually create more work for it to do after they have been serviced but before it can clear its queue. Differs from {deadl...
livelock2 is waiting for anything, but has a virtually infinite amount of work to do and can never catch up.
liveware is /liv'weir/ n. 1. Synonym for {wetware}. Less common. 2. [Cambridge] Vermin. "Waiter, there's some liveware in my salad..."
lobotomy is n. 1. What a hacker subjected to formal management training is said to have undergone. At IBM and elsewhere this term is used by both hackers and low-level management; the latter doubtless intend it as a joke. 2. The act of remov...
lobotomy2 is order to replace or upgrade it. Some very cheap {clone} systems are sold in `lobotomized' form --- everything but the brain.
locked and loaded is [from military slang for an M-16 rifle with magazine inserted and prepared for firing] adj. Said of a removable disk volume properly prepared for use --- that is, locked into the drive and with the heads loaded. Ironicall...
locked and loaded2 is the power is up, this description is never used of {{Winchester}} drives (which are named after a rifle).
locked up is adj. Syn. for {hung}, {wedged}.
logic bomb is n. Code surreptitiously inserted in an application or OS that causes it to perform some destructive or security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are met. Compare {back door}.
logical is [from the technical term `logical device', wherein a physical device is referred to by an arbitrary `logical' name] adj. Having the role of. If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were rep...
logical2 is known as the `logical' Les Earnest. (This does not imply any judgment on the replacement.) Compare {virtual}. At Stanford, `logical' compass directions denote a coordinate system in which `logical north' is toward San Francisco,...
logical3 is even though logical north varies between physical (true) north near San Francisco and physical west near San Jose. (The best rule of thumb here is that, by definition, El Camino Real always runs logical north-and-south.) In givi...
logical4 is Tarasco restaurant, get onto {El Camino Bignum} going logical north." Using the word `logical' helps to prevent the recipient from worrying about that the fact that the sun is setting almost directly in front of him. The concept...
logical5 is which are almost, but not quite, consistently labeled with logical rather than physical directions. A similar situation exists at MIT. Route 128 (famous for the electronics industry that has grown up along it) is a 3-quarters cir...
logical6 is miles, terminating near the coastline at each end. It would be most precise to describe the two directions along this highway as `clockwise' and `counterclockwise', but the road signs all say "north" and "south", respectively. ...
logical7 is `logical north' and `logical south', to indicate that they are conventional directions not corresponding to the usual denotation for those words. (If you went logical south along the entire length of route 128, you would start out...
logical8 is and finish headed due east!)
loop through is vt. To process each element of a list of things. "Hold on, I've got to loop through my paper mail." Derives from the computer-language notion of an iterative loop; compare `cdr down' (under {cdr}), which is less common among C...
loop through2 is say `IRP over' after an obscure pseudo-op in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler.
lord high fixer is [primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's `lord high executioner'] n. The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system. See {wizard}.
lose is [MIT] vi. 1. To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional condition or fails to work in the expected manner. 2. To be exceptionally unesthetic or crocky. 3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to...
lose 2 is 4. n. Refers to something that is {losing}, especially in the phrases "That's a lose!" and "What a lose!"
lose lose is interj. A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose, lose."
loser is n. An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person. Someone who habitually loses. (Even winners can lose occasionally.) Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows not. Emphatic forms are `real loser', `total l...
loser2 is loser', which would be a contradiction in terms). See {luser}.
losing is adj. Said of anything that is or causes a {lose} or {lossage}.
loss is n. Something (not a person) that loses; a situation in which something is losing. Emphatic forms include `moby loss', and `total loss', `complete loss'. Common interjections are "What a loss!" and "What a moby loss!" Note that `mob...
loss2 is not used; applied to an abstract noun, moby is simply a magnifier, whereas when applied to a person it implies substance and has positive connotations. Compare {lossage}.
lossage is /los'*j/ n. The result of a bug or malfunction. This is a mass or collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What lossage!" are nearly synonymous. The former is slightly more particular to the speaker's present circumstances; the latt...
lossage2 is speaker is currently a victim. Thus (for example) a temporary hardware failure is a loss, but bugs in an important tool (like a compiler) are serious lossage.
lost in the noise is adj. Syn. {lost in the underflow}. This term is from signal processing, where signals of very small amplitude cannot be separated from low-intensity noise in the system. Though popular among hackers, it is not confined t...
lost in the noise2 is astronomers, and statisticians all use it.
lost in the underflow is adj. Too small to be worth considering; more specifically, small beyond the limits of accuracy or measurement. This is a reference to `floating underflow', a condition that can occur when a floating-point arithmetic p...
lost in the underflow2 is than its limit of magnitude. It is also a pun on `undertow' (a kind of fast, cold current that sometimes runs just offshore and can be dangerous to swimmers). "Well, sure, photon pressure from the stadium lights alte...
lost in the underflow3 is effect gets lost in the underflow." See also {overflow bit}.
lots of MIPS but no I/O is adj. Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively. Technically it describes a machine that has lots of processing power but is bottlenecked on in...
lots of MIPS but no I/O2 is RS/6000, is a notorious recent example).
low-bandwidth is [from communication theory] adj. Used to indicate a talk that, although not {content-free}, was not terribly informative. "That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you expect for an audience of {suit}s!" Compare {zero-con...
LPT is /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ [MIT, via DEC] n. Line printer, of course. Rare under UNIX, commoner in hackers with MS-DOS or CP/M background. The printer device is called `LPT' on those systems that, like ITS, were strongly infl...
lunatic fringe is [IBM] n. Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of software.
lurker is n. One of the `silent majority' in a electronic forum; one who posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is casually used reflexively "Oh, I'm just l...
lurker2 is hypothetical audience for the group's {flamage}-emitting regulars.
luser is /loo'zr/ n. A {user}; esp. one who is also a {loser}. ({luser} and {loser} are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the...
luser2 is status information, including how many people were already using the computer; it might print "14 users", for example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a grea...
luser3 is particularly want to be called losers to their faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the computer ...
luser4 is or "losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise "lusers", and it stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported `luser' as a request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a museum piece; the usage lives ...
luser5 is seen in program comments.*M [SI] pref. (on units) suff. (on numbers) See {{quantifiers}}.
macdink is /mak'dink/ [from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such behavior] vt. To make many incremental and unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program or file. Often the subject of the macdinking would be better off without the...
macdink2 is was still macdinking the slides for his presentation." See also {fritterware}.
machinable is adj. Machine-readable. Having the {softcopy} nature.
machoflops is /mach'oh-flops/ [pun on `megaflops', a coinage for `millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second'] n. Refers to artificially inflated performance figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications are lucky to...
machoflops2 is mileage may vary}, {benchmark}.
Macintoy is /mak'in-toy/ n. The Apple Macintosh, considered as a {toy}. Less pejorative than {Macintrash}.
Macintrash is /mak'in-trash`/ n. The Apple Macintosh, as described by a hacker who doesn't appreciate being kept away from the *real computer* by the interface. The term {maggotbox} has been reported in regular use in the Research Triangle ar...
Macintrash2 is See also {beige toaster}, {WIMP environment}, {drool-proof paper}, {user-friendly}.
macro is /mak'roh/ [techspeak] n. A name (possibly followed by a formal {arg} list) that is equated to a text or symbolic expression to which it is to be expanded (possibly with the substitution of actual arguments) by a macro expander. This ...
macro2 is dictionary; what those won't tell you is how the hackish connotations of the term have changed over time. The term `macro' originated in early assemblers, which encouraged the use of macros as a structuring and information-hiding d...
macro3 is assemblers became ubiquitous, and sometimes quite as powerful and expensive as {HLL}s, only to fall from favor as improving compiler technology marginalized assembler programming (see {languages of choice}). Nowadays the term is m...
macro4 is preprocessor, LISP, or one of several special-purpose languages built around a macro-expansion facility (such as TeX or UNIX's [nt]roff suite). Indeed, the meaning has drifted enough that the collective `macros' is now sometimes us...
macro5 is application control language (whether or not the language is actually translated by text expansion), and for macro-like entities such as the `keyboard macros' supported in some text editors (and PC TSR or Macintosh INIT/CDEV keyboard...
macro- is pref. Large. Opposite of {micro-}. In the mainstream and among other technical cultures (for example, medical people) this competes with the prefix {mega-}, but hackers tend to restrict the latter to quantification.
macrology is /mak-rol'*-jee/ n. 1. Set of usually complex or crufty macros, e.g., as part of a large system written in {LISP}, {TECO}, or (less commonly) assembler. 2. The art and science involved in comprehending a macrology in sense 1. Som...
macrology2 is not unlike archeology, ecology, or {theology}, hence the sound-alike construction. See also {boxology}.
macrotape is /ma'kroh-tayp/ n. An industry-standard reel of tape, as opposed to a {microtape}.
maggotbox is /mag'*t-boks/ n. See {Macintrash}. This is even more derogatory.
magic is adj. 1. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain; compare {automagically} and (Arthur C.) Clarke's Third Law: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." "TTY echoing is controlled by a large numb...
magic2 is computes the parity of an 8-bit byte in three instructions." 2. Characteristic of something that works although no one really understands why (this is especially called {black magic}). 3. [Stanford] A feature not generally public...
magic3 is impossible, or a feature formerly in that category but now unveiled. Compare {black magic}, {wizardly}, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}. For more about hackish `magic', see appendix A.
magic cookie is [UNIX] n. 1. Something passed between routines or programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a capability ticket or opaque identifier. Especially used of small data objects that contain data encoded in a str...
magic cookie2 is E.g., on non-UNIX OSes with a non-byte-stream model of files, the result of `ftell(3)' may be a magic cookie rather than a byte offset; it can be passed to `fseek(3)', but not operated on in any meaningful way. The phrase ...
magic cookie3 is a result whose contents are not defined but which can be passed back to the same or some other program later. 2. An in-band code for changing graphic rendition (e.g., inverse video or underlining) or performing other contro...
magic cookie4 is leave a blank on the screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a {glitch}. See also {cookie}.
magic number is [UNIX/C] n. 1. In source code, some non-obvious constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line ({hardcoded}), rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a commente...
magic number2 is are bad style. 2. A number that encodes critical information used in an algorithm in some opaque way. The classic examples of these are the numbers used in hash or CRC functions, or the coefficients in a linear congruentia...
magic number3 is sense actually predates and was ancestral to the more common sense 1. 3. Special data located at the beginning of a binary data file to indicate its type to a utility. Under UNIX, the system and various applications program...
magic number4 is types of executable file by looking for a magic number. Once upon a time, these magic numbers were PDP-11 branch instructions that skipped over header data to the start of executable code; the 0407, for example, was octal for...
magic number5 is {wizard} knows the spells to create magic numbers. How do you choose a fresh magic number of your own? Simple --- you pick one at random. See? It's magic!
magic smoke is n. A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function (also called `blue smoke'; this is similar to the archaic `phlogiston' hypothesis about combustion). Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a c...
magic smoke2 is out, so it doesn't work any more. See {smoke test}, {let the smoke out}. USENETter Jay Maynard tells the following story: "Once, while hacking on a dedicated Z80 system, I was testing code by blowing EPROMs and plugging them...
magic smoke3 is One time, I plugged one in backwards. I only discovered that *after* I realized that Intel didn't put power-on lights under the quartz windows on the tops of their EPROMs --- the die was glowing white-hot. Amazingly, the EPRO...
magic smoke4 is full of zeros, then erased it again. For all I know, it's still in service. Of course, this is because the magic smoke didn't get let out." Compare the original phrasing of {Murphy's Law}.
main loop is n. Software tools are often written to perform some actions repeatedly on whatever input is handed to them, terminating when there is no more input or they are explicitly told to go away. In such programs, the loop that gets and p...
mainframe is n. This term originally referred 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 tr...
mainframe2 is as `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating system retrofi...
mainframe3 is built by IBM, Unisys, and the other great {dinosaur}s surviving from computing's {Stone Age}. It is common wisdom among hackers that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for {n...
mainframe4 is having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. As of 1991, corporate America hasn't quite figured this out yet, though the wave of failures, takeovers, and mergers among tradi...
mainframe5 is the wind (see {dinosaurs mating}).
management is n. 1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see also {suit}). Spoken derisively, as in "*Management* decided that ...". 2. Mythically, ...
management2 is world's minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed `The Mgt'; this derives from the `Illuminatus' novels (see the Bibliography).
mandelbug is /mon'del-buhg/ [from the Mandelbrot set] n. A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a {Bohr bug}, ...
manged is /monjd/ [probably from the French `manger' or Italian `mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English n. `mange', `mangy'] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair. "The disk was manged after the e...
mangle is vt. Used similarly to {mung} or {scribble}, but more violent in its connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally trashed.
mangler is [DEC] n. A manager. Compare {mango}; see also {management}. Note that {system mangler} is somewhat different in connotation.
mango is /mang'go/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A manager. Compare {mangler}. See also {devo} and {doco}.
marbles is [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] pl.n. The minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to determine if the machine has enough marbles to come u...
marbles2 is rebuild from backups, or if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to compile `Hello World'."
marginal is adj. 1. Extremely small. "A marginal increase in {core} can decrease {GC} time drastically." In everyday terms, this means that it is a lot easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of the junk while you...
marginal2 is merit. "This proposed new feature seems rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small probability of {win}ning. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."
Marginal Hacks is n. Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which the Stanford AI Lab was moved near the beginning of the 1980s (from the {D. C. Power Lab}).
marginally is adv. Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place." See {epsilon}.
marketroid is /mar'k*-troyd/ alt. `marketing slime', `marketing droid', `marketeer' n. A member of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users that the next version of a product will have features that are not actually sche...
marketroid2 is to implement, and/or are in violation of the laws of physics; and/or one who describes existing features (and misfeatures) in ebullient, buzzword-laden adspeak. Derogatory. Compare {droid}.* martian: n. A packet sent on a TC...
marketroid3 is test loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back at you labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth. "The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a ...
massage: vt. Vague term used to describe `smooth' transformations of is a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain than {munch} or {crunch}. "He wrote a program that massages X bitm...
math-out: [poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)] n. A is paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actually {conte...
Matrix: [FidoNet] n. 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call is {FidoNet}. 2. Fanciful term for a {cyberspace} expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see {network, the}). Some people refer to the totality of present net...
Mbogo, Dr. Fred: /*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ [Stanford] n. The is archetypal man you don't want to see about a problem, esp. an incompetent professional; a shyster. "Do you know a good eye doctor?" "Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and Professional Dr...
Mbogo, Dr. Fred: /*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ [Stanford] n. The2 is between {bogus} and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who was Gomez Addams' physician on the old "Addams Family" TV show. See also {fred}.
meatware is n. Synonym for {wetware}. Less common.
meeces is /mees'*z/ [TMRC] n. Occasional furry visitors who are not {urchin}s. [That is, mice. This may no longer be in live use; it clearly derives from the refrain of the early-1960s cartoon character Mr. Jinx: "I hate meeces to *pieces*!" ...
meg is /meg/ n. See {{quantifiers}}.
mega- is /me'g*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.
megapenny is /meg'*-pen`ee/ n. $10,000 (1 cent * 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in comparing computer cost and performance figures.
MEGO is /me'goh/ or /mee'goh/ [`My Eyes Glaze Over', often `Mine Eyes Glazeth (sic) Over', attributed to the futurologist Herman Kahn] Also `MEGO factor'. 1. n. A {handwave} intended to confuse the listener and hopefully induce agreement beca...
MEGO2 is not understanding what is going on. MEGO is usually directed at senior management by engineers and contains a high proportion of {TLA}s. 2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics. 3. Among non-hackers this term often refers ...
MEGO3 is glaze, but to the eye-glazing reaction itself, which may be triggered by the mere threat of technical detail as effectively as by an actual excess of it.
meltdown, network is n. See {network meltdown}.
meme is /meem/ [coined on analogy with `gene' by Richard Dawkins] n. An idea considered as a {replicator}, esp. with the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them much as viruses do. Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex'...
meme2 is memes that form an organized belief system, such as a religion. This lexicon is an (epidemiological) vector of the `hacker subculture' meme complex; each entry might be considered a meme. However, `meme' is often misused to mean `...
meme3 is acceptance of the idea that in humans (and presumably other tool- and language-using sophonts) cultural evolution by selection of adaptive ideas has superseded biological evolution by selection of hereditary traits. Hackers find this...
meme plague is n. The spread of a successful but pernicious {meme}, esp. one that parasitizes the victims into giving their all to propagate it. Astrology, BASIC, and the other guy's religion are often considered to be examples. This usage i...
meme plague2 is `joiner' ideologies like Naziism or various forms of millennarian Christianity have exhibited plague-like cycles of exponential growth followed by collapses to small reservoir populations.
memetics is /me-met'iks/ [from {meme}] The study of memes. As of mid-1991, this is still an extremely informal and speculative endeavor, though the first steps towards at least statistical rigor have been made by H. Keith Henson and others. ...
memetics2 is among hackers, who like to see themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes live and replicate.
memory leak is n. An error in a program's dynamic-store allocation logic that causes it to fail to reclaim discarded memory, leading to eventual collapse due to memory exhaustion. Also (esp. at CMU) called {core leak}. See {aliasing bug}, {f...
memory leak2 is {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}, {leaky heap}, {leak}.
menuitis is /men`yoo-i:'tis/ n. Notional disease suffered by software with an obsessively simple-minded menu interface and no escape. Hackers find this intensely irritating and much prefer the flexibility of command-line or language-style inte...
menuitis2 is macros or a special-purpose language in which one can encode useful hacks. See {user-obsequious}, {drool-proof paper}, {WIMP environment}, {for the rest of us}.
mess-dos is /mes-dos/ n. Derisory term for MS-DOS. Often followed by the ritual banishing "Just say No!" See {{MS-DOS}}. Most hackers (even many MS-DOS hackers) loathe MS-DOS for its single-tasking nature, its limits on application size, it...
mess-dos2 is IBMness (see {fear and loathing}). Also `mess-loss', `messy-dos', `mess-dog', `mess-dross', `mush-dos', and various combinations thereof. In Ireland and the U.K. it is even sometimes called `Domestos' after a brand of toilet c...
meta is /me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ [from analytic philosophy] adj.,pref. One level of description up. A meta-syntactic variable is a variable in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to descri...
meta2 is briefly, but much hacker humor turns on deliberate confusion between meta-levels. See {{Humor, Hacker}}.
meta bit is n. The top bit of an 8-bit character, which is on in character values 128--255. Also called {high bit}, {alt bit}, or {hobbit}. Some terminals and consoles (see {space-cadet keyboard}) have a META shift key. Others (including, ...
meta bit2 is machines) have an ALT key. See also {bucky bits}.
MFTL is /M-F-T-L/ [acronym: `My Favorite Toy Language'] 1. adj. Describes a talk on a programming language design that is heavy on the syntax (with lots of BNF), sometimes even talks about semantics (e.g., type systems), but rarely, if ever, h...
MFTL2 is broadly applied to talks --- even when the topic is not a programming language --- in which the subject matter is gone into in unnecessary and meticulous detail at the sacrifice of any conceptual content. "Well, it was a typical MFTL...
MFTL3 is which the developers are passionate (often to the point of prosyletic zeal) but no one else cares about. Applied to the language by those outside the originating group. "He cornered me about type resolution in his MFTL." The fir...
MFTL4 is MFTL is usually to write a compiler for it, then bootstrap the design away from contamination by lesser languages by writing a compiler for it in itself. Thus, the standard put-down question at an MFTL talk is "Has it been used for...
MFTL5 is other hand, a language that *cannot* be used to write its own compiler is beneath contempt...
mickey is n. The resolution unit of mouse movement. It has been suggested that the `disney' will become a benchmark unit for animation graphics performance.
mickey mouse program is n. North American equivalent of a {noddy} (that is, trivial) program. Doesn't necessarily have the belittling connotations of mainstream slang "Oh, that's just mickey mouse stuff!"; sometimes trivial programs can be ve...
micro- is pref. 1. Very small; this is the root of its use as a quantifier prefix. 2. A quantifier prefix, calling for multiplication by 10^{-6} (see {{quantifiers}}). Neither of these uses is peculiar to hackers, but hackers tend to fling ...
micro-2 is countenanced in standard English. It is recorded, for example, that one CS professor used to characterize the standard length of his lectures as a microcentury --- that is, about 52.6 minutes (see also {attoparsec}, {nanoacre}, a...
micro-3 is or human-scale --- that is, capable of being maintained or comprehended or manipulated by one human being. This sense is generalized from `microcomputer', and is esp. used in contrast with `macro-' (the corresponding Greek prefix...
micro-4 is global (or {macro-}). Thus a hacker might say that buying a smaller car to reduce pollution only solves a microproblem; the macroproblem of getting to work might be better solved by using mass transit, moving to within walking di...
micro-5 is microfloppies n. 3.5-inch floppies, as opposed to 5.25-inch {vanilla} or mini-floppies and the now-obsolete 8-inch variety. This term may be headed for obsolescence as 5.25-inchers pass out of use, only to be revived if anybody floa...
micro-6 is {stiffy}, {minifloppies}.
microfortnight is n. About 1.2 sec. The VMS operating system has a lot of tuning parameters that you can set with the SYSGEN utility, and one of these is TIMEPROMPTWAIT, the time the system will wait for an operator to set the correct date and...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
mode bit is n. A {flag}, usually in hardware, that selects between two (usually quite different) modes of operation. The connotations are different from {flag} bit in that mode bits are mainly written during a boot or set-up phase, are seldom...
mode bit2 is lifetime of an ordinary program. The classic example was the EBCDIC-vs.-ASCII bit (#12) of the Program Status Word of the IBM 360. Another was the bit on a PDP-12 that controlled whether it ran the PDP-8 or the LINC instruction ...
modulo is /mo'dyu-loh/ prep. Except for. From mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that 4 = 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod 9). "Well, LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that {GC} bug." "I feel fine today modulo a slight he...
molly-guard is /mol'ee-gard/ [University of Illinois] n. A shield to prevent tripping of some {Big Red Switch} by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of some plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's t...
molly-guard2 is twice in one day. Later generalized to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.
Mongolian Hordes technique is n. Development by {gang bang} (poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian clusterfuck' for a public orgy). Implies that large numbers of inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better pe...
Mongolian Hordes technique2 is `Chinese Army technique'; see also {Brooks's Law}.
monkey up is vt. To hack together hardware for a particular task, especially a one-shot job. Connotes an extremely {crufty} and consciously temporary solution. Compare {hack up}, {kluge up}, {cruft together}, {cruft together}.
monkey, scratch is n. See {scratch monkey}.
monstrosity is 1. n. A ridiculously {elephantine} program or system, esp. one that is buggy or only marginally functional. 2. The quality of being monstrous (see `Overgeneralization' in the discussion of jargonification). See also {baroque}.
Moof is /moof/ [MAC users] n. The Moof or `dogcow' is a semi-legendary creature that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh Technical Notes Hypercard stack V3.1; specifically, the full story of the dogcow is told in technical note #31 (the parti...
Moof2 is `Clarus'). Option-shift-click will cause it to emit a characteristic `Moof!' or `!fooM' sound. *Getting* to tech note 31 is the hard part; to discover how to do that, one must needs examine the stack script with a hackerly eye. Cl...
Moof3 is if you choose `Page Setup...' with a LaserWriter selected and click on the `Options' button.
Moore's Law is /morz law/ prov. The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^{(n - 1962)}; that is, the amount of information storable in one square inch of si...
Moore's Law2 is since the technology was invented. See also {Parkinson's Law of Data}.
moria is /mor'ee-*/ n. Like {nethack} and {rogue}, one of the large PD Dungeons-and-Dragons-like simulation games, available for a wide range of machines and operating systems. Extremely addictive and a major consumer of time better used for ...
MOTAS is /moh-toz/ [USENET: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after {MOTOS} and {MOTSS}] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also {SO}.
MOTOS is /moh-tohs/ [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via USENET: Member Of The Opposite Sex] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See {MOTAS}, {MOTSS}, {SO}. Less common than MOTSS or {MOTAS}, which have largely displac...
MOTSS is /mots/ or /M-O-T-S-S/ [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via USENET, Member Of The Same Sex] n. Esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The gay-issues newsgroup on USENET is called soc.motss. See {MOTOS} and {MOTAS}, which d...
mouse ahead is vi. Point-and-click analog of `type ahead'. To manipulate a computer's pointing device (almost always a mouse in this usage, but not necessarily) and its selection or command buttons before a computer program is ready to accept...
mouse ahead2 is accepting the input. Handling this properly is rare, but it can help make a {WIMP environment} much more usable, assuming the users are familiar with the behavior of the user interface.
mouse around is vi. To explore public portions of a large system, esp. a network such as Internet via {FTP} or {TELNET}, looking for interesting stuff to {snarf}.
mouse belt is n. See {rat belt}.
mouse droppings is [MS-DOS] n. Pixels (usually single) that are not properly restored when the mouse pointer moves away from a particular location on the screen, producing the appearance that the mouse pointer has left droppings behind. The m...
mouse droppings2 is that write to the screen memory corresponding to the mouse pointer's current location without hiding the mouse pointer first, and mouse drivers that do not quite support the graphics mode in use.
mouse elbow is n. A tennis-elbow-like fatigue syndrome resulting from excessive use of a {WIMP environment}. Similarly, `mouse shoulder'; GLS reports that he used to get this a lot before he taught himself to be ambimoustrous.
mouso is /mow'soh/ n. [by analogy with `typo'] An error in mouse usage resulting in an inappropriate selection or graphic garbage on the screen. Compare {thinko}, {braino}.
MS-DOS is /M-S-dos/ [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] n. A {clone} of {{CP/M}} for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson, who is said to have regretted it ever since. Numerous features, including vaguely UNIX-like but rat...
MS-DOS2 is redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to ...
MS-DOS3 is case-sensitive. The resulting mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, wh...
MS-DOS4 is operating system for the 360). Some people like to pronounce DOS like "dose", as in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a dose of brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation among hackers exhorts: "MS-...
mu is /moo/ The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies that you used to beat your...
mu2 is because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter (see the Bibliography), the correct answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your question canno...
mu3 is assumptions". Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word `mu' is actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is used in mainstream Japanese in tha...
mu4 is the Discordian question-denying use. It almost certainly derives from overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known Rinzei Zen teaching riddle: A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu retorte...
mu5 is Koans}, and Douglas Hofstadter's `G"odel, Escher, Bach' (pointer in the Bibliography).
mudhead is n. Commonly used to refer to a {MUD} player who sleeps, breathes, and eats MUD. Mudheads have been known to fail their degrees, drop out, etc., with the consolation, however, that they made wizard level. When encountered in person...
mudhead2 is topics: the tactic, character, or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her from becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD, and the MUD he or she is writing or going to write because all existing MUDs are so drea...
multician is /muhl-ti'shn/ [coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] n. Competent user of {{Multics}}. Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted the analogous `Unician'.
Multics is /muhl'tiks/ n. [from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An early (late 1960s) timesharing operating system co-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories. Very innovative for its time --- among o...
Multics2 is treating all devices uniformly as special files. All the members but GE eventually pulled out after determining that {second-system effect} had bloated Multics to the point of practical unusability (the `lean' predecessor in que...
Multics3 is Multics after buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful (among other things, on some versions one was commonly required to enter a password to log out). One of the developers left in the lurch by the proje...
Multics4 is which led directly to the birth of {{UNIX}}. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See also {brain-damaged} and {GCOS}.
multitask is n. Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to describe a person doing several things at once (but see {thrash}). The term `multiplex', from communications technology (meaning to handle more than one channel...
mumblage is /muhm'bl*j/ n. The topic of one's mumbling (see {mumble}). "All that mumblage" is used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear how the subject of discussion works, or like "all that crap" when `mumble' is being used as an ...
mumble is interj. 1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion. "Don't you think that...
mumble2 is a hybrid reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?" "Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it." 2. Sometimes used as an expression...
mumble3 is {VAX}." "Mumble!" Common variant: `mumble frotz' (see {frotz}; interestingly, one does not say `mumble frobnitz' even though `frotz' is short for `frobnitz'). 3. Yet another metasyntactic variable, like {foo}. 4. When used as a ...
mumble4 is understand you". 5. Sometimes used in `public' contexts on-line as a placefiller for things one is barred from giving details about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in his machine might say "Yup, my machine now ...
mumble5 is I'm testing for Mumbleco."
munch is [often confused with {mung}, q.v.] vt. To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related to {crunch} and nearly synonymous with {grovel}, but connotes...
munching is n. Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer for thrills, notoriety, or to annoy the system manager. Compare {cracker}. See also {hacked off}.
munching squares is n. A {display hack} dating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T --- see {HAKMEM} it...
munching squares2 is display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these, later (re)discovered on the LISP machin...
munching squares3 is (try AND for XOR and toggling points instead of plotting them), `munching w's', and `munching mazes'. More generally, suppose a graphics program produces an impressive and ever-changing display of some basic form, foo, on...
munching squares4 is relatively simple program; then the program (or the resulting display) is likely to be referred to as `munching foos' (this is a good example of the use of the word {foo} as a metasyntactic variable).
munchkin is /muhnch'kin/ [from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's `The Wizard of Oz'] n. A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking BASIC or something else equally constricted. A term of mild derision --- munchkins are ann...
munchkin2 is passing through a {larval stage}. The term {urchin} is also used. See also {wannabee}, {bitty box}.
mundane is [from SF fandom] n. 1. A person who is not in science fiction fandom. 2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my mundane life...." See also {Real World}.
mung is /muhng/ alt. `munge' /muhnj/ [in 1960 at MIT, `Mash Until No Good'; sometime after that the derivation from the {{recursive acronym}} `Mung Until No Good' became standard] vt. 1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevoca...
mung2 is usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously; this is a consequence of {Finagle's Law}. See {scribble}, {mangle}, {trash}, {nuke}. Reports from {USENET} suggest that the pronunciation /...
mung3 is spelling `mung' is still common in program comments (compare the widespread confusion over the proper spelling of {kluge}). 3. The kind of beans of which the sprouts are used in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! R...
Music is n. A common extracurricular interest of hackers (compare {{science-fiction fandom}}, {{oriental food}}; see also {filk}). Hackish folklore has long claimed that musical and programming abilities are closely related, and there has bee...
Music2 is that supports this. Hackers, as a rule, like music and often develop musical appreciation in unusual and interesting directions. Folk music is very big in hacker circles; so is electronic music, and the sort of elaborate instrumen...
Music3 is `progressive' and isn't recorded much any more. The hacker's musical range tends to be wide; many can listen with equal appreciation to (say) Talking Heads, Yes, Gentle Giant, Spirogyra, Scott Joplin, Tangerine Dream, King Sunny Ade...
Music4 is Concerti. It is also apparently true that hackerdom includes a much higher concentration of talented amateur musicians than one would expect from a similar-sized control group of {mundane} types.
mutter is vt. To quietly enter a command not meant for the ears, eyes, or fingers of ordinary mortals. Often used in `mutter an {incantation}'. See also {wizard}.
N is /N/ quant. 1. A large and indeterminate number of objects: "There were N bugs in that crock!" Also used in its original sense of a variable name: "This crock has N bugs, as N goes to infinity." (The true number of bugs is always at le...
N2 is inherited from the current context. For example, when a meal is being ordered at a restaurant, N may be understood to mean however many people there are at the table. From the remark "We'd like to order N wonton soups and a family di...
N3 is person at the table wants to eat only soup, even though you don't know how many people there are (see {great-wall}). 3. `Nth': adj. The ordinal counterpart of N, senses #1 and #2. "Now for the Nth and last time..." In the specific co...
N4 is assumed to be at least 4, and is usually 5 or more (see {tenured graduate student}). See also {{random numbers}}, {two-to-the-n}.
nailed to the wall is [like a trophy] adj. Said of a bug finally eliminated after protracted, and even heroic, effort.
nailing jelly is vi. See {like nailing jelly to a tree}.
na"ive is adj. Untutored in the perversities of some particular program or system; one who still tries to do things in an intuitive way, rather than the right way (in really good designs these coincide, but most designs aren't `really good' in...
na"ive2 is unrelated to general maturity or competence, or even competence at any other specific program. It is a sad commentary on the primitive state of computing that the natural opposite of this term is often claimed to be `experienced ...
na"ive user is n. A {luser}. Tends to imply someone who is ignorant mainly owing to inexperience. When this is applied to someone who *has* experience, there is a definite implication of stupidity.
NAK is /nak/ [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0010101] interj. 1. On-line joke answer to {ACK}?: "I'm not here." 2. On-line answer to a request for chat: "I'm not available." 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you don't understan...
NAK2 is stopped making sense. See {ACK}, sense 3. "And then, after we recode the project in COBOL...." "Nak, Nak, Nak! I thought I heard you say COBOL!"
nano is /nan'oh/ [CMU: from `nanosecond'] n. A brief period of time. "Be with you in a nano" means you really will be free shortly, i.e., implies what mainstream people mean by "in a jiffy" (whereas the hackish use of `jiffy' is quite differe...
nano- is [SI: the next quantifier below {micro-}; meaning * 10^{-9}] pref. Smaller than {micro-}, and used in the same rather loose and connotative way. Thus, one has {{nanotechnology}} (coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with `mi...
nano-2 is architectures have a `nanocode' level below `microcode'. Tom Duff at Bell Labs has also pointed out that "Pi seconds is a nanocentury". See also {{quantifiers}}, {pico-}, {nanoacre}, {nanobot}, {nanocomputer}, {nanofortnight}.
nanoacre is /nan'oh-ay`kr/ n. A unit (about 2 mm square) of real estate on a VLSI chip. The term gets its giggle value from the fact that VLSI nanoacres have costs in the same range as real acres once one figures in design and fabrication-set...
nanobot is /nan'oh-bot/ n. A robot of microscopic proportions, presumably built by means of {{nanotechnology}}. As yet, only used informally (and speculatively!). Also called a `nanoagent'.
nanocomputer is /nan'oh-k*m-pyoo'tr/ n. A computer whose switching elements are molecular in size. Designs for mechanical nanocomputers which use single-molecule sliding rods for their logic have been proposed. The controller for a {nanobot}...
nanofortnight is [Adelaide University] n. 1 fortnight * 10^-9, or about 1.2 msec. This unit was used largely by students doing undergraduate practicals. See {microfortnight}, {attoparsec}, and {micro-}.
nanotechnology is /nan'-oh-tek-no`l*-jee/ n. A hypothetical fabrication technology in which objects are designed and built with the individual specification and placement of each separate atom. The first unequivocal nanofabrication experiments...
nanotechnology2 is with the deposition of individual xenon atoms on a nickel substrate to spell the logo of a certain very large computer company. Nanotechnology has been a hot topic in the hacker subculture ever since the term was coined by ...
nanotechnology3 is Creation', where he predicted that nanotechnology could give rise to replicating assemblers, permitting an exponential growth of productivity and personal wealth. See also {blue goo}, {gray goo}, {nanobot}.
nastygram is /nas'tee-gram/ n. 1. A protocol packet or item of email (the latter is also called a {letterbomb}) that takes advantage of misfeatures or security holes on the target system to do untoward things. 2. Disapproving mail, esp. from ...
nastygram2 is {netiquette} or a complaint about failure to correct some mail- or news-transmission problem. Compare {shitogram}. 3. A status report from an unhappy, and probably picky, customer. "What'd Corporate say in today's nastygram?" ...
nastygram3 is {daemon}; in particular, a {bounce message}.
Nathan Hale is n. An asterisk (see also {splat}, {{ASCII}}). Oh, you want an etymology? Notionally, from "I regret that I have only one asterisk for my country!", a misquote of the famous remark uttered by Nathan Hale just before he was hang...
Nathan Hale2 is in the American War of Independence.
nature is n. See {has the X nature}.
neat hack is n. 1. A clever technique. 2. A brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch (see appendix A). See {hack}.
neep-neep is /neep neep/ [onomatopoeic, from New York SF fandom] n. One who is fascinated by computers. More general than {hacker}, as it need not imply more skill than is required to boot games on a PC. The derived noun `neep-neeping' appli...
neep-neep2 is about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most SF-convention parties. Fandom has a related proverb to the effect that "Hacking is a conversational black hole!".
neophilia is /nee`oh-fil'-ee-*/ n. The trait of being excited and pleased by novelty. Common trait of most hackers, SF fans, and members of several other connected leading-edge subcultures, including the pro-technology `Whole Earth' wing of t...
neophilia2 is members of Mensa, and the Discordian/neo-pagan underground. All these groups overlap heavily and (where evidence is available) seem to share characteristic hacker tropisms for science fiction, {{Music}}, and {{oriental food}}....
net.- is /net dot/ pref. [USENET] Prefix used to describe people and events related to USENET. From the time before the {Great Renaming}, when most non-local newsgroups had names beginning `net.'. Includes {net.god}s, `net.goddesses' (variou...
net.-2 is on-line admirers), `net.lurkers' (see {lurker}), `net.person', `net.parties' (a synonym for {boink}, sense 2), and many similar constructs. See also {net.police}.
net.god is /net god/ n. Used to refer to anyone who satisfies some combination of the following conditions: has been visible on USENET for more than 5 years, ran one of the original backbone sites, moderated an important newsgroup, wrote news ...
net.god2 is Henry, Chuq, and Greg personally. See {demigod}. Net.goddesses such as Rissa or the Slime Sisters have (so far) been distinguished more by personality than by authority.
net.personality is /net per`sn-al'-*-tee/ n. Someone who has made a name for him or herself on {USENET}, through either longevity or attention-getting posts, but doesn't meet the other requirements of {net.god}hood.
net.police is /net-p*-lees'/ n. (var. `net.cops') Those USENET readers who feel it is their responsibility to pounce on and {flame} any posting which they regard as offensive or in violation of their understanding of {netiquette}. Generally ...
net.police2 is spelled `net police'. See also {net.-}, {code police}.
nethack is /net'hak/ [UNIX] n. A dungeon game similar to {rogue} but more elaborate, distributed in C source over {USENET} and very popular at UNIX sites and on PC-class machines (nethack is probably the most widely distributed of the freeware...
nethack2 is written by Jay Fenlason and later considerably enhanced by Andries Brouwer, were simply called `hack'. The name changed when maintenance was taken over by a group of hackers originally organized by Mike Stephenson; the current c...
nethack3 is nethack-bugs@linc.cis.upenn.edu.
netiquette is /net'ee-ket/ or /net'i-ket/ [portmanteau from "network etiquette"] n. Conventions of politeness recognized on {USENET}, such as avoidance of cross-posting to inappropriate groups or refraining from commercial pluggery on the net.
netnews is /net'n[y]ooz/ n. 1. The software that makes {USENET} run. 2. The content of USENET. "I read netnews right after my mail most mornings."
netrock is /net'rok/ [IBM] n. A {flame}; used esp. on VNET, IBM's internal corporate network.
network address is n. (also `net address') As used by hackers, means an address on `the' network (see {network, the}; this is almost always a {bang path} or {{Internet address}}). Such an address is essential if one wants to be to be taken se...
network address2 is or organizations that claim to understand, work with, sell to, or recruit from among hackers but *don't* display net addresses are quietly presumed to be clueless poseurs and mentally flushed (see {flush}, sense 4). Hacke...
network address3 is business cards and wear them prominently in contexts where they expect to meet other hackers face-to-face (see also {{science-fiction fandom}}). This is mostly functional, but is also a signal that one identifies with ha...
network address4 is tie-dyed T-shirts among Grateful Dead fans). Net addresses are often used in email text as a more concise substitute for personal names; indeed, hackers may come to know each other quite well by network names without ever ...
network address5 is also {sitename}, {domainist}.
network meltdown is n. A state of complete network overload; the network equivalent of {thrash}ing. This may be induced by a {Chernobyl packet}. See also {broadcast storm}, {kamikaze packet}.
network, the is n. 1. The union of all the major noncommercial, academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the old ARPANET, NSFnet, {BITNET}, and the virtual UUCP and {USENET} `networks', plus the corporate in-house networks and...
network, the2 is CompuServe) that gateway to them. A site is generally considered `on the network' if it can be reached through some combination of Internet-style (@-sign) and UUCP (bang-path) addresses. See {bang path}, {{Internet address}}...
network, the3 is conspiracy of libertarian hacker-subversives and anti-authoritarian monkeywrenchers described in Robert Anton Wilson's novel `Schr"odinger's Cat', to which many hackers have subsequently decided they belong (this is an examp...
network, the4 is `network' is often abbreviated to `net'. "Are you on the net?" is a frequent question when hackers first meet face to face, and "See you on the net!" is a frequent goodbye.
New Jersey is [primarily Stanford/Silicon Valley] adj. Brain-damaged or of poor design. This refers to the allegedly wretched quality of such software as C, C++, and UNIX (which originated at Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey). "This comp...
New Jersey2 is from a compiler designed in New Jersey?" Compare {Berkeley Quality Software}. See also {UNIX conspiracy}.
New Testament is n. [C programmers] The second edition of K&R's `The C Programming Language' (Prentice-Hall, 1988; ISBN 0-13-110362-8), describing ANSI Standard C. See {K&R}.
newbie is /n[y]oo'bee/ n. [orig. from British public-school and military slang variant of `new boy'] A USENET neophyte. This term surfaced in the {newsgroup} talk.bizarre but is now in wide use. Criteria for being considered a newbie vary w...
newbie2 is newsgroup while remaining a respected regular in another. The label `newbie' is sometimes applied as a serious insult to a person who has been around USENET for a long time but who carefully hides all evidence of having a clue. ...
newgroup wars is /n[y]oo'groop wohrz/ [USENET] n. The salvos of dueling `newgroup' and `rmgroup' messages sometimes exchanged by persons on opposite sides of a dispute over whether a {newsgroup} should be created net-wide. These usually settl...
newgroup wars2 is clear whether the group has a natural constituency (usually, it doesn't). At times, especially in the completely anarchic alt hierarchy, the names of newsgroups themselves become a form of comment or humor; e.g., the spinoff...
newgroup wars3 is alt.tv.muppets in early 1990, or any number of specialized abuse groups named after particularly notorious {flamer}s, e.g., alt.weemba.
newline is /n[y]oo'li:n/ n. 1. [techspeak, primarily UNIX] The ASCII LF character (0001010), used under {{UNIX}} as a text line terminator. A Bell-Labs-ism rather than a Berkeleyism; interestingly (and unusually for UNIX jargon), it is said t...
newline2 is (Though the term `newline' appears in ASCII standards, it never caught on in the general computing world before UNIX). 2. More generally, any magic character, character sequence, or operation (like Pascal's writeln procedure) re...
newline3 is lines. See {crlf}, {terpri}.
NeWS is /nee'wis/, /n[y]oo'is/ or /n[y]ooz/ [acronym; the `Network Window System'] n. The road not taken in window systems, an elegant PostScript-based environment that would almost certainly have won the standards war with {X} if it hadn't be...
NeWS2 is is a lesson here that too many software vendors haven't yet heeded. Many hackers insist on the two-syllable pronunciations above as a way of distinguishing NeWS from {news} (the {netnews} software).
news is n. See {netnews}.
newsfroup is // [USENET] n. Silly synonym for {newsgroup}, originally a typo but now in regular use on USENET's talk.bizarre and other lunatic-fringe groups.
newsgroup is [USENET] n. One of {USENET}'s huge collection of topic groups or {fora}. Usenet groups can be `unmoderated' (anyone can post) or `moderated' (submissions are automatically directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then po...
newsgroup2 is parallel {mailing list}s for Internet people with no netnews access, with postings to the group automatically propagated to the list and vice versa. Some moderated groups (especially those which are actually gatewayed Internet...
newsgroup3 is with groups of postings periodically collected into a single large posting with an index. Among the best-known are comp.lang.c (the C-language forum), comp.arch (on computer architectures), comp.unix.wizards (for UNIX wizards...
newsgroup4 is fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political discussions and {flamage}).
nickle is /ni'kl/ [from `nickel', common name for the U.S. 5-cent coin] n. A {nybble} + 1; 5 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. See als...
night mode is n. See {phase} (of people).
Nightmare File System is n. Pejorative hackerism for Sun's Network File System (NFS). In any nontrivial network of Suns where there is a lot of NFS cross-mounting, when one Sun goes down, the others often freeze up. Some machine tries to acc...
Nightmare File System2 is repeats indefinitely. This causes it to appear dead to some messages (what is actually happening is that it is locked up in what should have been a brief excursion to a higher {spl} level). Then another machine trie...
Nightmare File System3 is pseudo-down machine, and itself becomes pseudo-down. The first machine to discover the down one is now trying both to access the down one and to respond to the pseudo-down one, so it is even harder to reach. This sn...
Nightmare File System4 is network of machines is frozen --- the user can't even abort the file access that started the problem! (ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of UNIX's alleged bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file sy...
Nightmare File System5 is 1970s.) See also {broadcast storm}.
NIL is /nil/ [from LISP terminology for `false'] No. Used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the `-P' convention. See {T}.
NMI is /N-M-I/ n. Non-Maskable Interrupt. An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680[01234]0; the NMI line on an 80{88,[1234]}86. In contrast with a {priority interrupt} (which might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is *never* ignored.
no-op is /noh'op/ alt. NOP /nop/ [no operation] n. 1. (also v.) A machine instruction that does nothing (sometimes used in assembler-level programming as filler for data or patch areas, or to overwrite code to be removed in binaries). See als...
no-op2 is nothing to a project, or has nothing going on upstairs, or both. As in "He's a no-op." 3. Any operation or sequence of operations with no effect, such as circling the block without finding a parking space, or putting money into a ...
no-op3 is into the coin-return box, or asking someone for help and being told to go away. "Oh, well, that was a no-op." Hot-and-sour soup (see {great-wall}) that is insufficiently either is `no-op soup'; so is wonton soup if everybody else...
noddy is /nod'ee/ [UK: from the children's books] adj. 1. Small and un-useful, but demonstrating a point. Noddy programs are often written by people learning a new language or system. The archetypal noddy program is {hello, world}. Noddy co...
noddy2 is bug of a compiler. May be used of real hardware or software to imply that it isn't worth using. "This editor's a bit noddy." 2. A program that is more or less instant to produce. In this use, the term does not necessarily connot...
noddy3 is sufficiently trivial that it can be written and debugged while carrying on (and during the space of) a normal conversation. "I'll just throw together a noddy {awk} script to dump all the first fields." In North America this might...
NOMEX underwear is /noh'meks uhn'-der-weir/ [USENET] n. Syn. {asbestos longjohns}, used mostly in auto-related mailing lists and newsgroups. NOMEX underwear is an actual product available on the racing equipment market, used as a fire resista...
non-optimal solution is n. (also `sub-optimal solution') An astoundingly stupid way to do something. This term is generally used in deadpan sarcasm, as its impact is greatest when the person speaking looks completely serious. Compare {stunni...
nonlinear is adj. [scientific computation] 1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable fashion. When used to describe the behavior of a machine or program, it suggests that said machine or program is being forced to run far outside of design ...
nonlinear2 is induced by unreasonable inputs, or may be triggered when a more mundane bug sends the computation far off from its expected course. 2. When describing the behavior of a person, suggests a tantrum or a {flame}. "When you talk to...
nonlinear3 is go nonlinear for hours." In this context, `go nonlinear' connotes `blow up out of proportion' (proportion connotes linearity).
nontrivial is adj. Requiring real thought or significant computing power. Often used as an understated way of saying that a problem is quite difficult or impractical, or even entirely unsolvable ("Proving P=NP is nontrivial"). The preferred ...
nontrivial2 is See {trivial}, {uninteresting}, {interesting}.
notwork is /not'werk/ n. A network, when it is acting {flaky} or is {down}. Compare {nyetwork}. Said at IBM to have orig. referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBM's VNET corporate network, ca. 1988; but there are independent repor...
NP- is /N-P/ pref. Extremely. Used to modify adjectives describing a level or quality of difficulty; the connotation is often `more so than it should be' (NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a good a pri...
NP-2 is this algorithm to perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying." This is generalized from the computer-science terms `NP-hard' and `NP-complete'. NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial algorithms, those that can be complete...
NP-3 is amount of time that is a polynomial function of the size of the input; a solution for one NP-complete problem would solve all the others.
nuke is vt. 1. To intentionally delete the entire contents of a given directory or storage volume. "On UNIX, `rm -r /usr' will nuke everything in the usr filesystem." Never used for accidental deletion. Oppose {blow away}. 2. Syn. for {d...
nuke2 is features, or code sections. Often used to express a final verdict. "What do you want me to do with that 80-meg {wallpaper} file?" "Nuke it." 3. Used of processes as well as files; nuke is a frequent verbal alias for `kill -9' on...
nuke3 is {fandango on core} can trash the operating system, including the FAT (the in-core copy of the disk block chaining information). This can utterly scramble attached disks, which are then said to have been `nuked'. This term is also ...
nuke4 is other micros without memory protection.
number-crunching is n. Computations of a numerical nature, esp. those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers. The only thing {Fortrash} is good for. This term is in widespread informal use outside hackerdom and even in mainstream ...
number-crunching2 is connotations: namely, that the computations are mindless and involve massive use of {brute force}. This is not always {evil}, esp. if it involves ray tracing or fractals or some other use that makes {pretty pictures}, esp...
numbers is [scientific computation] n. Output of a computation that may not be significant results but at least indicate that the program is running. May be used to placate management, grant sponsors, etc. `Making numbers' means running a pr...
numbers2 is necessarily meaningful output --- is needed as a demonstration of progress. See {pretty pictures}, {math-out}, {social science number}.
NUXI problem is /nuk'see pro'bl*m/ n. This refers to the problem of transferring data between machines with differing byte-order. The string `UNIX' might look like `NUXI' on a machine with a different `byte sex' (e.g., when transferring data ...
NUXI problem2 is vice-versa). See also {middle-endian}, {swab}, and {bytesexual}.
nybble is /nib'l/ (alt. `nibble') [from v. `nibble' by analogy with `bite' => `byte'] n. Four bits; one {hex} digit; a half-byte. Though `byte' is now techspeak, this useful relative is still jargon. Compare {{byte}}, {crumb}, {tayste}, {d...
nybble2 is Apparently this spelling is uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as British orthography suggests the pronunciation /ni:'bl/.
nyetwork is /nyet'werk/ [from Russian `nyet' = no] n. A network, when it is acting {flaky} or is {down}. Compare {notwork}.
Ob- is /ob/ pref. Obligatory. A piece of {netiquette} acknowledging that the author has been straying from the newsgroup's charter topic. For example, if a posting in alt.sex is a response to a part of someone else's posting that has nothing...
Ob-2 is append `ObSex' (or `Obsex') and toss off a question or vignette about some unusual erotic act. It is considered a sign of great {winnitude} when your Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.
Obfuscated C Contest is n. An annual contest run since 1984 over USENET by Landon Curt Noll and friends. The overall winner is whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but working) C program; various other prizes are award...
Obfuscated C Contest2 is and macro-preprocessor facilities give contestants a lot of maneuvering room. The winning programs often manage to be simultaneously (a) funny, (b) breathtaking works of art, and (c) horrible examples of how *not* to ...
Obfuscated C Contest3 is entry might help convey the flavor of obfuscated C /* * HELLO WORLD program * by Jack Applin and Robert Heckendorn, 1985 */ main(v,c)char**c;{for(v[c++]="Hello, world!\n)"; (!!c)[*c]&&(v--||--c&&...
obi-wan error is /oh'bee-won` er'*r/ [RPI, from `off-by-one' and the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in "Star Wars"] n. A loop of some sort in which the index is off by 1. Common when the index should have started from 0 but instead started from 1....
Objectionable-C is n. Hackish take on "Objective-C", the name of an object-oriented dialect of C in competition with the better-known C++ (it is used to write native applications on the NeXT machine). Objectionable-C uses a Smalltalk-like sy...
Objectionable-C2 is method calls, and (like many such efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the {Right Thing} without actually doing so.
obscure is adj. Used in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply total incomprehensibility. "The reason for that last crash is obscure." "The `find(1)' command's syntax is obscure!" The phrase `moderately obscure' implies that it coul...
obscure2 is the trouble. The construction `obscure in the extreme' is the preferred emphatic form.
octal forty is /ok'tl for'tee/ n. Hackish way of saying "I'm drawing a blank." Octal 40 is the {{ASCII}} space character, 0100000; by an odd coincidence, {hex} 40 (01000000) is the {{EBCDIC}} space character. See {wall}.
off the trolley is adj. Describes the behavior of a program that malfunctions and goes catatonic, but doesn't actually {crash} or abort. See {glitch}, {bug}, {deep space}.
off-by-one error is n. Exceedingly common error induced in many ways, such as by starting at 0 when you should have started at 1 or vice versa, or by writing `< N' instead of `<= N' or vice-versa. Also applied to giving something to the perso...
off-by-one error2 is Often confounded with {fencepost error}, which is properly a particular subtype of it.
offline is adv. Not now or not here. "Let's take this discussion offline." Specifically used on {USENET} to suggest that a discussion be taken off a public newsgroup to email.
old fart is n. Tribal elder. A title self-assumed with remarkable frequency by (esp.) USENETters who have been programming for more than about 25 years; often appears in {sig block}s attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeologica...
old fart2 is the second or third person but one of pride in first person.
Old Testament is n. [C programmers] The first edition of {K&R}, the sacred text describing {Classic C}.
one-line fix is n. Used (often sarcastically) of a change to a program that is thought to be trivial or insignificant right up to the moment it crashes the system. Usually `cured' by another one-line fix. See also {I didn't change anything!}
one-liner wars is n. A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see {write-only language}). The objective is to see who can code the most interesting and/or useful routine in one line of operators chosen from APL's exceedingly...
one-liner wars2 is was practiced among {TECO} hackers. Ken Iverson, the inventor of APL, has been credited with a one-liner that, given a number N, produces a list of the prime numbers from 1 to N inclusive. It looks like this (2 = 0 +.= T...
one-liner wars3 is character, the assignment arrow is a single character, and `i' represents the APL iota.
ooblick is /oo'blik/ [from Dr. Seuss's `Bartholomew and the Oobleck'] n. A bizarre semi-liquid sludge made from cornstarch and water. Enjoyed among hackers who make batches during playtime at parties for its amusing and extremely non-Newtonia...
ooblick2 is resists rapid motion like a solid and will even crack when hit by a hammer. Often found near lasers. Here is a field-tested ooblick recipe contributed by GLS 1 cup cornstarch 1 cup baking soda 3/4 cup water N drops o...
ooblick3 is non-Newtonian as a pure cornstarch ooblick, but has an appropriately slimy feel. Some, however, insist that the notion of an ooblick *recipe* is far too mechanical, and that it is best to add the water in small increments so that...
ooblick4 is through as it *becomes* ooblick can be grokked in fullness by many hands. For optional ingredients of this experience, see the "Ceremonial Chemicals" section of appendix B.
open is n. Abbreviation for `open (or left) parenthesis' --- used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. To read aloud the LISP form (DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1)) one might say "Open defun foo, open eks close, open, plus eks one, close clos...
open switch is [IBM prob. from railroading] n. An unresolved question, issue, or problem.
operating system is [techspeak] n. (Often abbreviated `OS') The foundation software of a machine, of course; that which schedules tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the user between applications. The facilities an o...
operating system2 is design philosophy exert an extremely strong influence on programming style and on the technical cultures that grow up around its host machines. Hacker folklore has been shaped primarily by the {{UNIX}}, {{ITS}}, {{TOPS-10...
operating system3 is {{CP/M}}, {{MS-DOS}}, and {{Multics}} operating systems (most importantly by ITS and UNIX).
Orange Book is n. The U.S. Government's standards document `Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, DOD standard 5200.28-STD, December, 1985' which characterize secure computing architectures and defines levels A1 (most secure) through D ...
Orange Book2 is can be upgraded to about C1 without excessive pain. See also {{book titles}}.
oriental food is n. Hackers display an intense tropism towards oriental cuisine, especially Chinese, and especially of the spicier varieties such as Szechuan and Hunan. This phenomenon (which has also been observed in subcultures that overlap...
oriental food2 is science-fiction fandom) has never been satisfactorily explained, but is sufficiently intense that one can assume the target of a hackish dinner expedition to be the best local Chinese place and be right at least three times o...
oriental food3 is {stir-fried random}, {laser chicken}, {Yu-Shiang Whole Fish}. Thai, Indian, Korean, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular.
orphan is [UNIX] n. A process whose parent has died; one inherited by `init(1)'. Compare {zombie}.
orphaned i-node is /or'f*nd i'nohd/ [UNIX] n. 1. [techspeak] A file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories of a filesystem. 2. By extension, a pejorative for any person serving no useful function within some organizatio...
orthogonal is [from mathematics] adj. Mutually independent; well separated; sometimes, irrelevant to. Used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, s...
orthogonal2 is system and are in some sense non-overlapping or mutually independent. For example, in architectures such as the PDP-11 or VAX where all or nearly all registers can be used interchangeably in any role with respect to any instr...
orthogonal3 is orthogonal. Or, in logic, the set of operators `not' and `or' is orthogonal, but the set `nand', `or', and `not' is not (because any one of these can be expressed in terms of the others). Also used in comments on human disco...
OS is /O-S/ 1. [Operating System] n. An acronym heavily used in email, occasionally in speech. 2. n.,obs. On ITS, an output spy. See appendix A.
OS/2 is /O S too/ n. The anointed successor to MS-DOS for Intel 286- and 386-based micros; proof that IBM/Microsoft couldn't get it right the second time, either. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among hackers --- the design wa...
OS/22 is 1.x so bad, that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major {app}s shipping for it on the fingers of two hands --- in unary. Often called `Half-an-OS'. On January 28, 1991, Microsoft announced that it was dropping it...
OS/23 is leaving the OS entirely in the hands of IBM; on January 29 they claimed the media had got the story wrong, but were vague about how. It looks as though OS/2 is moribund. See {vaporware}, {monstrosity}, {cretinous}, {second-system ...
out-of-band is [from telecommunications and network theory] adj. 1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its `natural' range of return values, but are rather signals that some kind of exception has occurred. Many C fun...
out-of-band2 is nonnegative integral value, or indicate failure with an out-of-band return value of -1. Compare {hidden flag}, {green bytes}. 2. Also sometimes used to describe what communications people call `shift characters', like the E...
out-of-band3 is terminals, or the level shift indicators in the old 5-bit Baudot codes. 3. In personal communication, using methods other than email, such as telephones or {snail-mail}.
overflow bit is n. 1. [techspeak] On some processors, an attempt to calculate a result too large for a register to hold causes a particular {flag} called an {overflow bit} to be set. 2. Hackers use the term of human thought too. "Well, the {{...
overflow bit2 is but I could hack it OK until they got to the exception handling ... that set my overflow bit." 3. The hypothetical bit that will be set if a hacker doesn't get to make a trip to the Room of Porcelain Fixtures "I'd better proce...
overrun is n. 1. [techspeak] Term for a frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, esp. in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if your {sil...
overrun2 is machine takes longer than 2 msec to get to service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost. 2. Also applied to non-serial-I/O communications. "I forgot to pay my electric bill due to mail overrun." "Sorry, I got four ph...
overrun3 is your message to overrun." When {thrash}ing at tasks, the next person to make a request might be told "Overrun!" 3. More loosely, may refer to a {buffer overflow} not necessarily related to processing time (as in {overrun screw}...
overrun screw is [C programming] n. A variety of {fandango on core} produced by scribbling past the end of an array (C has no checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if it is auto, the result may b...
overrun screw2 is in {heisenbug}s of the most diabolical subtlety. The term `overrun screw' is used esp. of scribbles beyond the end of arrays allocated with `malloc(3)'; this typically trashes the allocation header for the next block in the ...
overrun screw3 is malloc and often a core dump on the next operation to use `stdio(3)' or `malloc(3)' itself. See {spam}, {overrun}; see also {memory leak}, {aliasing bug}, {precedence lossage}, {fandango on core}, {secondary damage}.*P.O.D...
overrun screw4 is opposed to a code section). Usage pedantic and rare. See also {pod}.
padded cell is n. Where you put {luser}s so they can't hurt anything. A program that limits a luser to a carefully restricted subset of the capabilities of the host system (for example, the `rsh(1)' utility on USG UNIX). Note that this is di...
padded cell2 is overt and not aimed at enforcing security so much as protecting others (and the luser) from the consequences of the luser's boundless na"ivet'e (see {na"ive}). Also `padded cell environment'.
page in is [MIT] vi. 1. To become aware of one's surroundings again after having paged out (see {page out}). Usually confined to the sarcastic comment "Eric pages in. Film at 11." See {film at 11}. 2. Syn. `swap in'; see {swap}.
page out is [MIT] vi. 1. To become unaware of one's surroundings temporarily, due to daydreaming or preoccupation. "Can you repeat that? I paged out for a minute." See {page in}. Compare {glitch}, {thinko}. 2. Syn. `swap out'; see {swap}.
pain in the net is n. A {flamer}.
paper-net is n. Hackish way of referring to the postal service, analogizing it to a very slow, low-reliability network. USENET {sig block}s not uncommonly include a "Paper-Net" header just before the sender's postal address; common variants o...
paper-net2 is {voice-net}, {snail-mail}.
param is /p*-ram'/ n. Shorthand for `parameter'. See also {parm}; Compare {arg}, {var}.
parent message is n. See {followup}.
parity errors is pl.n. Little lapses of attention or (in more severe cases) consciousness, usually brought on by having spent all night and most of the next day hacking. "I need to go home and crash; I'm starting to get a lot of parity errors...
parity errors2 is nearly always correctable transient error in RAM hardware.
Parkinson's Law of Data is prov. "Data expands to fill the space available for storage"; buying more memory encourages the use of more memory-intensive techniques. It has been observed over the last 10 years that the memory usage of evolving ...
Parkinson's Law of Data2 is 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available for constant dollars tends to double about once every 12 months (see {Moore's Law}); unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter cannot continue ind...
parm is /parm/ n. Further-compressed form of {param}. This term is an IBMism, and written use is almost unknown outside IBM shops; spoken /parm/ is more widely distributed, but the synonym {arg} is favored among hackers. Compare {arg}, {var}...
parse is [from linguistic terminology] vt. 1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other utterance (close to the standard English meaning). "That was the one I saw you." "I can't parse that." 2. More generally, to understan...
parse2 is just kretch the glims and then aos the zotz." "I can't parse that." 3. Of fish, to have to remove the bones yourself. "I object to parsing fish", means "I don't want to get a whole fish, but a sliced one is okay". A `parsed fis...
parse3 is over whether `unparsed' should mean `bony', or also mean `deboned'.
Pascal is n. An Algol-descended language designed by Niklaus Wirth on the CDC 6600 around 1967--68 as an instructional tool for elementary programming. This language, designed primarily to keep students from shooting themselves in the foot an...
Pascal2 is general-purpose-programming point of view, was later promoted as a general-purpose tool and, in fact, became the ancestor of a large family of languages including Modula-2 and {{Ada}} (see also {bondage-and-discipline language}). T...
Pascal3 is probably best summed up by a devastating (and, in its deadpan way, screamingly funny) 1981 paper by Brian Kernighan (of {K&R} fame) entitled "Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language", which was never formally published ...
Pascal4 is Part of his discussion is worth repeating here, because its criticisms are still apposite to Pascal itself after ten years of improvement and could also stand as an indictment of many other bondage-and-discipline languages. At th...
Pascal5 is Pascal, Kernighan wrote 9. There is no escape This last point is perhaps the most important. The language is inadequate but circumscribed, because there is no way to escape its limitations. There are no casts to disable ...
Pascal6 is no way to replace the defective run-time environment with a sensible one, unless one controls the compiler that defines the "standard procedures". The language is closed. People who use Pascal for serious programming fall in...
Pascal7 is impotent, it must be extended. But each group extends Pascal in its own direction, to make it look like whatever language they really want. Extensions for separate compilation, FORTRAN-like COMMON, string data types, interna...
Pascal8 is numbers, bit operators, etc., all add to the utility of the language for one group but destroy its portability to others. I feel that it is a mistake to use Pascal for anything much beyond its original target. In its pure...
Pascal9 is for teaching but not for real programming. Pascal has since been almost entirely displaced (by {C}) from the niches it had acquired in serious applications and systems programming, but retains some popularity as a hobbyist language ...
patch is 1. n. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a {quick-and-dirty} remedy to an existing bug or misfeature. A patch may or may not work, and may or may not eventually be incorporated permanently into the program. Distingu...
patch2 is that a patch is generated by more primitive means than the rest of the program; the classical examples are instructions modified by using the front panel switches, and changes made directly to the binary executable of a program ori...
patch3 is fix}. 2. vt. To insert a patch into a piece of code. 3. [in the UNIX world] n. A {diff} (sense 2). 4. A set of modifications to binaries to be applied by a patching program. IBM operating systems often receive updates to the op...
patch4 is hexadecimal patches. If you have modified your OS, you have to disassemble these back to the source. The patches might later be corrected by other patches on top of them (patches were said to "grow scar tissue"). The result was of...
patch5 is galore. There is a classic story of a {tiger team} penetrating a secure military computer that illustrates the danger inherent in binary patches (or, indeed, any that you can't --- or don't --- inspect and examine before installing...
patch6 is any way to penetrate security of IBM's OS, so they made a site visit to an IBM office (remember, these were official military types who were purportedly on official business), swiped some IBM stationery, and created a fake patch. Th...
patch7 is needed. The patch was distributed at about the right time for an IBM patch, had official stationery and all accompanying documentation, and was dutifully installed. The installation manager very shortly thereafter learned something...
patch space is n. An unused block of bits left in a binary so that it can later be modified by insertion of machine-language instructions there (typically, the patch space is modified to contain new code, and the superseded code is patched to ...
patch space2 is The widening use of HLLs has made this term rare; it is now primarily historical outside IBM shops. See {patch} (sense 4), {zap} (sense 4), {hook}.
path is n. 1. A {bang path} or explicitly routed {{Internet address}}; a node-by-node specification of a link between two machines. 2. [UNIX] A filename, fully specified relative to the root directory (as opposed to relative to the current di...
path2 is `relative path'). This is also called a `pathname'. 3. [UNIX and MS-DOS] The `search path', an environment variable specifying the directories in which the {shell} (COMMAND.COM, under MS-DOS) should look for commands. Other, simila...
path3 is the C preprocessor has a `search path' it uses in looking for `#include' files).
pathological is adj. 1. [scientific computation] Used of a data set that is grossly atypical of normal expected input, esp. one that exposes a weakness or bug in whatever algorithm one is using. An algorithm that can be broken by pathological...
pathological2 is are very unlikely to occur in practice. 2. When used of test input, implies that it was purposefully engineered as a worst case. The implication in both senses is that the data is spectacularly ill-conditioned or that someone...
pathological3 is algorithm in order to come up with such a crazy example. 3. Also said of an unlikely collection of circumstances. "If the network is down and comes up halfway through the execution of that command by root, the system may j...
pathological4 is case." Often used to dismiss the case from discussion, with the implication that the consequences are acceptable since that they will happen so infrequently (if at all) that there is no justification for going to extra trou...
payware is /pay'weir/ n. Commercial software. Oppose {shareware} or {freeware}.
PBD is /P-B-D/ [abbrev. of `Programmer Brain Damage'] n. Applied to bug reports revealing places where the program was obviously broken by an incompetent or short-sighted programmer. Compare {UBD}; see also {brain-damaged}.
PC-ism is /P-C-izm/ n. A piece of code or coding technique that takes advantage of the unprotected single-tasking environment in IBM PCs and the like, e.g., by busy-waiting on a hardware register, direct diddling of screen memory, or using har...
PC-ism2 is {vaxism}, {unixism}. Also, `PC-ware' n., a program full of PC-isms on a machine with a more capable operating system. Pejorative.
PD is /P-D/ adj. Common abbreviation for `public domain', applied to software distributed over {USENET} and from Internet archive sites. Much of this software is not in fact public domain in the legal sense but travels under various copyright...
PD2 is anyone who can {snarf} a copy. See {copyleft}.
pdl is /pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ [acronym for `Push Down List'] 1. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for {stack}. 2. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of {Zork}; (his {network address} on the ITS machines was at one time pdl@dms). 3. `Program De...
pdl2 is formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which {management} forces one to design programs. {Management} often expects it to be maintained in parallel with the code. See also {{flowchart}}. 4. To design using a program des...
pdl3 is eyes won't focus beyond 2 feet."
PDP-10 is [Programmed Data Processor model 10] n. The machine that made timesharing real. It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT ...
PDP-102 is the instruction set (most notably the bit-field instructions) are still considered unsurpassed. The 10 was eventually eclipsed by the VAX machines (descendants of the PDP-11) when DEC recognized that the 10 and VAX product lines we...
PDP-103 is concentrate its software development effort on the more profitable VAX. The machine was finally dropped from DEC's line in 1983, following the failure of the Jupiter Project at DEC to build a viable new model. (Some attempts by o...
PDP-104 is nothing; see {Foonly}) This event spelled the doom of {{ITS}} and the technical cultures that had spawned the original Jargon File, but by mid-1991 it had become something of a badge of honorable old-timerhood among hackers to hav...
PDP-105 is {{TOPS-10}}, {{ITS}}, {AOS}, {BLT}, {DDT}, {DPB}, {EXCH}, {HAKMEM}, {JFCL}, {LDB}, {pop}, {push}, appendix A.
PDP-20 is n. The most famous computer that never was. {PDP-10} computers running the {{TOPS-10}} operating system were labeled `DECsystem-10' as a way of differentiating them from the PDP-11. Later on, those systems running {TOPS-20} were lab...
PDP-202 is being the result of a lawsuit brought against DEC by Singer, which once made a computer called `system-10'), but contrary to popular lore there was never a `PDP-20'; the only difference between a 10 and a 20 was the operating syst...
PDP-203 is all) machines sold to run TOPS-10 were painted `Basil Blue', whereas most TOPS-20 machines were painted `Chinese Red' (often mistakenly called orange).
peek is n.,vt. (and {poke}) The commands in most microcomputer BASICs for directly accessing memory contents at an absolute address; often extended to mean the corresponding constructs in any {HLL} (peek reads memory, poke modifies it). Much ...
peek2 is {peek}ing around memory, more or less at random, to find the location where the system keeps interesting stuff. Long (and variably accurate) lists of such addresses for various computers circulate (see {{interrupt list, the}}). Th...
peek3 is highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most likely) total {lossage} (see {killer poke}).
pencil and paper is n. An archaic information storage and transmission device that works by depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp. More recent developments in paper-based technology include improved `write-once' update devices w...
pencil and paper2 is balls to deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled at so-called `handwriting' technique. These technologies are ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers h...
pencil and paper3 is years of keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts. See also append...
peon is n. A person with no special ({root} or {wheel}) privileges on a computer system. "I can't create an account on *foovax* for you; I'm only a peon there."
percent-S is /per-sent' es'/ [From the code in C's `printf(3)' library function used to insert an arbitrary string argument] n. An unspecified person or object. "I was just talking to some percent-s in administration." Compare {random}.
perf is /perf/ n. See {chad} (sense 1). The term `perfory' /per'f*-ree/ is also heard.
perfect programmer syndrome is n. Arrogance; the egotistical conviction that one is above normal human error. Most frequently found among programmers of some native ability but relatively little experience (especially new graduates; their per...
perfect programmer syndrome2 is excellent performance at solving {toy problem}s). "Of course my program is correct, there is no need to test it." "Yes, I can see there may be a problem here, but *I'll* never type `rm -r /' while in {root}."
Perl is /perl/ [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] n. An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall (lwall@jpl.nasa.gov, author of `patch(1)' and `rn(1)') and distributed over USENET. Su...
Perl2 is hairier (see {awk}). UNIX sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible hackers, increasingly consider it one of the {languages of choice}. Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark about `lex(1)', as the "Swiss-Army...
pessimal is /pes'im-l/ [Latin-based antonym for `optimal'] adj. Maximally bad. "This is a pessimal situation." Also `pessimize' vt. To make as bad as possible. These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for `optimal' and `optimize', b...
pessimal2 is most English dictionaries, although `pessimize' is listed in the OED.
pessimizing compiler is /pes'*-miz`ing k*m-pil'r/ [antonym of `optimizing compiler'] n. A compiler that produces object code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious hand translation. The implication is that the compiler is actually ...
pessimizing compiler2 is excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A few pessimizing compilers have been written on purpose, however, as pranks or burlesques.
peta- is /pe't*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.
PETSCII is /pet'skee/ [abbreviation of PET ASCII] n. The variation (many would say perversion) of the {{ASCII}} character set used by the Commodore Business Machines PET series of personal computers and the later Commodore C64, C16, and C128 m...
PETSCII2 is and up-arrow (as in old-style ASCII) instead of underscore and caret, placed the unshifted alphabet at positions 65--90, put the shifted alphabet at positions 193--218, and added graphics characters.
phase is 1. n. The phase of one's waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the standard 24-hour cycle. This is a useful concept among people who often work at night and/or according to no fixed schedule. It is not uncommon to change one's ph...
phase2 is regular basis. "What's your phase?" "I've been getting in about 8 P.M. lately, but I'm going to {wrap around} to the day schedule by Friday." A person who is roughly 12 hours out of phase is sometimes said to be in `night mode'. ...
phase3 is frequently) used, meaning you're working 9 to 5 (or, more likely, 10 to 6).) The act of altering one's cycle is called `changing phase'; `phase shifting' has also been recently reported from Caltech. 2. `change phase the hard way'...
phase4 is to get into a different phase. 3. `change phase the easy way' To stay asleep, etc. However, some claim that either staying awake longer or sleeping longer is easy, and that it is *shortening* your day or night that's hard (see {wra...
phase5 is travelers who cross many time-zone boundaries may be attributed to two distinct causes the strain of travel per se, and the strain of changing phase. Hackers who suddenly find that they must change phase drastically in a short per...
phase6 is experience something very like jet lag without traveling.
phase of the moon is n. Used humorously as a random parameter on which something is said to depend. Sometimes implies unreliability of whatever is dependent, or that reliability seems to be dependent on conditions nobody has been able to dete...
phase of the moon2 is channel open in mumble mode, having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." True story Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase of the moon. There is a little subroutine that had ...
phase of the moon3 is MIT to calculate an approximation to the moon's true phase. GLS incorporated this routine into a LISP program that, when it wrote out a file, would print a timestamp line almost 80 characters long. Very occasionally t...
phase of the moon4 is and would overflow onto the next line, and when the file was later read back in the program would {barf}. The length of the first line depended on both the precise date and time and the length of the phase specificatio...
phase of the moon5 is bug literally depended on the phase of the moon! The first paper edition of the Jargon File (Steele-1983) included an example of one of the timestamp lines that exhibited this bug, but the typesetter `corrected' it. Th...
phreaking is [from `phone phreak'] n. 1. The art and science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make free long-distance calls). 2. By extension, security-cracking in any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on co...
phreaking2 is phreaking was a semi-respectable activity among hackers; there was a gentleman's agreement that phreaking as an intellectual game and a form of exploration was OK, but serious theft of services was taboo. There was significant c...
phreaking3 is hard-core phone phreaks who ran semi-underground networks of their own through such media as the legendary `TAP Newsletter'. This ethos began to break down in the mid-1980s as wider dissemination of the techniques put them in ...
phreaking4 is the same time, changes in the phone network made old-style technical ingenuity less effective as a way of hacking it, so phreaking came to depend more on overtly criminal acts such as stealing phone-card numbers. The crimes an...
phreaking5 is turned that game very ugly. A few old-time hackers still phreak casually just to keep their hand in, but most these days have hardly even heard of `blue boxes' or any of the other paraphernalia of the great phreaks of yore.
pico- is [SI a quantifier meaning * 10^-12] pref. Smaller than {nano-}; used in the same rather loose connotative way as {nano-} and {micro-}. This usage is not yet common in the way {nano-} and {micro-} are, but should be instantly recog...
pico-2 is {{quantifiers}}, {micro-}.
run like a pig is v. To run very slowly on given hardware, said of software. Distinct from {hog}.
pilot error is [Sun from aviation] n. A user's misconfiguration or misuse of a piece of software, producing apparently buglike results (compare {UBD}). "Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail that causes it to generate bogus headers." "That's ...
ping is [from the TCP/IP acronym `Packet INternet Groper', prob. originally contrived to match the submariners' term for a sonar pulse] 1. n. Slang term for a small network message (ICMP ECHO) sent by a computer to check for the presence and ...
ping2 is a phone greeting. See {ACK}, also {ENQ}. 2. vt. To verify the presence of. 3. vt. To get the attention of. From the UNIX command `ping(1)' that sends an ICMP ECHO packet to another host. 4. vt. To send a message to all members ...
ping3 is order to verify that everybody's addresses are reachable). "We haven't heard much of anything from Geoff, but he did respond with an ACK both times I pinged jargon-friends." The funniest use of `ping' to date was described in Janua...
ping4 is comp.sys.next. He was trying to isolate a faulty cable segment on a TCP/IP Ethernet hooked up to a NeXT machine, and got tired of having to run back to his console after each cabling tweak to see if the ping packets were getting th...
ping5 is on the NeXT, then wrote a script that repeatedly invoked `ping(8)', listened for an echo, and played back the recording on each returned packet. Result? A program that caused the machine to repeat, over and over, "Ping ... ping ......
ping6 is turned the volume to maximum, ferreted through the building with one ear cocked, and found a faulty tee connector in no time.
Pink-Shirt Book is `The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC'. The original cover featured a picture of Peter Norton with a silly smirk on his face, wearing a pink shirt. Perhaps in recognition of this usage, the current edition has...
Pink-Shirt Book2 is pink shirt. See also {{book titles}}.
PIP is /pip/ [Peripheral Interchange Program] vt.,obs. To copy; from the program PIP on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, and OS/8 (derived from a utility on the PDP-6) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about every other file ...
PIP2 is that when the program was originated, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was called ATLATL (`Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord').
pistol is [IBM] n. A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot. "UNIX `rm *' makes such a nice pistol!"
pizza box is [Sun] n. The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes. Two meg single-platter removable disk packs ...
pizza box2 is they were stuck into was referred to as a pizza oven. It's an index of progress that in the old days just the disk was pizza-sized, while now the entire computer is.
ANSI standard pizza is /an'see stan'd*rd peet'z*/ [CMU] Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because most pizzas ordered by CMU hackers during some period leading up to mid-1990 were of that flavor. See also {rotary debugger}; comp...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
pnambic2 is implementation or to the complexity of the system, requires human interaction to simulate or replace some or all of the actions, inputs, or outputs of the process or function. 2. Of or pertaining to a process or function whose a...
pnambic3 is falsified. 3. Requiring {prestidigitization}. The ultimate pnambic product was "Dan Bricklin's Demo", a program which supported flashy user-interface design prototyping. There is a related maxim among hackers "Any sufficiently ...
pnambic4 is a rigged demo." See {magic}, sense 1, for illumination of this point.
pod is [allegedly from acronym POD for `Prince Of Darkness'] n. A Diablo 630 (or, latterly, any letter-quality impact printer). From the DEC-10 PODTYPE program used to feed formatted text to it. See also {P.O.D.}
poke is n.,vt. See {peek}.
poll is v.,n. 1. [techspeak] The action of checking the status of an input line, sensor, or memory location to see if a particular external event has been registered. 2. To repeatedly call or check with someone "I keep polling him, but he's n...
poll2 is out." 3. To ask. "Lunch? I poll for a takeout order daily."
polygon pusher is n. A chip designer who spends most of his or her time at the physical layout level (which requires drawing *lots* of multi-colored polygons). Also `rectangle slinger'.
POM is /P-O-M/ n. Common acronym for {phase of the moon}. Usage usually in the phrase `POM-dependent', which means {flaky}.
pop is [from the operation that removes the top of a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on the stack] (also capitalized `POP' /pop/) 1. vt. To remove something from a {stack} or {pdl}. If a person says he/she has po...
pop2 is he/she has finally finished working on it and can now remove it from the list of things hanging overhead. 2. When a discussion gets to too deep a level of detail so that the main point of the discussion is being lost, someone will s...
pop3 is level!" The shout is frequently accompanied by an upthrust arm with a finger pointing to the ceiling.
POPJ is /pop'J/ [from a {PDP-10} return-from-subroutine instruction] n.,v. To return from a digression. By verb doubling, "Popj, popj" means roughly "Now let's see, where were we?" See {RTI}.
posing is n. On a {MUD}, the use of `' or an equivalent command to announce to other players that one is taking a certain physical action that has no effect on the game (it may, however, serve as a social signal or propaganda device that induc...
posing2 is example, if one's character name is Firechild, one might type ` looks delighted at the idea and begins hacking on the nearest terminal' to broadcast a message that says "Firechild looks delighted at the idea and begins hacking on ...
post is v. To send a message to a {mailing list} or {newsgroup}. Distinguished in context from `mail'; one might ask, for example "Are you going to post the patch or mail it to known users?"
posting is n. Noun corresp. to v. {post} (but note that {post} can be nouned). Distinguished from a `letter' or ordinary {email} message by the fact that it is broadcast rather than point-to-point. It is not clear whether messages sent to a ...
posting2 is perhaps the best dividing line is that if you don't know the names of all the potential recipients, it is a posting.
postmaster is n. The email contact and maintenance person at a site connected to the Internet or UUCPNET. Often, but not always, the same as the {admin}. It is conventional for each machine to have a `postmaster' address that is aliased to t...
pound on is vt. Syn. {bang on}.
power cycle is vt. (also, `cycle power' or just `cycle') To power off a machine and then power it on immediately, with the intention of clearing some kind of {hung} or {gronk}ed state. Syn. {120 reset}; see also {Big Red Switch}. Compare {V...
power cycle2 is see the AI Koan in appendix A about Tom Knight and the novice.
PPN is /P-P-N/, /pip'n/ [from `Project-Programmer Number'] n. A user-ID under {{TOPS-10}} and its various mutant progeny at SAIL, BBN, CompuServe, and elsewhere. Old-time hackers from the PDP-10 era sometimes use this to refer to user IDs on ...
precedence lossage is /pre's*-dens los'*j/ [C programmers] n. Coding error in an expression due to unexpected grouping of arithmetic or logical operators by the compiler. Used esp. of certain common coding errors in C due to the nonintuitivel...
precedence lossage2 is `<<', and `>>' (for this reason, experienced C programmers deliberately forget the language's {baroque} precedence hierarchy and parenthesize defensively). Can always be avoided by suitable use of parentheses. {LISP}...
precedence lossage3 is happen in *their* favorite language, which eschews precedence entirely, requiring one to use explicit parentheses everywhere. See {aliasing bug}, {memory leak}, {smash the stack}, {fandango on core}, {overrun screw}.
prepend is /pree`pend'/ [by analogy with `append'] vt. To prefix. As with `append' (but not `prefix' or `suffix' as a verb), the direct object is always the thing being added and not the original word (or character string, or whatever). "If ...
prepend2 is translation routine will pass it through unaltered."
prestidigitization is /pres`t*-di`j*-ti-zay'sh*n/ n. 1. The act of putting something into digital notation via sleight of hand. 2. Data entry through legerdemain.
pretty pictures is n. [scientific computation] The next step up from {numbers}. Interesting graphical output from a program that may not have any sensible relationship to the system the program is intended to model. Good for showing to {mana...
prettyprint is /prit'ee-print/ (alt. `pretty-print') v. 1. To generate `pretty' human-readable output from a {hairy} internal representation; esp. used for the process of {grind}ing (sense 2) LISP code. 2. To format in some particularly slick...
pretzel key is [Mac users] n. See {command key}.
prime time is [from TV programming] n. Normal high-usage hours on a timesharing system; the day shift. Avoidance of prime time is a major reason for {night mode} hacking.
priority interrupt is [from the hardware term] n. Describes any stimulus compelling enough to yank one right out of {hack mode}. Classically used to describe being dragged away by an {SO} for immediate sex, but may also refer to more mundane i...
priority interrupt2 is in the near vicinity. Also called an {NMI} (non-maskable interrupt), especially in PC-land.
profile is n. 1. A control file for a program, esp. a text file automatically read from each user's home directory and intended to be easily modified by the user in order to customize the program's behavior. Used to avoid {hardcoded} choices....
profile2 is time spent in each routine of a program, used to find and {tune} away the {hot spot}s in it. This sense is often verbed. Some profiling modes report units other than time (such as call counts) and/or report at granularities other...
proglet is /prog'let/ [UK] n. A short extempore program written to meet an immediate, transient need. Often written in BASIC, rarely more than a dozen lines long, and contains no subroutines. The largest amount of code that can be written off...
proglet2 is any editing, and that runs correctly the first time (this amount varies significantly according to the language one is using). Compare {toy program}, {noddy}, {one-liner wars}.
program is n. 1. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input into error messages. 2. An exercise in experimental epistemology. 3. A form of art, ostensibly intended for the instruction of computers, which is neverthele...
program2 is programmers can't understand it.
Programmer's Cheer is "Shift to the left! Shift to the right! Pop up, push down! Byte! Byte! Byte!" A joke so old it has hair on it.
programming is n. 1. The art of debugging a blank sheet of paper (or, in these days of on-line editing, the art of debugging an empty file). 2. n. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward...
programming2 is clothes on (although clothes are not mandatory).
propeller head is n. Used by hackers, this is syn. with {computer geek}. Non-hackers sometimes use it to describe all techies. Prob. derives from SF fandom's tradition (originally invented by old-time fan Ray Faraday Nelson) of propeller bean...
propeller head2 is actually wears them except as a joke).
propeller key is [Mac users] n. See {command key}.
proprietary is adj. 1. In {marketroid}-speak, superior; implies a product imbued with exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of the company's hardware or software designers. 2. In the language of hackers and users, inferior; implies a pr...
proprietary2 is standards, and thus one that puts the customer at the mercy of a vendor able to gouge freely on service and upgrade charges after the initial sale has locked the customer in (that's assuming it wasn't too expensive in the first...
protocol is n. As used by hackers, this never refers to niceties about the proper form for addressing letters to the Papal Nuncio or the order in which one should use the forks in a Russian-style place setting; hackers don't care about such th...
protocol2 is set of rules that allow different machines or pieces of software to coordinate with each other without ambiguity. So, for example, it does include niceties about the proper form for addressing packets on a network or the order in...
protocol3 is Philosophers Problem. It implies that there is some common message format and an accepted set of primitives or commands that all parties involved understand, and that transactions among them follow predictable logical sequences. ...
provocative maintenance is [common ironic mutation of `preventive maintenance'] n. Actions performed upon a machine at regularly scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable state. So called because it is all too often pe...
provocative maintenance2 is know what he is doing; this results in the machine's remaining in an *un*usable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See also {scratch monkey}.
prowler is [UNIX] n. A {daemon} that is run periodically (typically once a week) to seek out and erase {core} files, truncate administrative logfiles, nuke `lost+found' directories, and otherwise clean up the {cruft} that tends to pile up in t...
prowler2 is {GFR}, {reaper}, {skulker}.
pseudo is /soo'doh/ [USENET truncation of `pseudonym'] n. 1. An electronic-mail or {USENET} persona adopted by a human for amusement value or as a means of avoiding negative repercussions of one's net.behavior; a `nom de USENET', often associa...
pseudo2 is message origins. Perhaps the best-known and funniest hoax of this type is {BIFF}. 2. Notionally, a {flamage}-generating AI program simulating a USENET user. Many flamers have been accused of actually being such entities, despite...
pseudo3 is sophistication yet exists. However, in 1989 there was a famous series of forged postings that used a phrase-frequency-based travesty generator to simulate the styles of several well-known flamers; it was based on large samples of t...
pseudo4 is Press}). A significant number of people were fooled by the forgeries, and the debate over their authenticity was settled only when the perpetrator came forward to publicly admit the hoax.
pseudoprime is n. A backgammon prime (six consecutive occupied points) with one point missing. This term is an esoteric pun derived from a mathematical method that, rather than determining precisely whether a number is prime (has no divisors)...
pseudoprime2 is whether the number is `probably' prime. A number that passes this test is called a pseudoprime. The hacker backgammon usage stems from the idea that a pseudoprime is almost as good as a prime it does the job of a prime until ...
pseudosuit is /soo'doh-s[y]oot`/ n. A {suit} wannabee; a hacker who has decided that he wants to be in management or administration and begins wearing ties, sport coats, and (shudder!) suits voluntarily. It's his funeral. See also {lobotomy}...
psychedelicware is /si`k*-del'-ik-weir/ [UK] n. Syn. {display hack}. See also {smoking clover}.
psyton is /si'ton/ [TMRC] n. The elementary particle carrying the sinister force. The probability of a process losing is proportional to the number of psytons falling on it. Psytons are generated by observers, which is why demos are more lik...
psyton2 is watching. [This term appears to have been largely superseded by {bogon}; see also {quantum bogodynamics}. --- ESR]
pubic directory is [NYU] (also `pube directory' /pyoob' d*-rek't*-ree/) n. The `pub' (public) directory on a machine that allows {FTP} access. So called because it is the default location for {SEX} (sense 1). "I'll have the source in the p...
puff is vt. To decompress data that has been crunched by Huffman coding. At least one widely distributed Huffman decoder program was actually *named* `PUFF', but these days it is usually packaged with the encoder. Oppose {huff}.
punched card is alt. `punch card' [techspeak] n.obs. The signature medium of computing's {Stone Age}, now obsolescent outside of some IBM shops. The punched card actually predated computers considerably, originating in 1801 as a control devic...
punched card2 is patented by Hollerith and used with mechanical tabulating machines in the 1890 U.S. Census was a piece of cardboard about 90 mm by 215 mm, designed to fit exactly in the currency trays used for that era's larger dollar bills. ...
punched card3 is manufacturer) married the punched card to computers, encoding binary information as patterns of small rectangular holes; one character per column, 80 columns per card. Other coding schemes, sizes of card, and hole shapes we...
punched card4 is width of most character terminals is a legacy of the IBM punched card; so is the size of the quick-reference cards distributed with many varieties of computers even today. See {chad}, {chad box}, {eighty-column mind}, {green ...
punt is [from the punch line of an old joke referring to American football "Drop back 15 yards and punt!"] v. 1. To give up, typically without any intention of retrying. "Let's punt the movie tonight." "I was going to hack all night to get t...
punt2 is mean that you've decided not to stay up all night, and may also mean you're not ever even going to put in the feature. 2. More specifically, to give up on figuring out what the {Right Thing} is and resort to an inefficient hack. 3...
punt3 is problem, typically because one cannot define what is desirable sufficiently well to frame an algorithmic solution. "No way to know what the right form to dump the graph in is --- we'll punt that for now." 4. To hand a tricky impleme...
punt4 is the design. "It's too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the runtime system."
Purple Book is n. The `System V Interface Definition'. The covers of the first editions were an amazingly nauseating shade of off-lavender. See also {{book titles}}.
push is [from the operation that puts the current information on a stack, and the fact that procedure return addresses are saved on a stack] Also PUSH /push/ or PUSHJ /push'J/ (the latter based on the PDP-10 procedure call instruction). 1. To...
push2 is one says that something has been pushed onto one's stack, it means that the Damoclean list of things hanging over ones's head has grown longer and heavier yet. This may also imply that one will deal with it *before* other pending i...
push3 is was `added to my queue'. 2. vi. To enter upon a digression, to save the current discussion for later. Antonym of {pop}; see also {stack}, {pdl}.*quad n. 1. Two bits; syn. for {quarter}, {crumb}, {tayste}. 2. A four-pack of anything ...
push4 is box glyph used in the APL language for various arcane purposes mostly related to I/O. Former Ivy-Leaguers and Oxbridge types are said to associate it with nostalgic memories of dear old University.
quadruple bucky is n., obs. 1. On an MIT {space-cadet keyboard}, use of all four of the shifting keys (control, meta, hyper, and super) while typing a character key. 2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in {raw mode}, use of four shift keys while...
quadruple bucky2 is shift keys are the control and meta keys on *both* sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your left hand, the right-control and ...
quadruple bucky3 is fifth key with your nose. Quadruple-bucky combinations were very seldom used in practice, because when one invented a new command one usually assigned it to some character that was easier to type. If you want to imply th...
quadruple bucky4 is or features, you can say something like "Oh, the command that makes it spin the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is quadruple-bucky-cokebottle." See {double bucky}, {bucky bits}, {cokebottle}.
quantifiers is In techspeak and jargon, the standard metric prefixes used in the SI (Syst`eme International) conventions for scientific measurement have dual uses. With units of time or things that come in powers of 10, such as money, they re...
quantifiers2 is by powers of 1000 = 10^3. But when used with bytes or other things that naturally come in powers of 2, they usually denote multiplication by powers of 1024 = 2^{10}. The binary peta- and exa- loadings are not in common us...
quantifiers3 is multiplication by 1000^{-1}, has always been rare (there is, however, a standard joke about the `millihelen' --- notionally, the amount of beauty required to launch one ship). See the entries on {micro-}, {pico-}, and {nano-...
quantifiers4 is use of these terms. `Femto' and `atto' (which, interestingly, derive not from Greek but from Danish) have not yet acquired jargon loadings, though it is easy to predict what those will be once computing technology enters the...
quantifiers5 is {attoparsec}). There are, of course, some standard unit prefixes for powers of 10. In the following table, the `prefix' column is the international standard suffix for the appropriate power of ten; the `binary' column lists ...
quantifiers6 is corresponding power of 2. The B-suffixed forms are commonly used for byte quantities; the words `meg' and `gig' are nouns which may (but do not always) pluralize with `s'. Confusingly, hackers often use K as though it were...
quantifiers7 is prefix; thus "2K dollars". This is also true (though less commonly) of G and M. Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is `k'; some use this strictly, reserving `K' for multiplication by 1024 (KB is `kilobytes'). K...
quantifiers8 is bytes; thus, 64G is 64 gigabytes and `a K' is a kilobyte (compare mainstream use of `a G' as short for `a grand', that is, $1000). Whether one pronounces `gig' with hard or soft `g' depends on what one thinks the proper pron...
quantifiers9 is 1024 (or other powers of 2 and 10 close in magnitude) --- for example, describing a memory in units of 500K or 524K instead of 512K --- is a sure sign of the {marketroid}.
quantum bogodynamics is /kwon'tm boh`goh-di-nam'iks/ n. A theory that characterizes the universe in terms of bogon sources (such as politicians, used-car salesmen, TV evangelists, and {suit}s in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and com...
quantum bogodynamics2 is Bogon absorption, of course, causes human beings to behave mindlessly and machines to fail (and may also cause both to emit secondary bogons); however, the precise mechanics of the bogon-computron interaction are not y...
quantum bogodynamics3 is Quantum bogodynamics is most often invoked to explain the sharp increase in hardware and software failures in the presence of suits; the latter emit bogons, which the former absorb. See {bogon}, {computron}, {suit}, ...
quarter is n. Two bits. This in turn comes from the `pieces of eight' famed in pirate movies --- Spanish gold pieces that could be broken into eight pie-slice-shaped `bits' to make change. Early in American history the Spanish coin was consi...
quarter2 is `bits' was considered worth 12.5 cents. Syn. {tayste}, {crumb}, {quad}. Usage rare. See also {nickle}, {nybble}, {{byte}}, {dynner}.
ques is /kwes/ 1. n. The question mark character (`?', ASCII 0111111). 2. interj. What? Also frequently verb-doubled as "Ques ques?" See {wall}.
quick-and-dirty is adj. Describes a {crock} put together under time or user pressure. Used esp. when you want to convey that you think the fast way might lead to trouble further down the road. "I can have a quick-and-dirty fix in place tonig...
quick-and-dirty2 is module to solve the underlying design problem." See also {kluge}.
quote chapter and verse is [by analogy with the mainstream phrase] v. To reproduce a relevant excerpt from an appropriate {bible}. "I don't care if `rn' gets it wrong; `Followup-To poster' is explicitly permitted by RFC-1036. I'll quote chap...
quotient is n. See {coefficient}.
quux is /kwuhks/ Mythically, from the Latin semi-deponent verb quuxo, quuxare, quuxandum iri; noun form variously `quux' (plural `quuces', anglicized to `quuxes') and `quuxu' (genitive plural is `quuxuum', for four u-letters out of seven in al...
quux2 is Scrabble).] 1. Originally, a metasyntactic variable like {foo} and {foobar}. Invented by Guy Steele for precisely this purpose when he was young and na"ive and not yet interacting with the real computing community. Many people in...
quux3 is been lucky enough to have spread a little. In an eloquent display of poetic justice, it has returned to the originator in the form of a nickname. 2. interj. See {foo}; however, denotes very little disgust, and is uttered mostly fo...
quux4 is in his persona as `The Great Quux', which is somewhat infamous for light verse and for the `Crunchly' cartoons. 4. In some circles, quux is used as a punning opposite of `crux'. "Ah, that's the quux of the matter!" implies that the ...
quux5 is ice-cube}). 5. quuxy adj. Of or pertaining to a quux.
qux is /kwuhks/ The fourth of the standard metasyntactic variables, after {baz} and before the quu(u...)x series. See {foo}, {bar}, {baz}, {quux}. This appears to be a recent mutation from {quux}, and many versions of the standard series j...
QWERTY is /kwer'tee/ [from the keycaps at the upper left] adj. Pertaining to a standard English-language typewriter keyboard (sometimes called the Sholes keyboard after its inventor), as opposed to Dvorak or foreign-language layouts or a {spac...
QWERTY2 is Historical note The QWERTY layout is a fine example of a {fossil}. It is sometimes said that it was designed to slow down the typist, but this is wrong; it was designed to allow *faster* typing --- under a constraint now long obsole...
QWERTY3 is nearby type-bars jammed the mechanism. So Sholes fiddled the layout to separate the letters of many common digraphs (he did a far from perfect job, though; `th', `tr', `ed', and `er', for example, each use two nearby keys). Also, ...
QWERTY4 is line allowed it to be typed with particular speed and accuracy for {demo}s. The jamming problem was essentially solved soon afterward by a suitable use of springs, but the keyboard layout lives on.*rain dance n. 1. Any ceremonial a...
QWERTY5 is with the expectation that nothing will be accomplished. This especially applies to reseating printed circuit boards, reconnecting cables, etc. "I can't boot up the machine. We'll have to wait for Greg to do his rain dance." 2. An...
QWERTY6 is computers or software in order to achieve some goal; the term is usually restricted to rituals that include both an {incantation} or two and physical activity or motion. Compare {magic}, {voodoo programming}, {black art}.
random is adj. 1. Unpredictable (closest to mathematical definition); weird. "The system's been behaving pretty randomly." 2. Assorted; undistinguished. "Who was at the conference?" "Just a bunch of random business types." 3. (pejorative...
random2 is just a random loser." 4. Incoherent or inelegant; poorly chosen; not well organized. "The program has a random set of misfeatures." "That's a random name for that function." "Well, all the names were chosen pretty randomly." 5...
random3 is deterministic. "The I/O channels are in a pool, and when a file is opened one is chosen randomly." 6. Arbitrary. "It generates a random name for the scratch file." 7. Gratuitously wrong, i.e., poorly done and for no good apparen...
random4 is handles file name defaulting in a particularly useless way, or an assembler routine that could easily have been coded using only three registers, but redundantly uses seven for values with non-overlapping lifetimes, so that no one e...
random5 is extra registers. What {randomness}! 8. n. A random hacker; used particularly of high-school students who soak up computer time and generally get in the way. 9. n. Anyone who is not a hacker (or, sometimes, anyone not known to the ...
random6 is "I went to the talk, but the audience was full of randoms asking bogus questions". 10. n. (occasional MIT usage) One who lives at Random Hall. See also {J. Random}, {some random X}.
random numbers is n. When one wishes to specify a large but random number of things, and the context is inappropriate for {N}, certain numbers are preferred by hacker tradition (that is, easily recognized as placeholders). These include the f...
random numbers2 is as `the least random number'; see 23. 23 Sacred number of Eris, Goddess of Discord (along with 17 and 5). 42 The Answer to the Ultimate Question of Life, the Universe, and Everything. (Note that ...
random numbers3 is 69 From the sexual act. This one was favored in MIT's ITS culture. 105 69 hex = 105 decimal, and 69 decimal = 105 octal. 666 The Number of the Beast. For further enlightenment, consult the `Pr...
random numbers4 is to the Galaxy', `The Joy of Sex', and the Christian Bible (Revelation 138). See also {Discordianism} or consult your pineal gland. One common rhetorical maneuver uses any of the canonical random numbers as placeholders fo...
random numbers5 is arguments, for arbitrary values of 42." "There are 69 ways to leave your lover, for 69 = 50." This is especially likely when the speaker has uttered a random number and realizes that it was not recognized as such, but even ...
random numbers6 is this fashion. A related joke is that pi equals 3 --- for small values of pi and large values of 3.
randomness is n. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. Also, a {hack} or {crock} that depends on a complex combination of coincidences (or, possibly, the combination upon which the crock depends for its accidental failure to malfu...
randomness2 is 40--57 by putting the character in the four-bit accumulator field of an XCT and then extracting six bits --- the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are the right thing." "What randomness!"
rape is vt. 1. To {screw} someone or something, violently; in particular, to destroy a program or information irrecoverably. Often used in describing file-system damage. "So-and-so was running a program that did absolute disk I/O and ended up...
rape2 is a piece of hardware for parts.
rare mode is [UNIX] adj. CBREAK mode (character-by-character with interrupts enabled). Distinguished from {raw mode} and `cooked mode'; the phrase "a sort of half-cooked (rare?) mode" is used in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode. Usage...
raster blaster is n. [Cambridge] Specialized hardware for {bitblt} operations (a {blitter}). Allegedly inspired by `Rasta Blasta', British slang for the sort of portable stereo Americans call a `boom box' or `ghetto blaster'.
raster burn is n. Eyestrain brought on by too many hours of looking at low-res, poorly tuned, or glare-ridden monitors, esp. graphics monitors. See {terminal illness}.
rat belt is n. A cable tie, esp. the sawtoothed, self-locking plastic kind that you can remove only by cutting (as opposed to a random twist of wire or a twist tie or one of those humongous metal clip frobs). Small cable ties are `mouse belts...
rave is [WPI] vi. 1. To persist in discussing a specific subject. 2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows very little. 3. To complain to a person who is not in a position to correct the difficulty. 4. To purposely anno...
rave2 is evangelize. See {flame}. 6. Also used to describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly bullshitting. `Rave' differs slightly from {flame} in that `rave' implies that it is the persistence or obliviousness of the pers...
rave3 is implies somewhat more strongly that the tone is offensive as well.
rave on! is imp. Sarcastic invitation to continue a {rave}, often by someone who wishes the raver would get a clue but realizes this is unlikely.
ravs is /ravz/, also `Chinese ravs' n. Jiao-zi (steamed or boiled) or Guo-tie (pan-fried). A Chinese appetizer, known variously in the plural as dumplings, pot stickers (the literal translation of guo-tie), and (around Boston) `Peking Ravioli...
ravs2 is which among hackers always means the Chinese kind rather than the Italian kind. Both consist of a filling in a pasta shell, but the Chinese kind includes no cheese, uses a thinner pasta, has a pork-vegetable filling (good ones incl...
ravs3 is either by steaming or frying. A rav or dumpling can be cooked any way, but a potsticker is always the fried kind (so called because it sticks to the frying pot and has to be scraped off). "Let's get hot-and-sour soup and three ord...
raw mode is n. A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O device without any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Compare {rare}. This is techspeak under UNIX, jargon elsewhere.
rc file is /R-C fil/ [UNIX from the startup script `/etc/rc', but this is commonly believed to have been named after older scripts to `run commands'] n. Script file containing startup instructions for an application program (or an entire ope...
rc file2 is commands of the sort that might have been invoked manually once the system was running but are to be executed automatically each time the system starts up. See also {dot file}.
RE is /R-E/ n. Common spoken and written shorthand for {regexp}.
read-only user is n. Describes a {luser} who uses computers almost exclusively for reading USENET, bulletin boards, and/or email, rather than writing code or purveying useful information. See {twink}, {terminal junkie}, {lurker}.
README file is n. By convention, the top-level directory of a UNIX source distribution always contains a file named `README' (or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or some other variant), which is a hacker's-eye introduction containing a pointer to mor...
README file2 is miscellaneous revision history notes, etc. When asked, hackers invariably relate this to the famous scene in Lewis Carroll's `Alice's Adventures In Wonderland' in which Alice confronts magic munchies labeled "Eat Me" and "Drink...
real estate is n. May be used for any critical resource measured in units of area. Most frequently used of `chip real estate', the area available for logic on the surface of an integrated circuit (see also {nanoacre}). May also be used of fl...
real estate2 is on a crowded desktop (whether physical or electronic).
real hack is n. A {crock}. This is sometimes used affectionately; see {hack}.
real operating system is n. The sort the speaker is used to. People from the academic community are likely to issue comments like "System V? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?", people from the commercial/industrial UNIX sector are...
real operating system2 is a *real* operating system?", and people from IBM object "UNIX? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?" See {holy wars}, {religious issues}, {proprietary}, {Get a real computer!}
real programmer is [indirectly, from the book `Real Men Don't Eat Quiche'] n. A particular sub-variety of hacker one possessed of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when justified by experience. The archetypal `real p...
real programmer2 is metal} and is very good at same, remembers the binary opcodes for every machine he has ever programmed, thinks that HLLs are sissy, and uses a debugger to edit his code because full-screen editors are for wimps. Real Pro...
real programmer3 is been {bum}med into a state of {tense}ness just short of rupture. Real Programmers never use comments or write documentation "If it was hard to write", says the Real Programmer, "it should be hard to understand." Real Pr...
real programmer4 is were never in their spec sheets; in fact, they are seldom really happy unless doing so. A Real Programmer's code can awe with its fiendish brilliance, even as its crockishness appalls. Real Programmers live on junk food a...
real programmer5 is walls, and terrify the crap out of other programmers --- because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand their code in order to change it. Their successors generally consider it a {Good Thing} that there are...
real programmer6 is For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait of a Real Programmer, see "The Story of Mel" in appendix A.
Real Soon Now is [orig. from SF's fanzine community, popularized by Jerry Pournelle's column in `BYTE'] adv. 1. Supposed to be available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever) real soon now according to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical....
Real Soon Now2 is commitments permit one to get to it (in other words, don't hold your breath). Often abbreviated RSN.
real time is 1. [techspeak] adj. Describes an application which requires a program to respond to stimuli within some small upper limit of response time (typically milli- or microseconds). Process control at a chemical plant is the classic exa...
real time2 is special operating systems (because everything else must take a back seat to response time) and speed-tuned hardware. 2. adv. In jargon, refers to doing something while people are watching or waiting. "I asked her how to find the...
real time3 is stack and she came up with an algorithm in real time."
real user is n. 1. A commercial user. One who is paying *real* money for his computer usage. 2. A non-hacker. Someone using the system for an explicit purpose (a research project, a course, etc.) other than pure exploration. See {user}. H...
real user2 is real users. "I need this fixed so I can do a problem set. I'm not complaining out of randomness, but as a real user." See also {luser}.
Real World is n. 1. Those institutions at which `programming' may be used in the same sentence as `FORTRAN', `{COBOL}', `RPG', `{IBM}', `DBASE', etc. Places where programs do such commercially necessary but intellectually uninspiring things a...
Real World2 is 2. The location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 3. A bizarre dimension in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5 (see {code grinder}...
Real World3 is fellow, he's left MIT and gone into the Real World." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In conversation, talking of someone who has entered the Real World is not unlike speaking of a deceased person. See also ...
reality check is n. 1. The simplest kind of test of software or hardware; doing the equivalent of asking it what 2 + 2 is and seeing if you get 4. The software equivalent of a {smoke test}. 2. The act of letting a {real user} try out proto...
reaper is n. A {prowler} that {GFR}s files. A file removed in this way is said to have been `reaped'.
rectangle slinger is n. See {polygon pusher}.
recursion is n. See {recursion}. See also {tail recursion}.
recursive acronym is pl.n. A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose acronyms that refer humorously to themselves or to other acronyms. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE ("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Wa...
recursive acronym2 is a Scheme compiler called LIAR (Liar Imitates Apply Recursively), and {GNU} (q.v., sense 1) stands for "GNU's Not UNIX!" --- and a company with the name CYGNUS, which expands to "Cygnus, Your GNU Support". See also {mung...
Red Book is n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard references on PostScript (`PostScript Language Reference Manual', Adobe Systems (Addison-Wesley, 1985; QA76.73.P67P67; ISBN 0-201-10174-2); the others are known as the {Green Book} ...
Red Book2 is one of the 3 standard references on Smalltalk (`Smalltalk-80 The Interactive Programming Environment' by Adele Goldberg (Addison-Wesley, 1984; QA76.8.S635G638; ISBN 0-201-11372-4); this too is associated with blue and green book...
Red Book3 is CCITT eighth plenary assembly. Until now, these have changed color each review cycle (1988 was {Blue Book}, 1992 will be {Green Book}); however, it is rumored that this convention is going to be dropped before 1992. These incl...
Red Book4 is and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. 4. The new version of the {Green Book} (sense 4) --- IEEE 1003.1-1990, a.k.a ISO 9945-1 --- is (because of the color and the fact that it is printed on A4 paper) known in the U.S.A. as "th...
Red Book5 is and in Europe as "the Ugly Red Book That's A Sensible Size". 5. The NSA `Trusted Network Interpretation' companion to the {Orange Book}. See also {{book titles}}.
regexp is /reg'eksp/ [UNIX] n. (alt. `regex' or `reg-ex') 1. Common written and spoken abbreviation for `regular expression', one of the wildcard patterns used, e.g., by UNIX utilities such as `grep(1)', `sed(1)', and `awk(1)'. These use con...
regexp2 is those described under {glob}. For purposes of this lexicon, it is sufficient to note that regexps also allow complemented character sets using `^'; thus, one can specify `any non-alphabetic character' with `[^A-Za-z]'. 2. Name o...
regexp3 is portable C, written by revered USENETter Henry Spencer (henry@zoo.toronto.edu).
reinvent the wheel is v. To design or implement a tool equivalent to an existing one or part of one, with the implication that doing so is silly or a waste of time. This is often a valid criticism. On the other hand, automobiles don't use woo...
reinvent the wheel2 is be reinvented many times before you get them right. On the third hand, people reinventing the wheel do tend to come up with the moral equivalent of a trapezoid with an offset axle.
religious issues is n. Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off {holy wars}, such as "What is the best operating system (or editor, language, architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?", "What about that Heinlein gu...
religious issues2 is Jargon File?" See {holy wars}; see also {theology}, {bigot}. This term is an example of {ha ha only serious}. People actually develop the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when the t...
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
sleep is vi. 1. [techspeak] On a timesharing system, a process that relinquishes its claim on the scheduler until some given event occurs or a specified time delay elapses is said to `go to sleep'. 2. In jargon, used very similarly to v. {blo...
sleep2 is on'. Often used to indicate that the speaker has relinquished a demand for resources until some (possibly unspecified) external event "They can't get the fix I've been asking for into the next release, so I'm going to sleep on it ...
slim is n. A small, derivative change (e.g., to code).
slop is n. 1. A one-sided {fudge factor}, that is, an allowance for error but in only one of two directions. For example, if you need a piece of wire 10 feet long and have to guess when you cut it, you make very sure to cut it too long, by a ...
slop2 is short by even a little bit, because you can always cut off the slop but you can't paste it back on again. When discrete quantities are involved, slop is often introduced to avoid the possibility of being on the losing side of a {fence...
slop3 is code generated by a compiler over the size of equivalent assembler code produced by {hand-hacking}; i.e., the space (or maybe time) you lose because you didn't do it yourself. This number is often used as a measure of the goodness ...
slop4 is 10% is usually acceptable. With modern compiler technology, esp. on RISC machines, the compiler's slop may actually be *negative*; that is, humans may be unable to generate code as good. This is one of the reasons assembler program...
slopsucker is /slop'suhk-r/ n. A lowest-priority task that must wait around until everything else has `had its fill' of machine resources. Only when the machine would otherwise be idle is the task allowed to `suck up the slop'. Also called a...
slopsucker2 is slopsucker hunts for large prime numbers. Compare {background}.
slurp is vt. To read a large data file entirely into {core} before working on it. This may be contrasted with the strategy of reading a small piece at a time, processing it, and then reading the next piece. "This program slurps in a 1K-by-1K...
smart is adj. Said of a program that does the {Right Thing} in a wide variety of complicated circumstances. There is a difference between calling a program smart and calling it intelligent; in particular, there do not exist any intelligent pr...
smart2 is {robust} (smart programs can be {brittle}).
smart terminal is n. A terminal that has enough computing capability to render graphics or to offload some kind of front-end processing from the computer it talks to. The development of workstations and personal computers has made this term a...
smart terminal2 is semi-obsolescent, but one may still hear variants of the phrase `act like a smart terminal' used to describe the behavior of workstations or PCs with respect to programs that execute almost entirely out of a remote {server}'...
smart terminal3 is Compare {glass tty}. There is a classic quote from Rob Pike (inventor of the {blit} terminal) "A smart terminal is not a smart*ass* terminal, but rather a terminal you can educate." This illustrates a common design proble...
smart terminal4 is else) intelligent sometimes results in finicky, rigid `special features' that become just so much dead weight if you try to use the device in any way the designer didn't anticipate. Flexibility and programmability, on the...
smash case is vi. To lose or obliterate the uppercase/lowercase distinction in text input. "MS-DOS will automatically smash case in the names of all the files you create." Compare {fold case}.
smash the stack is [C programming] n. On many C implementations it is possible to corrupt the execution stack by writing past the end of an array declared `auto' in a routine. Code that does this is said to `smash the stack', and can cause re...
smash the stack2 is address. This can produce some of the most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind. Variants include `trash' the stack, {scribble} the stack, {mangle} the stack; the term *{mung} the stack is not used, as this is n...
smash the stack3 is also {aliasing bug}, {fandango on core}, {memory leak}, {precedence lossage}, {overrun screw}.
smiley is n. See {emoticon}.
smoke test is n. 1. A rudimentary form of testing applied to electronic equipment following repair or reconfiguration, in which power is applied and the tester checks for sparks, smoke, or other dramatic signs of fundamental failure. See {mag...
smoke test2 is of a piece of software after construction or a critical change. See and compare {reality check}. There is an interesting semi-parallel to this term among typographers and printers When new typefaces are being punch-cut by han...
smoke test3 is smoke, then press it onto paper) is used to check out new dies.
smoking clover is [ITS] n. A {display hack} originally due to Bill Gosper. Many convergent lines are drawn on a color monitor in {AOS} mode (so that every pixel struck has its color incremented). The lines all have one endpoint in the middle...
smoking clover2 is spaced one pixel apart around the perimeter of a large square. The color map is then repeatedly rotated. This results in a striking, rainbow-hued, shimmering four-leaf clover. Gosper joked about keeping it hidden from the...
smoking clover3 is Administration) lest its hallucinogenic properties cause it to be banned.
SMOP is /S-M-O-P/ [Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming] n. 1. A piece of code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is significantly greater than its complexity. Used to refer to a program that could obviously be written, but is not ...
SMOP2 is imply that a difficult problem can be easily solved because a program can be written to do it; the irony is that it is very clear that writing such a program will be a great deal of work. "It's easy to enhance a FORTRAN compiler to ...
SMOP3 is Often used ironically by the intended victim when a suggestion for a program is made which seems easy to the suggester, but is obviously (to the victim) a lot of work.
SNAFU principle is /sna'foo prin'si-pl/ [from WWII Army acronym for `Situation Normal, All Fucked Up'] n. "True communication is possible only between equals, because inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasan...
SNAFU principle2 is central tenet of {Discordianism}, often invoked by hackers to explain why authoritarian hierarchies screw up so reliably and systematically. The effect of the SNAFU principle is a progressive disconnection of decision-mak...
snail is vt. To {snail-mail} something. "Snail me a copy of those graphics, will you?"
snail-mail is n. Paper mail, as opposed to electronic. Sometimes written as the single word `SnailMail'. One's postal address is, correspondingly, a `snail address'. Derives from earlier coinage `USnail' (from `U.S. Mail'), for which there ...
snap is v. To replace a pointer to a pointer with a direct pointer; to replace an old address with the forwarding address found there. If you telephone the main number for an institution and ask for a particular person by name, the operator ma...
snap2 is connecting you, in the hopes that you will `snap your pointer' and dial direct next time. The underlying metaphor may be that of a rubber band stretched through a number of intermediate points; if you remove all the thumbtacks in the...
snap3 is first to last. See {chase pointers}. Often, the behavior of a {trampoline} is to perform an error check once and then snap the pointer that invoked it so as henceforth to bypass the trampoline (and its one-shot error check). In th...
snap4 is links'. For example, in a Lisp implementation, a function interface trampoline might check to make sure that the caller is passing the correct number of arguments; if it is, and if the caller and the callee are both compiled, then ...
snap5 is to use a direct procedure-call instruction with no further overhead.
snarf is /snarf/ vt. 1. To grab, esp. to grab a large document or file for the purpose of using it with or without the author's permission. See also {BLT}. 2. [in the UNIX community] To fetch a file or set of files across a network. See als...
snarf2 is late 1960s, meaning `to eat piggishly'. It may still have this connotation in context. "He's in the snarfing phase of hacking --- {FTP}ing megs of stuff a day." 3. To acquire, with little concern for legal forms or politesse (but...
snarf3 is away samples, so I snarfed a bunch of them." 4. Syn. for {slurp}. "This program starts by snarfing the entire database into core, then...."
snarf & barf is /snarf'n-barf`/ n. Under a {WIMP environment}, the act of grabbing a region of text and then stuffing the contents of that region into another region (or the same one) to avoid retyping a command line. In the late 1960s, this ...
snarf & barf2 is regret it later' cheap-restaurant expedition.
snarf down is v. To {snarf}, with the connotation of absorbing, processing, or understanding. "I'll snarf down the latest version of the {nethack} user's guide --- It's been a while since I played last and I don't know what's changed recentl...
snark is [Lewis Carroll, via the Michigan Terminal System] n. 1. A system failure. When a user's process bombed, the operator would get the message "Help, Help, Snark in MTS!" 2. More generally, any kind of unexplained or threatening event o...
snark2 is boojum). Often used to refer to an event or a log file entry that might indicate an attempted security violation. See {snivitz}. 3. UUCP name of snark.thyrsus.com, home site of the Jargon File 2.*.* versions (i.e., this lexicon)...
sneakernet is /snee'ker-net/ n. Term used (generally with ironic intent) for transfer of electronic information by physically carrying tape, disks, or some other media from one machine to another. "Never underestimate the bandwidth of a stati...
sneakernet2 is filled with CD-ROMs." Also called `Tennis-Net', `Armpit-Net', `Floppy-Net'.
sniff is v.,n. Synonym for {poll}.
snivitz is /sniv'itz/ n. A hiccup in hardware or software; a small, transient problem of unknown origin (less serious than a {snark}). Compare {glitch}.
SO is /S-O/ n. 1. (also `S.O.') Abbrev. for Significant Other, almost invariably written abbreviated and pronounced /S-O/ by hackers. Used to refer to one's primary relationship, esp. a live-in to whom one is not married. See {MOTAS}, {MOT...
SO2 is character in ASCII (Control-N, 0001110).
social science number is [IBM] n. A statistic that is {content-free}, or nearly so. A measure derived via methods of questionable validity from data of a dubious and vague nature. Predictively, having a social science number in hand is seldom...
social science number2 is considerably worse. {Management} loves them. See also {numbers}, {math-out}, {pretty pictures}.
soft boot is n. See {boot}.
softcopy is /soft'ko-pee/ n. [by analogy with `hardcopy'] A machine-readable form of corresponding hardcopy. See {bits}, {machinable}.
software bloat is n. The results of {second-system effect} or {creeping featuritis}. Commonly cited examples include `ls(1)', {X}, {BSD}, {Missed'em-five}, and {OS/2}.
software rot is n. Term used to describe the tendency of software that has not been used in a while to {lose}; such failure may be semi-humorously ascribed to {bit rot}. More commonly, `software rot' strikes when a program's assumptions becom...
software rot2 is insufficiently {robust}, this may cause it to fail in mysterious ways. For example, owing to endemic shortsightedness in the design of COBOL programs, most will succumb to software rot when their 2-digit year counters {wrap ...
software rot3 is Actually, related lossages often afflict centenarians who have to deal with computer software designed by unimaginative clods. One such incident became the focus of a minor public flap in 1990, when a gentleman born in 1889 a...
software rot4 is Raleigh, North Carolina. The new system refused to issue the card, probably because with 2-digit years the ages 101 and 1 cannot be distinguished. Historical note Software rot in an even funnier sense than the mythical one ...
software rot5 is (e.g., the R1; see {grind crank}). If a program that depended on a peculiar instruction hadn't been run in quite a while, the user might discover that the opcodes no longer did the same things they once did. ("Hey, so-and-...
software rot6 is We can {snarf} this opcode, right? No one uses it.") Another classic example of this sprang from the time an MIT hacker found a simple way to double the speed of the unconditional jump instruction on a PDP-6, so he patched ...
software rot7 is fragile timing software in a music-playing program, throwing its output out of tune. This was fixed by adding a defensive initialization routine to compare the speed of a timing loop with the real-time clock; in other words, ...
software rot8 is day, and corrected appropriately. Compare {bit rot}.
softwarily is /soft-weir'i-lee/ adv. In a way pertaining to software. "The system is softwarily unreliable." The adjective `softwary' is *not* used. See {hardwarily}.
softy is [IBM] n. Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant of the mysteries of hardware.
some random X is adj. Used to indicate a member of class X, with the implication that Xs are interchangeable. "I think some random cracker tripped over the guest timeout last night." See also {J. Random}.
sorcerer's apprentice mode is [from the film "Fantasia"] n. A bug in a protocol where, under some circumstances, the receipt of a message causes multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received, triggers the same bug. Used esp. of s...
sorcerer's apprentice mode2 is loops in {email} software. Compare {broadcast storm}, {network meltdown}.
SOS is n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously {losing} text editor. Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a {quick-and-dirty} `stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfo...
SOS2 is discarded when new ones (in particular, {TECO}) came along. SOS is a descendant (`Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to...
SOS3 is editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion `Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed). 2. /sos/ n. To decrease; inverse of {AOS}, from the PDP-10 instruction set.
source of all good bits is n. A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a {guru} might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly comp...
space-cadet keyboard is n. The Knight keyboard, a now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the design of {EMACS}. It was inspired by the Stanford keyboard and equipped wi...
space-cadet keyboard2 is keys for {bucky bits} (`control', `meta', `hyper', and `super') and three like regular shift keys, called `shift', `top', and `front'. Many keys had three symbols on them a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek ...
space-cadet keyboard3 is key had an `L' and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the front. And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyb...
space-cadet keyboard4 is characters! This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the command mean...
space-cadet keyboard5 is typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands to ope...
space-cadet keyboard6 is bucky}, {meta bit}, {quadruple bucky}.
SPACEWAR is n. A space-combat simulation game, inspired by E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and jumping through hyperspace. This game was first implemente...
SPACEWAR2 is aficionados formed the core of the early hacker culture at MIT. Nine years later, a descendant of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became {{UNIX}}. Less ...
SPACEWAR3 is commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are still {feep}ing in video arcades everywhere.
spaghetti code is n. Code with a complex and tangled control structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other `unstructured' branching constructs. Pejorative. The synonym `kangaroo code' has been reported, doubtless because such co...
spaghetti inheritance is n. [encountered among users of object-oriented languages that use inheritance, such as Smalltalk] A convoluted class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving subclasses from other classes just for the s...
spaghetti inheritance2 is (successful) attempt to discourage such practice, through guilt-by-association with {spaghetti code}.
spam is [from the {MUD} community] vt. To crash a program by overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also {buffer overflow}, {overrun screw}, {smash the stack}.
special-case is vt. To write unique code to handle input to or situations arising in program that are somehow distinguished from normal processing. This would be used for processing of mode switches or interrupt characters in an interactive i...
special-case2 is normal commands), or for processing of {hidden flag}s in the input of a batch program or {filter}.
speedometer is n. A pattern of lights displayed on a linear set of LEDs (today) or nixie tubes (yesterday, on ancient mainframes). The pattern is shifted left every N times the software goes through its main loop. A swiftly moving pattern in...
speedometer2 is speedometer slows down as the system becomes overloaded. The speedometer on Sun Microsystems hardware bounces back and forth like the eyes on one of the Cylons from the wretched "Battlestar Galactica" TV series. Historical n...
speedometer3 is 600) actually had an *analog* speedometer on the front panel, calibrated in instructions executed per second.
spell is n. Syn. {incantation}.
spiffy is /spi'fee/ adj. 1. Said of programs having a pretty, clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface. "Have you seen the spiffy {X} version of {empire} yet?" 2. Said sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more ...
spiffy2 is meaning should be drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to #1.
spin is vi. Equivalent to {buzz}. More common among C and UNIX programmers.
spl is /S-P-L/ [abbrev, from Set Priority Level] The way traditional UNIX kernels implement mutual exclusion by running code at high interrupt levels. Used in jargon to describe the act of tuning in or tuning out ordinary communication. Clas...
spl2 is at spl 6 today." would mean that he is very hard to interrupt. "Wait till I finish this; I'll spl down then." See also {interrupts locked out}.
splat is n. 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk (`*') character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the `squashed-bug' appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers. 2. [MIT] Name used by some peopl...
splat2 is [Rochester Institute of Technology] The {command key} on a Mac (same as {ALT}, sense 2). 4. [Stanford] Name used by some people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This character is also called `blobby' and ...
splat3 is used by mathematicians as a notation for `tensor product'. 5. [Stanford] Name for the semi-mythical extended ASCII circle-plus character. 6. Canonical name for an output routine that outputs whatever the local interpretation of...
splat4 is 4--6 are now nearly obsolete. See also {{ASCII}}.
sponge is [UNIX] n. A special case of a {filter} that reads its entire input before writing any output; the canonical example is a sort utility. Unlike most filters, a sponge can conveniently overwrite the input file with the output data stre...
sponge2 is ITS did and VMS does now) the sponge/filter distinction loses its usefulness, because directing filter output would just write a new version. See also {slurp}.
spooge is /spooj/ 1. n. Inexplicable or arcane code, or random and probably incorrect output from a computer program. 2. vi. To generate spooge (sense 1).
spool is [from early IBM `Simultaneous Peripheral Operation Off-Line', but this acronym is widely thought to have been contrived for effect] vt. To send files to some device or program (a `spooler') that queues them up and does something usefu...
spool2 is understood is the `print spooler' controlling output of jobs to a printer, but the term has been used in connection with other peripherals (especially plotters and graphics devices). See also {demon}.
stack is n. A person's stack is the set of things he or she has to do in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked as having risen to the top of the stack. "I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this'll have to be pushed wa...
stack2 is because every time I pop my stack something new gets pushed." If you are interrupted several times in the middle of a conversation, "My stack overflowed" means "I forget what we were talking about." The implication is that more i...
stack3 is remembered, so the least recent items were lost. The usual physical example of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria a pile of plates or trays sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on the top they all sink down, ...
stack4 is spring up a bit. See also {push} and {pop}. At MIT, {pdl} used to be a more common synonym for {stack} in all these contexts, and this may still be true. Everywhere else {stack} seems to be the preferred term. {Knuth} (`The Art ...
stack5 is 1, p. 236) says Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues independently have given other names to these structures stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages, cellars, nesti...
stack6 is lists, and even yo-yo lists!
stack puke is n. Some processor architectures are said to `puke their guts onto the stack' to save their internal state during exception processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to 92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined ...
stale pointer bug is n. Synonym for {aliasing bug} used esp. among microcomputer hackers.
state is n. 1. Condition, situation. "What's the state of your latest hack?" "It's winning away." "The system tried to read and write the disk simultaneously and got into a totally wedged state." The standard question "What's your state?" ...
state2 is you about to do?" Typical answers are "about to gronk out", or "hungry". Another standard question is "What's the state of the world?", meaning "What's new?" or "What's going on?". The more terse and humorous way of asking these...
state3 is of phrasing the first question under sense 1 would be "state-p latest hack?". 2. Information being maintained in non-permanent memory (electronic or human).
steam-powered is adj. Old-fashioned or underpowered; archaic. This term does not have a strong negative loading and may even be used semi-affectionately for something that clanks and wheezes a lot but hangs in there doing the job.
stiffy is [University of Lowell, Massachusetts.] n. 3.5-inch {microfloppies}, so called because their jackets are more firm than those of the 5.25-inch and the 8-inch floppy. Elsewhere this might be called a `firmy'.
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
Suzie COBOL is /soo'zee koh'bol/ 1. [IBM prob. from Frank Zappa's `Suzy Creamcheese'] n. A coder straight out of training school who knows everything except the value of comments in plain English. Also (fashionable among personkind wishing to ...
Suzie COBOL2 is or (in some non-IBM circles) `Cobol Charlie'. 2. [proposed] Meta-name for any {code grinder}, analogous to {J. Random Hacker}.
swab is /swob/ [From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 `SWAp Byte' instruction, as immortalized in the `dd(1)' option `conv=swab' (see {dd})] 1. vt. To solve the {NUXI problem} by swapping bytes in a file. 2. n. The program in V7 UNIX used to perfo...
swab2 is equivalent to it. See also {big-endian}, {little-endian}, {middle-endian}, {bytesexual}.
swap is vt. 1. [techspeak] To move information from a fast-access memory to a slow-access memory (`swap out'), or vice versa (`swap in'). Often refers specifically to the use of disks as `virtual memory'. As pieces of data or program are nee...
swap2 is processing; when they are no longer needed they may be swapped out again. 2. The jargon use of these terms analogizes people's short-term memories with core. Cramming for an exam might be spoken of as swapping in. If you temporaril...
swap3 is it, your excuse is that it was swapped out. To `keep something swapped in' means to keep it fresh in your memory "I reread the TECO manual every few months to keep it swapped in." If someone interrupts you just as you got a good i...
swap4 is this out", implying that the piece of paper is your extra-somatic memory and if you don't swap the info out by writing it down it will get overwritten and lost as you talk. Compare {page in}, {page out}.
swap space is n. Storage space, especially temporary storage space used during a move or reconfiguration. "I'm just using that corner of the machine room for swap space."
swapped in is n. See {swap}. See also {page in}.
swapped out is n. See {swap}. See also {page out}.
swizzle is v. To convert external names, array indices, or references within a data structure into address pointers when the data structure is brought into main memory from external storage (also called `pointer swizzling'); this may be done f...
swizzle2 is simplify code (e.g., by turning lots of name lookups into pointer dereferences). The converse operation is sometimes termed `unswizzling'. See also {snap}.
sync is /sink/ (var. `synch') n., vi. 1. To synchronize, to bring into synchronization. 2. [techspeak] To force all pending I/O to the disk; see {flush}, sense 2. 3. More generally, to force a number of competing processes or agents to a sta...
sync2 is to crash; thus, to checkpoint (in the database-theory sense).
syntactic sugar is [coined by Peter Landin] n. Features added to a language or other formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans, that do not affect the expressiveness of the formalism (compare {chrome}). Used esp. when there is an obvious and ...
syntactic sugar2 is into other constructs already present in the notation. C's `a[i]' notation is syntactic sugar for `*(a + i)'. "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." --- Alan Perlis The variant `syntactic saccharine' is also...
syntactic sugar3 is gratuitous, in that syntactic sugar serves a purpose (making something more acceptable to humans) but syntactic saccharine serves no purpose at all.
sys-frog is /sis'frog/ [the PLATO system] n. Playful variant of `sysprog', which is in turn short for `systems programmer'.
sysadmin is /sis'ad-min/ n. Common contraction of `system admin'; see {admin}.
sysop is /sis'op/ n. [esp. in the BBS world] The operator (and usually the owner) of a bulletin-board system. A common neophyte mistake on {FidoNet} is to address a message to `sysop' in an international {echo}, thus sending it to hundreds of...
system is n. 1. The supervisor program or OS on a computer. 2. The entire computer system, including input/output devices, the supervisor program or OS, and possibly other software. 3. Any large-scale program. 4. Any method or algorithm. 5...
system2 is (in senses 1 and 2 only; for sense 3 one mentions the particular program e.g., `LISP hacker')
systems jock is n. See {jock}, (sense 2).
SysVile is /sis-vil'/ n. See {Missed'em-five}.
system mangler is n. Humorous synonym for `system manager', poss. from the fact that one major IBM OS had a {root} account called SYSMANGR. Refers specifically to a systems programmer in charge of administration, software maintenance, and upd...
system mangler2 is emphasizes the technical end of the skills involved.*T /T/ 1. [from LISP terminology for `true] Yes. Used in reply to a question (particularly one asked using the `-P convention). In LISP, the constant T means `true, among...
system mangler3 is instead of `Yes and `No almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. When a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he may well respond `T, meaning that he wants coffee; but of course...
system mangler4 is it happens, most hackers (particularly those who frequent Chinese restaurants) like tea at least as well as coffee --- so it is not that big a problem. 2. See {time T} (also {since time T equals minus infinity}). 3. [techs...
system mangler5 is abbreviation for the noun `transaction. 4. [Purdue] Alternate spelling of {tee}.
tail recursion is n. If you arent sick of it already, see {tail recursion}.
talk mode is n. A feature supported by UNIX, ITS, and some other OSes that allows two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time on-line conversation. It combines the immediacy of talking with all the precision (and verbosity) that written...
talk mode2 is communicate inflection, though conventions have arisen for some of these (see the section on writing style in the Prependices for details). Talk mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing, which are not used or...
talk mode3 is probably derived from) Morse-code jargon used by ham-radio amateurs since the 1920s. Most of these are not used at universities or in the UNIX world, though ROTF and TTFN have gained some currency there and IMHO is common; conv...
talk mode4 is unfamiliar with FOO?, BCNU, HELLOP, {NIL}, and {T}. The {MUD} community uses a mixture of USENET/Internet emoticons, a few of the more natural of the old-style talk-mode abbrevs, and some of the `social list above; specifically, ...
talk mode5 is b4, BTW, WTF, TTFN, and WTH. The use of `rehi is also common; in fact, mudders are fond of re- compounds and will frequently `rehug or `rebonk (see {bonk/oif}) people. The word `re by itself is taken as `regreet. In general, t...
talk mode6 is typing things out in full rather than using abbreviations; this may be due to the relative youth of the MUD cultures, which tend to include many touch typists and to assume high-speed links. The following uses specific to MUDs a...
talk mode7 is variant spelling `d00d) appear to be passing into wider use among some subgroups of MUDders. One final note on talk mode style neophytes, when in talk mode, often seem to think they must produce letter-perfect prose because t...
talk mode8 is not the best approach. It can be very frustrating to wait while your partner pauses to think of a word, or repeatedly makes the same spelling error and backs up to fix it. It is usually best just to leave typographical errors...
talk mode9 is confusion may result; in that case it is often fastest just to type "xxx" and start over from before the mistake. See also {hakspek}, {emoticon}, {bonk/oif}.
talker system is n. British hackerism for software that enables real-time chat or {talk mode}.
tall card is n. A PC/AT-size expansion card (these can be larger than IBM PC or XT cards because the AT case is bigger). See also {short card}. When IBM introduced the PS/2 model 30 (its last gasp at supporting the ISA) they made the case lo...
tall card2 is wouldnt fit; this was felt to be a reincarnation of the {connector conspiracy}, done with less style.
tanked is adj. Same as {down}, used primarily by UNIX hackers. See also {hosed}. Popularized as a synonym for `drunk by Steve Dallas in the late lamented "Bloom County" comic strip.
tar and feather is [from UNIX `tar(1)] vt. To create a transportable archive from a group of files by first sticking them together with `tar(1) (the Tape ARchiver) and then compressing the result (see {compress}). The latter action is dubbe...
tar and feather2 is an airplane propeller to decrease wind resistance, or with an oar to reduce water resistance; smaller files, after all, slip through comm links more easily.
taste is [primarily MIT] n. 1. The quality in a program that tends to be inversely proportional to the number of features, hacks, and kluges programmed into it. Also `tasty, `tasteful, `tastefulness. "This feature comes in N tasty flavors." ...
taste2 is essentially synonyms, `taste and {flavor} are not. Taste refers to sound judgment on the part of the creator; a program or feature can *exhibit* taste but cannot {have} taste. On the other hand, a feature can have {flavor}. Also...
taste3 is `kind or `variety not shared by `taste. {Flavor} is a more popular word than `taste, though both are used. See also {elegant}. 2. Alt. sp. of {tayste}.
tayste is /tayst/ n. Two bits; also as {taste}. Syn. {crumb}, {quarter}. Compare {{byte}}, {dynner}, {playte}, {nybble}, {quad}.
TCB is /T-C-B/ [IBM] n. 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to neglect. Compare {heisenbug}. Not to be confused with 2. Trusted Computing Base, an `official jargon term from the...
ISO standard cup of tea is [South Africa] n. A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on. Like many ...
ISO standard cup of tea2 is ring in North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feelin...
ISO standard cup of tea3 is analogous `ANSI standard cup of tea and wind up with a political situation distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious technical contexts. Milk and lemon dont mix very well.
TechRef is /tekref/ [MS-DOS] n. The original `IBM PC Technical Reference Manual, including the BIOS listing and complete schematics for the PC. The only PC documentation in the issue package thats considered serious by real hackers.
TECO is /teekoh/ obs. 1. vt. Originally, to edit using the TECO editor in one of its infinite variations (see below). 2. vt.,obs. To edit even when TECO is *not* the editor being used! This usage is rare and now primarily historical. 2. [or...
TECO2 is and COrrector; later, `Text Editor and COrrector] n. A text editor developed at MIT and modified by just about everybody. With all the dialects included, TECO might have been the most prolific editor in use before {EMACS}, to which...
TECO3 is powerful programming-language-like features and its unspeakably hairy syntax. It is literally the case that every string of characters is a valid TECO program (though probably not a useful one); one common hacker game used to be ment...
TECO4 is corresponding to human names did. As an example of TECOs obscurity, here is a TECO program that takes a list of names such as Loser, J. Random Quux, The Great Dick, Moby sorts them alphabetically according to surname, and...
TECO5 is comma, to produce the following Moby Dick J. Random Loser The Great Quux The program is [1 J^P$L$$ J <.-Z; .,(S,$ -D .)FX1 @F^B $K L I $ G1 L>$$ (where ^B means `Control-B (ASCII 0000010) and $ is actually an {ALT}...
TECO6 is fact, this very program was used to produce the second, sorted list from the first list. The first hack at it had a {bug} GLS (the author) had accidentally omitted the `@ in front of `F^B, which as anyone can see is clearly the {Wron...
TECO7 is There is no space to describe all the features of TECO, but it may be of interest that `^P means `sort and `J<.-Z; ... L> is an idiomatic series of commands for `do once for every line. In mid-1991, TECO is pretty much one with the ...
TECO8 is affections of hackerdom by {EMACS}. Descendants of an early (and somewhat lobotomized) version adopted by DEC can still be found lurking on VMS and a couple of crufty PDP-11 operating systems, however, and ports of the more advanced ...
TECO9 is antiquarian interest. See also {retrocomputing}, {write-only language}.
tee is n.,vt. [Purdue] A carbon copy of an electronic transmission. "Oh, youre sending him the {bits} to that? Slap on a tee for me." From the UNIX command `tee(1), itself named after a pipe fitting (see {plumbing}). Can also mean `save one...
Telerat is /tel*-rat/ n. Unflattering hackerism for `Teleray, a line of extremely losing terminals. See also {terminak}, {sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}.
TELNET is /telnet/ vt. To communicate with another Internet host using the {TELNET} program. TOPS-10 people used the word IMPCOM, since that was the program name for them. Sometimes abbreviated to TN /T-N/. "I usually TN over to SAIL just t...
ten-finger interface is n. The interface between two networks that cannot be directly connected for security reasons; refers to the practice of placing two terminals side by side and having an operator read from one and type into the other.
tense is adj. Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got that way because it was highly {bum}med, but sometimes it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student ...
tense2 is will bring tears to your eyes." A tense programmer is one who produces tense code.
tenured graduate student is n. One who has been in graduate school for 10 years (the usual maximum is 5 or 6) a `ten-yeared student (get it?). Actually, this term may be used of any grad student beginning in his seventh year. Students dont r...
tenured graduate student2 is professors do, but a tenth-year graduate student has probably been around the university longer than any untenured professor.
tera- is /ter*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.
teraflop club is /ter*-flop kluhb/ [FLOP = Floating Point Operation] n. A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techni...
teraflop club2 is said to have been the founder.
terminak is /termi-nak`/ [Caltech, ca. 1979] n. Any malfunctioning computer terminal. A common failure mode of Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the `L key to produce the `K code instead; complaints about this tended to look like "Terminak...
terminak2 is {sun-stools}, {Telerat}, {HP-SUX}.
terminal brain death is n. The extreme form of {terminal illness} (sense 1). What someone who has obviously been hacking continuously for far too long is said to be suffering from.
terminal illness is n. 1. Syn. {raster burn}. 2. The `burn-in condition your CRT tends to get if you dont have a screen saver.
terminal junkie is [UK] n. A {wannabee} or early {larval stage} hacker who spends most of his or her time wandering the directory tree and writing {noddy} programs just to get a fix of computer time. Variants include `terminal jockey, `cons...
terminal junkie2 is `console jockey seems to imply more expertise than the other three (possibly because of the exalted status of the {{console}} relative to an ordinary terminal). See also {twink}, {read-only user}.
terpri is /terpree/ [from LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP)] vi. To output a {newline}. Now rare as jargon, though still used as techspeak in Common LISP. It is a contraction of `TERminate PRInt line, named for the fact that, on early OSes, no c...
terpri2 is line was formed, so this operation terminated the line and emitted the output.
test is n. 1. Real users bashing on a prototype long enough to get thoroughly acquainted with it, with careful monitoring and followup of the results. 2. Some bored random user trying a couple of the simpler features with a developer looking ...
test2 is mistakes. Judging by the quality of most software, the second definition is far more prevalent. See also {demo}.
TeX is /tekh/ n. An extremely powerful {macro}-based text formatter written by Donald E. Knuth, very popular in the computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced UNIX `troff(1), the other favored formatter, even at many UNI...
TeX2 is correct (guttural) pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case `TeX is considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices). Fans like to proliferate...
TeX3 is TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I--III of his monument...
TeX4 is {bible}). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only ...
TeX5 is frozen around 1985, but volume IV of `The Art of Computer Programming has yet to appear as of mid-1991. The impact and influence of TeXs design has been such that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started ...
TeX6 is something else; Knuths diversion was simply on a grander scale than most.
text is n. 1. [techspeak] Executable code, esp. a `pure code portion shared between multiple instances of a program running in a multitasking OS (compare {English}). 2. Textual material in the mainstream sense; data in ordinary {{ASCII}} or {...
text2 is "Those are text files; you can review them using the editor." These two contradictory senses confuse hackers, too.
thanks in advance is [USENET] Conventional net.politeness ending a posted request for information or assistance. Sometimes written `advTHANKSance or `aTdHvAaNnKcSe or abbreviated `TIA. See {net.-}, {netiquette}.
the X that can be Y is not the true X is Yet another instance of hackerdoms peculiar attraction to mystical references --- a common humorous way of making exclusive statements about a class of things. The template is from the `Tao te Ching "T...
the X that can be Y is not the true X2 is true Tao." The implication is often that the X is a mystery accessible only to the enlightened. See the {trampoline} entry for an example, and compare {has the X nature}.
theology is n. 1. Ironically or humorously used to refer to {religious issues}. 2. Technical fine points of an abstruse nature, esp. those where the resolution is of theoretical interest but is relatively {marginal} with respect to actual use...
theology2 is software issues with a heavy AI or language-design component, such as the smart-data vs. smart-programs dispute in AI.
theory is n. The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently being used to inform a behavior. This is a generalization and abuse of the technical meaning. "Whats the theory on fixing this TECO loss?" "Whats the theory on...
theory2 is "Whats the current theory on letting lusers on during the day?" "The theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known screw...."
thinko is /thingkoh/ [by analogy with `typo] n. A momentary, correctable glitch in mental processing, especially one involving recall of information learned by rote; a bubble in the stream of consciousness. Syn. {braino}. Compare {mouso}.
This time, for sure! is excl. Ritual affirmation frequently uttered during protracted debugging sessions involving numerous small obstacles (e.g., attempts to bring up a UUCP connection). For the proper effect, this must be uttered in a fruit...
This time, for sure!2 is heard "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" The {canonical} response is, of course, "But that trick *never* works!" See {{Humor, Hacker}}.
thrash is vi. To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing anything useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded waste most of their time moving data into and out of core (rather than performing useful computation) and are the...
thrash2 is changing his mind (esp. about what to work on next) is said to be thrashing. A person frantically trying to execute too many tasks at once (and not spending enough time on any single task) may also be described as thrashing. Compa...
thread is n. [USENET, GEnie, CompuServe] Common abbreviation of `topic thread, a more or less continuous chain of postings on a single topic.
three-finger salute is n. Syn. {Vulcan nerve pinch}.
thud is n. 1. Yet another meta-syntactic variable (see {foo}). It is reported that at CMU from the mid-1970s the canonical series of these was `foo, `bar, `thud, `blat. 2. Rare term for the hash character, `# (ASCII 0100011). See {ASCII} for...
thunk is /thuhnk/ n. 1. "A piece of coding which provides an address", according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks in 1961 as a way of binding actual parameters to their formal definitions in Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is c...
thunk2 is formal parameter, the compiler generates a {thunk} to compute the expression and leave the address of the result in some standard location. 2. Later generalized into an expression, frozen together with its environment, for later e...
thunk3 is in techspeak is called a `closure). The process of unfreezing these thunks is called `forcing. 3. A {stubroutine}, in an overlay programming environment, that loads and jumps to the correct overlay. Compare {trampoline}. 4. Peop...
thunk4 is manner. "It occurred to me the other day that I am rather accurately modeled by a thunk --- I frequently need to be forced to completion." --- paraphrased from a {plan file}. Historical note There are a couple of onomatopoeic myth...
thunk5 is The most common is that it is the sound made by data hitting the stack; another holds that the sound is that of the data hitting an accumulator. Yet another holds that it is the sound of the expression being unfrozen at argument-e...
thunk6 is inventors, it was coined after they realized (in the wee hours after hours of discussion) that the type of an argument in Algol-60 could be figured out in advance with a little compile-time thought, simplifying the evaluation machi...
thunk7 is thought of; thus it was christened a `thunk, which is "the past tense of `think at two in the morning".
tick is n. 1. A {jiffy} (sense 1). 2. In simulations, the discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the simulation mechanism. In AI applications, this amount of time is often left unspecified, since the only constraint of inter...
tick2 is AI simulation is often pejoratively referred to as `tick-tick-tick simulation, especially when the issue of simultaneity of events with long, independent chains of causes is {handwave}d. 3. In the FORTH language, a single quote char...
tick-list features is [Acorn Computers] n. Features in software or hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort of thing). The American equivalent would be `checklist features, but this jargon sen...
tickle a bug is vt. To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest through some known series of inputs or operations. "You can tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA cards highlight handling by trying to set bright yellow reverse video."
tiger team is [U.S. military jargon] n. A team whose purpose is to penetrate security, and thus test security measures. These people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks, e.g., leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical defen...
tiger team2 is "Your codebooks have been stolen" (they usually havent been) inside safes, etc. After a successful penetration, some high-ranking security type shows up the next morning for a `security review and finds the sign, note, etc., ...
tiger team3 is of tiger teams sometimes lead to early retirement for base commanders and security officers (see the {patch} entry for an example). A subset of tiger teams are professional {cracker}s, testing the security of military computer...
tiger team4 is via networks or supposedly `secure comm channels. Some of their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the greatest hacks of all times. The term has been adopted in commercial computer-security circles in this m...
time sink is [poss. by analogy with `heat sink or `current sink] n. A project that consumes unbounded amounts of time.
time T is /tim T/ n. 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood time, often used in conjunction with a later time T+1. "Well meet on campus at time T or at Louies at time T+1" means, in the context of going out for dinner "We can meet on ...
time T2 is Louies itself a bit later." (Louies is a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that is a favorite with hackers.) Had the number 30 been used instead of the number 1, it would have implied that the travel time from campus to Louies is ...
time T3 is hasnt been decided on yet), you can meet half an hour later at Louies than you could on campus and end up eating at the same time. See also {since time T equals minus infinity}.
times-or-divided-by is [by analogy with `plus-or-minus] quant. Term occasionally used when describing the uncertainty associated with a scheduling estimate, for either humorous or brutally honest effect. For a software project, the factor is u...
tinycrud is /tinee-kruhd/ n. A pejorative used by habitues of older game-oriented {MUD} versions for TinyMUDs and other user-extensible {MUD} variants; esp. common among users of the rather violent and competitive AberMUD and MIST systems. Th...
tinycrud2 is how (allegedly) inconsistent and lacking in genuine atmosphere the scenarios generated in user extensible MUDs can be. Other common knocks on them are that they feature little overall plot, bad game topology, little competitive...
tinycrud3 is alleged horrors of the TinyMUD code itself. This dispute is one of the MUD worlds hardiest perennial {holy wars}.
tip of the ice-cube is [IBM] n. The visible part of something small and insignificant. Used as an ironic comment in situations where `tip of the iceberg might be appropriate if the subject were actually nontrivial.
tired iron is [IBM] n. Hardware that is perfectly functional but far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that the old stuff is starting to look a b...
tits on a keyboard is n. Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep touch-typists registered (usually on the `5 of a numeric keypad, and on the `F and `J of a QWERTY keyboard).
TLA is /T-L-A/ [Three-Letter Acronym] n. 1. Self-describing acronym for a species with which computing terminology is infested. 2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP, SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like th...
TLA2 is three letters, just as not all four-letter words have four letters. One also hears of `ETLA (Extended Three-Letter Acronym, pronounced /ee tee el ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms. The term `SFLA (Stupid Four-Letter ...
TLA3 is {YABA}. The self-effacing phrase "TDM TLA" (Too Damn Many...) is often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin "What do you think will be the biggest prob...
TLA4 is straight-faced response "There are only 17,000 three-letter acronyms." (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.)
TMRC is /tmerk/ n. The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 `Dictionary of the TMRC Language compiled by Peter Samson included several terms which became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp...
TMRC2 is legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity. The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were {scram switch}es located at numerous places around the room that could be pressed if something undesirable was about...
TMRC3 is an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital clock on the dispatch board. Normally it ran at some multiple of real time, but if someone hit a scram switch the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word ...
TMRC4 is the Bibliography), gives a stimulating account of those early years. TMRCs Power and Signals group included most of the early PDP-1 hackers and the people who later bacame the core of the MIT AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that ...
TMRC5 is lexicon accordingly includes a number of entries from a recent revision of the TMRC Dictionary.
to a first approximation is 1. [techspeak] When one is doing certain numerical computations, an approximate solution may be computed by any of several heuristic methods, then refined to a final value. By using the starting point of a first app...
to a first approximation2 is algorithm that converges more quickly to the correct result. 2. In jargon, a preface to any comment that indicates that the comment is only approximately true. The remark "To a first approximation, I feel good" m...
to a first approximation3 is reveal that not all is perfect (e.g., a nagging cough still remains after an illness).
to a zeroth approximation is [from `to a first approximation] A *really* sloppy approximation; a wild guess. Compare {social science number}.
toast is 1. n. Any completely inoperable system or component, esp. one that has just crashed and burned "Uh, oh ... I think the serial board is toast." 2. vt. To cause a system to crash accidentally, especially in a manner that requires manua...
toast2 is {firewall machine} again."
toaster is n. 1. The archetypal really stupid application for an embedded microprocessor controller; often used in comments that imply that a scheme is inappropriate technology (but see {elevator controller}). "{DWIM} for an assembler? Thatd...
toaster2 is toaster!" 2. A very, very dumb computer. "You could run this program on any dumb toaster." See {bitty box}, {Get a real computer!}, {toy}, {beige toaster}. 3. A Macintosh, esp. the Classic Mac. Some hold that this is implied b...
toaster3 is my box without toasters, but since then Ive added two boards and a second disk drive."
toeprint is n. A {footprint} of especially small size.
toggle is vt. To change a {bit} from whatever state it is in to the other state; to change from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1. This comes from `toggle switches, such as standard light switches, though the word `toggle actually refers to the mechanism...
toggle2 is which it is flipped rather than to the fact that the switch has two positions. There are four things you can do to a bit set it (force it to be 1), clear (or zero) it, leave it alone, or toggle it. (Mathematically, one would say t...
toggle3 is functions of one boolean argument, but saying that is much less fun than talking about toggling bits.)
tool is 1. n. A program used primarily to create, manipulate, modify, or analyze other programs, such as a compiler or an editor or a cross-referencing program. Oppose {app}, {operating system}. 2. [UNIX] An application program with a simple,...
tool2 is interface designed specifically to be used in programmed combination with other tools (see {filter}). 3. [MIT general to students there] vi. To work; to study (connotes tedium). The TMRC Dictionary defined this as "to set ones brain ...
tool3 is A student who studies too much and hacks too little. (MITs student humor magazine rejoices in the name `Tool and Die.)
toolsmith is n. The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes in making the {tool}s with which other programmers create applications. See also {uninteresting}.
topic drift is n. Term used on GEnie, USENET and other electronic fora to describe the tendency of a {thread} to drift away from the original subject of discussion (and thus, from the Subject header of the originating message), or the results ...
topic drift2 is reminders that the discussion has strayed off any useful track. "I think we started with a question about Nivens last book, but weve ended up discussing the sexual habits of the common marmoset. Now *thats* topic drift!"
topic group is n. Syn. {forum}.
TOPS-10 is /tops-ten/ n. DECs proprietary OS for the fabled {PDP-10} machines, long a favorite of hackers but now effectively extinct. A fountain of hacker folklore; see appendix A. See also {{ITS}}, {{TOPS-20}}, {{TWENEX}}, {VMS}, {operating...
TOPS-102 is BOTS-10 (from `bottoms-ten) as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything.
TOPS-20 is /tops-twentee/ n. See {{TWENEX}}.
toto is /tohtoh/ n. This is reported to be the default scratch file name among French-speaking programmers --- in other words, a francophone {foo}.
tourist is [ITS] n. A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for {comm mode}, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below {luser}. Hackers often spell this {turist}, perha...
tourist2 is {luser} (this also expresses the ITS cultures penchant for six-letterisms). Compare {twink}, {read-only user}.
tourist information is n. Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewers gestalt of whats going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category d...
tourist information2 is for at any given time. The `bytes free information at the bottom of an MS-DOS `dir display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a UNIX `ps(1) display.
touristic is adj. Having the quality of a {tourist}. Often used as a pejorative, as in `losing touristic scum. Often spelled `turistic or `turistik, so that phrase might be more properly rendered `lusing turistic scum.
toy is n. A computer system; always used with qualifiers. 1. `nice toy One that supports the speakers hacking style adequately. 2. `just a toy A machine that yields insufficient {computron}s for the speakers preferred uses. This is not con...
toy2 is least be fun. It is also strongly conditioned by ones expectations; Cray XMP users sometimes consider the Cray-1 a `toy, and certainly all RISC boxes and mainframes are toys by their standards. See also {Get a real computer!}.
toy language is n. A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. {Bad Thing}s can result when a toy language is promoted as a ...
toy language2 is (see {bondage-and-discipline language}); the classic example is {{Pascal}}. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming Turing machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative se...
toy problem is [AI] n. A deliberately oversimplified case of a challenging problem used to investigate, prototype, or test algorithms for a real problem. Sometimes used pejoratively. See also {gedanken}, {toy program}.
toy program is n. 1. One that can be readily comprehended; hence, a trivial program (compare {noddy}). 2. One for which the effort of initial coding dominates the costs through its life cycle. See also {noddy}.
trampoline is n. An incredibly {hairy} technique, found in some {HLL} and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do...
trampoline2 is pieces of {live data} are called `trampolines. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesnt bend your brain is not the true tram...
trap is 1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program. 2. vi. To cause a trap. "These instructions tr...
trap2 is to indicate the cause of the trap. "The monitor traps all input/output instructions." This term is associated with assembler programming (`interrupt or `exception is more common among {HLL} programmers) and appears to be fading int...
trap3 is assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and systems hackers (see {system}, sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I...
trap door is alt. `trapdoor n. 1. Syn. {back door}. 2. [techspeak] A `trap-door function is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions have important applications in cryptography, specifically ...
trash is vt. To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including {mung}, {mangle}, and {scribble}.
tree-killer is [Sun] n. 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This should be interpreted in a broad sense; `wasting paper includes the production of {spiffy} but {content-free} documents. Thus, most {suit}s are tree-killers.
trit is /trit/ [by analogy with `bit] n. One base-3 digit; the amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three equally likely outcomes (see also {bit}). These arise, for example, in the context of a {flag} that should actuall...
trit2 is as yes, no, or unknown. Trits are sometimes jokingly called `3-state bits. A trit may be semi-seriously referred to as `a bit and a half, although it is linearly equivalent to 1.5849625 bits (that is, log2(3) bits).
trivial is adj. 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speakers time. 3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly {cretinous} would have thought of them already. 4. Any problem one has already solv...
trivial2 is evaluates to `Ive seen it before). Hackers notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See {nontrivial}, {uninteresting}.
troglodyte is [Commodore] n. 1. A hacker who never leaves his cubicle. The term `Gnoll (from Dungeons & Dragons) is also reported. 2. A curmudgeon attached to an obsolescent computing environment. The combination `ITS troglodyte was flung a...
troglodyte2 is wringle-wrangle attending the 2.x.x revision of the Jargon File; at least one of the people it was intended to describe adopted it with pride.
troglodyte mode is [Rice University] n. Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because youve been up for so many days straight that your eyes hurt (see {raster burn}). Loud music blar...
troglodyte mode2 is optional but recommended. See {larval stage}, {hack mode}.
Trojan horse is [coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] n. A program designed to break security or damage a system that is disguised as something else benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, a game, or (in one notorious 1990 ...
Trojan horse2 is destroy viruses! See {back door}, {virus}, {worm}.
true-hacker is [analogy with `trufan from SF fandom] n. One who exemplifies the primary values of hacker culture, esp. competence and helpfulness to other hackers. A high compliment. "He spent 6 hours helping me bring up UUCP and netnews on ...
true-hacker2 is act of a true-hacker." Compare {demigod}, oppose {munchkin}.
tty is /T-T-Y/ [UNIX], /titee/ [ITS, but some UNIX people say it this way as well; this pronunciation is not considered to have sexual undertones] n. 1. A terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very li...
tty2 is Usage antiquated (like the TTYs themselves). See also {bit-paired keyboard}. 2. [especially UNIX] Any terminal at all; sometimes used to refer to the particular terminal controlling a given job.
tube is 1. n. A CRT terminal. Never used in the mainstream sense of TV; real hackers dont watch TV, except for Loony Toons, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Trek Classic, the Simpsons, and the occasional cheesy old swashbuckler movie (see appendix B). 2....
tube2 is someone elses terminal. "Tube me that note?"
tube time is n. Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of ones environment one uses most heavily. "I find Im spending too much of my tube time reading mail since I st...
tunafish is n. In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of `tunefs(8) in the original {BSD} 4.2 distribution. The joke was removed in later releases once commercial site...
tunafish2 is to the `tuning of file-system parameters for optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was a `BUGS section consisting of the line "You can tune a file system, but you cant tunafish". Variant...
tunafish3 is though it has been excised from some versions by humorless management {droid}s. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment apparently designed to prevent this "Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from n...
tune is [from automotive or musical usage] vt. To optimize a program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as {hook}s for tuning, e.g., by changing `#define lines in C. One may `tune for time ...
tune2 is memory use), or `tune for configuration (most efficient use of hardware). See {bum}, {hot spot}, {hand-hacking}.
factpacks/jargon-split.fact view on Meta::CPAN
voice is vt. To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or connecting in talk mode. "I'm busy now; I'll voice you later."
voice-net is n. Hackish way of referring to the telephone system, analogizing it to a digital network. USENET {sig block}s not uncommonly include the sender's phone next to a "Voice" or "Voice-Net" header; common variants of this are "Voicene...
voodoo programming is [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n. The use by guess or cookbook of an {obscure} or {hairy} system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may not work, and...
voodoo programming2 is Almost synonymous with {black magic}, except that black magic typically isn't documented and *nobody* understands it. Compare {magic}, {deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}, {rain dance}, {cargo cult programming}, {wave a de...
VR is // [MUD] n. On-line abbrev for {virtual reality}, as opposed to {RL}.
Vulcan nerve pinch is n. [from the old "Star Trek" TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; ...
Vulcan nerve pinch2 is <Cmd>-<Power switch>! Also called {three-finger salute}. Compare {quadruple bucky}.
vulture capitalist is n. Pejorative hackerism for `venture capitalist', deriving from the common practice of pushing contracts that deprive inventors of control over their own innovations and most of the money they ought to have made from them...
vulture capitalist2 is Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashi...
vulture capitalist3 is includes infinite self-replication but is not a {virus} or {worm}. See also {cookie monster}.
WAITS is /wayts/ n. The mutant cousin of {{TOPS-10}} used on a handful of systems at {{SAIL}} up to 1990. There was never an `official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequ...
WAITS2 is ITS'. Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of {EMACS}, ...
WAITS3 is `E' editor --- one of a family of editors that were the first to do `real-time editing', in which the editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region...
WAITS4 is and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. {Bucky bits} were also invented there --- thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is ...
WAITS5 is seldom duplicated elsewhere was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now called ...
WAITS6 is and video signals to be switched to programming terminals.
waldo is /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention des...
waldo2 is wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used i...
waldo3 is and general nonsense word. See {foo}, {bar}, {foobar}, {quux}.
walk is n.,vt. Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in {core}. See also {codewalker}, {silly walk}, {clobber}.
walk off the end of is vt. To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it --- a good way to land in trouble. Often the result of an {off-by-one error}. Compare {clobber}, {roach}, {smash the stack}.
walking drives is n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky {washing machine}s. Those old {dinosaur} parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or ...
walking drives2 is with the floor could cause them to `walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jamme...
walking drives3 is wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hacke...
walking drives4 is patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.
wall is [WPI] interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare {octal forty}. It is said that "Wall?" really came from `like talking to a blank wall'. It w...
wall2 is you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a "Hello, wall?" to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Late...
wall3 is themselves.
wall follower is n. A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily p...
wall follower2 is the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping a `finger' on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was ...
wall follower3 is simply-connected mazes --- and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to `learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it. Used of humans, the term *is* pejorative and implies an un...
wall follower4 is See also {code grinder}, {droid}.
wall time is n. (also `wall clock time') 1. `Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of {clocks} required to execute i...
wall time2 is differ, as no one program gets all the {clocks}, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor clocks than real-time clocks).
wallpaper is n. 1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for such listings was essentially good only for wallp...
wallpaper2 is used to cover windows.) Now rare, esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g., PHOTO on TWENEX). However, the UNIX world doesn't have an equivalent term, so perhaps {wallpaper} will take hold there. The t...
wallpaper3 is commands to begin and end transcript files were `WALBEG' and `WALEND', with default file `WALL PAPER' (the space was a path delimiter). 2. The background pattern used on graphical workstations (this is techspeak under the `Win...
wallpaper4 is 3. `wallpaper file' n. The file that contains the wallpaper information before it is actually printed on paper. (Even if you don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy of the file, it is still called a wallpaper file.)
wango is /wang'goh/ n. Random bit-level {grovel}ling going on in a system during some unspecified operation. Often used in combination with {mumble}. For example "You start with the `.o' file, run it through this postprocessor that does mumb...
wango2 is object-oriented executable."
wank is /wangk/ [Columbia University prob. by mutation from Commonwealth slang v. `wank', to masturbate] n.,v. Used much as {hack} is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May describe (n...
wank2 is sake ("Quit wanking, let's go get supper!") or (more positively) a {wizard}. Adj. `wanky' describes something particularly clever (a person, program, or algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when there are too many wanks ...
wank3 is by an overload of the `wankometer' (compare {bogometer}). When the wankometer overloads, the conversation's subject must be changed, or all non-wanks will leave. Compare `neep-neeping' (under {neep-neep}). Usage U.S. only. In Br...
wank4 is *extremely* rude and is best avoided unless one intends to give offense.
wannabee is /won'*-bee/ (also, more plausibly, spelled `wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang] n. A would-be {hacker}. The connotations of thi...
wannabee2 is and exposure of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering {larval stage}, it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of ...
wannabee3 is writer, or {suit}, it is derogatory, implying that said person is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about. Overuse of terms from this lexicon is...
wannabee4 is Compare {newbie}. Historical note The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now (1991) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in {larval stage}, the proc...
wannabee5 is unconscious and unaffected by models known in popular culture --- communities formed spontaneously around people who, *as individuals*, felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees experienced was a fairly p...
wannabee6 is wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever; society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980 included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero, and the result is that some people semi-consc...
wannabee7 is hackish prestige by fitting the popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the change; amo...
wannabee8 is about the effects of public compendia of lore like this one.
warm boot is n. See {boot}.
wart is n. A small, {crock}y {feature} that sticks out of an otherwise {clean} design. Something conspicuous for localized ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule. For example, in some versions of `csh(1)', single quot...
wart2 is except `!'. In ANSI C, the `??' syntax used obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart. See also {miswart}.
washing machine is n. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the `top-loading' access to the media packs --- and, of course, they were always set on `spin cycle'. The washing...
washing machine2 is it is even used in Russian hacker jargon. See also {walking drives}. The thick channel cables connecting these were called `bit hoses' (see {hose}).
water MIPS is n. (see {MIPS}, sense 2) Large, water-cooled machines of either today's ECL-supercomputer flavor or yesterday's traditional {mainframe} type.
wave a dead chicken is v. To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended. "...
wave a dead chicken2 is code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug." Compare {voodoo programming}, {rain dance}.
weasel is n. [Cambridge] A na"ive user, one who deliberately or accidentally does things that are stupid or ill-advised. Roughly synonymous with {loser}.
wedged is [from a common description of recto-cranial inversion] adj. 1. To be stuck, incapable of proceeding without help. This is different from having crashed. If the system has crashed, then it has become totally non-functioning. If the...
wedged2 is something but cannot make progress; it may be capable of doing a few things, but not be fully operational. For example, a process may become wedged if it {deadlock}s with another (but not all instances of wedging are deadlocks). B...
wedged3 is {hung}. See also {gronk}, {locked up}, {hosed}. Describes a {deadlock}ed condition. 2. Often refers to humans suffering misconceptions. "He's totally wedged --- he's convinced that he can levitate through meditation." 3. [UNIX...
wedged4 is TTY left in a losing state by abort of a screen-oriented program or one that has messed with the line discipline in some obscure way.
wedgie is [Fairchild] n. A bug. Prob. related to {wedged}.
wedgitude is /wedj'i-t[y]ood/ n. The quality or state of being {wedged}.
weeble is /weeb'l/ [Cambridge] interj. Used to denote frustration, usually at amazing stupidity. "I stuck the disk in upside down." "Weeble...." Compare {gurfle}.
weeds is n. 1. Refers to development projects or algorithms that have no possible relevance or practical application. Comes from `off in the weeds'. Used in phrases like "lexical analysis for microcode is serious weeds...." 2. At CDC/ETA be...
weeds2 is weeds' was equivalent to IBM's {branch to Fishkill} and mainstream hackerdom's {jump off into never-never land}.
weenie is n. 1. When used with a qualifier (for example, as in {UNIX weenie}, VMS weenie, IBM weenie) this can be either an insult or a term of praise, depending on context, tone of voice, and whether or not it is applied by a person who consi...
weenie2 is weenie. Implies that the weenie has put a major investment of time, effort, and concentration into the area indicated; whether this is positive or negative depends on the hearer's judgment of how the speaker feels about that area. ...
weenie3 is character, `;' (ASCII 0111011).
Weenix is /wee'niks/ [ITS] n. A derogatory term for {{UNIX}}, derived from {UNIX weenie}. According to one noted ex-ITSer, it is "the operating system preferred by Unix Weenies typified by poor modularity, poor reliability, hard file deletion...
Weenix2 is everywhere, and users who believe that these are all advantages". Some ITS fans behave as though they believe UNIX stole a future that rightfully belonged to them. See {{ITS}}, sense 2.
well-behaved is adj. 1. [primarily {{MS-DOS}}] Said of software conforming to system interface guidelines and standards. Well-behaved software uses the operating system to do chores such as keyboard input, allocating memory and drawing graphic...
well-behaved2 is does its job quietly and without counterintuitive effects. Esp. said of software having an interface spec sufficiently simple and well-defined that it can be used as a {tool} by other software. See {cat}.
well-connected is adj. Said of a computer installation, this means that it has reliable email links with {the network} and/or that it relays a large fraction of available {USENET} newsgroups. `Well-known' can be almost synonymous, but also imp...
well-connected2 is many (due perhaps to an archive service or active USENET users).
wetware is /wet'weir/ [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] n. 1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers." 2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administra...
wetware2 is opposed to the system's hardware or software. See {liveware}, {meatware}.
whacker is [University of Maryland from {hacker}] n. 1. A person, similar to a {hacker}, who enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities. Whereas a hacker tends to produce great hacks, a whacker o...
whacker2 is in question. Whackers are often quite egotistical and eager to claim {wizard} status, regardless of the views of their peers. 2. A person who is good at programming quickly, though rather poorly and ineptly.
whales is n. See {like kicking dead whales down the beach}.
wheel is [from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] n. A person who has an active a {wheel bit}. "We need to find a wheel to un{wedge} the hung tape drives."
wheel bit is n. A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any address in the running monito...
wheel bit2 is create jobs and user accounts. The term was invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged logon is sometimes called `wheel mode'. This term enter...
wheel bit3 is mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See also {root}.
wheel wars is [Stanford University] A period in {larval stage} during which student hackers hassle each other by attempting to log each other out of the system, delete each other's files, and otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of th...
White Book is n. Syn. {K&R}.
whizzy is [Sun] adj. (alt. `wizzy') Describes a {cuspy} program; one that is feature-rich and well presented.
WIBNI is // [Bell Labs Wouldn't It Be Nice If] n. What most requirements documents and specifications consist entirely of. Compare {IWBNI}.
widget is n. 1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entrie...
widget2 is user interface object in {X} graphical user interfaces.
wiggles is n. [scientific computation] In solving partial differential equations by finite difference and similar methods, wiggles are sawtooth (up-down-up-down) oscillations at the shortest wavelength representable on the grid. If an algorit...
wiggles2 is unstable waveform, so it grows to dominate the solution. Alternatively, stable (though inaccurate) wiggles can be generated near a discontinuity by a Gibbs phenomenon.
WIMP environment is n. [acronymic from `Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu)'] A graphical-user-interface-based environment such as {X} or the Macintosh interface, as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces...
WIMP environment2 is extensibility. See {menuitis}, {user-obsequious}.
win is [MIT] 1. vi. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions arise, or (especially) if it sufficiently {robust} to take exceptions in stride. 2. n. Success, or a specific instance thereof. A pleasing outcome. A {feature}. Em...
win2 is `hyper-win' (often used interjectively as a reply). For some reason `suitable win' is also common at MIT, usually in reference to a satisfactory solution to a problem. Oppose {lose}; see also {big win}, which isn't quite just an in...
win big is vi. To experience serendipity. "I went shopping and won big; there was a 2-for-1 sale." See {big win}.
win win is interj. Expresses pleasure at a {win}.
Winchester is n. Informal generic term for `floating-head' magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the disk surface on an air cushion. The name arose because the original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became ...
Winchester2 is volumes; 30--30 became `Winchester' when somebody noticed the similarity to the common term for a famous Winchester rifle (in the latter, the first 30 referred to caliber and the second to the grain weight of the charge).
winged comments is n. Comments set on the same line as code, as opposed to {boxed comments}. In C, for example d = sqrt(x*x + y*y); /* distance from origin */ Generally these refer only to the action(s) taken on that line.
winkey is n. (alt. `winkey face') See {emoticon}.
winnage is /win'*j/ n. The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when something is winning.
winner is 1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer, or person. "So it turned out I could use a {lexer} generator instead of hand-coding my own pattern recognizer. What a win!" 2. `real winner' Often sarcastic, but also used ...
winner2 is {user}). "He's a real winner --- never reports a bug till he can duplicate it and send in an example."
winnitude is /win'*-t[y]ood/ n. The quality of winning (as opposed to {winnage}, which is the result of winning). "Guess what? They tweaked the microcode and now the LISP interpreter runs twice as fast as it used to." "That's really great! B...
winnitude2 is a half-hour's winnage on the next run of my program." Perhaps curiously, the obvious antonym `lossitude' is rare.
wired is n. See {hardwired}.
wirehead is /wir'hed/ n. [prob. from SF slang for an electrical-brain-stimulation addict] 1. A hardware hacker, especially one who concentrates on communications hardware. 2. An expert in local-area networks. A wirehead can be a network so...
wirehead2 is ability to deal with network hardware, down to the smallest component. Wireheads are known for their ability to lash up an Ethernet terminator from spare resistors, for example.
wish list is n. A list of desired features or bug fixes that probably won't get done for a long time, usually because the person responsible for the code is too busy or can't think of a clean way to do it. "OK, I'll add automatic filename com...
wish list2 is interface." Compare {tick-list features}.
within delta of is adj. See {delta}.
within epsilon of is adj. See {epsilon}.
wizard is n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works (that is, who {grok}s it); esp. someone who can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency. Someone is a {hacker} if he or she has general hacking ability, bu...
wizard2 is if he or she has specific detailed knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for something given the time to study it. 2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has {wheel} ...
wizard3 is esp. a UNIX systems programmer. This usage is well enough established that `UNIX Wizard' is a recognized job title at some corporations and to most headhunters. See {guru}, {lord high fixer}. See also {deep magic}, {heavy wizar...
wizard4 is dance}, {voodoo programming}, {wave a dead chicken}.
Wizard Book is n. Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman's `Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' (MIT Press, 1984; ISBN 0-262-01077-1, an excellent computer science text used in introductory courses at MIT. So called because of the wizar...
Wizard Book2 is LISP/Scheme world.
wizard mode is [from {rogue}] n. A special access mode of a program or system, usually passworded, that permits some users godlike privileges. Generally not used for operating systems themselves (`root mode' or `wheel mode' would be used inst...
wizardly is adj. Pertaining to wizards. A wizardly {feature} is one that only a wizard could understand or use properly.
womb box is n. 1. [TMRC] Storage space for equipment. 2. [proposed] A variety of hard-shell equipment case with heavy interior padding and/or shaped carrier cutouts in a foam-rubber matrix; mundanely called a `flight case'. Used for delicate...
WOMBAT is [Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] adj. Applied to problems which are both profoundly {uninteresting} in themselves and unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling w...
WOMBAT2 is {SMOP}. Also note the rather different usage as a meta-syntactic variable in {{Commonwealth Hackish}}.
wonky is /wong'kee/ [from Australian slang] adj. Yet another approximate synonym for {broken}. Specifically connotes a malfunction that produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or amusingly perverse. "That was the day the printer's font lo...
wonky2 is out in Tengwar." Also in `wonked out'. See {funky}, {demented}, {bozotic}.
workaround is n. A temporary {kluge} inserted in a system under development or test in order to avoid the effects of a {bug} or {misfeature} so that work can continue. Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced by {fix}es; in practice, ...
workaround2 is workarounds in the first couple of releases. "The code died on NUL characters in the input, so I fixed it to interpret them as spaces." "That's not a fix, that's a workaround!"
working as designed is [IBM] adj. 1. In conformance to a wrong or inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned. 2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility. 3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accep...
working as designed2 is this sense is used in official documents! See {BAD}.
worm is [from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel `The Shockwave Rider', via XEROX PARC] n. A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Compare {virus}. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is...
worm2 is Perhaps the best-known example was Robert T. Morris's `Internet Worm' of 1988, a `benign' one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See also {cracker}, {RTM}, {Trojan horse}, {ice}.
wound around the axle is adj. In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types.
wrap around is vi. (also n. `wraparound' and v. shorthand `wrap') 1. [techspeak] The action of a counter that starts over at zero or at `minus infinity' (see {infinity}) after its maximum value has been reached, and continues incrementing, eit...
wrap around2 is because of an overflow (as when a car's odometer starts over at 0). 2. To change {phase} gradually and continuously by maintaining a steady wake-sleep cycle somewhat longer than 24 hours, e.g., living six long (28-hour) days i...
wrap around3 is rate of 10 microhertz).
write-only code is [a play on `read-only memory'] n. Code so arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even by him/her. A {Bad Thing}.
write-only language is n. A language with syntax (or semantics) sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size is {write-only code}. A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and often to APL, though {INTERCAL} and {TECO} cer...
write-only memory is n. The obvious antonym to `read-only memory'. Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component specifications, during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at...
write-only memory2 is a write-only memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics {management} only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing ...
write-only memory3 is edition of the data book and requested the return of the `erroneous' ones. Later, around 1974, Signetics bought a double-page spread in `Electronics' magazine's April issue and used the spec as an April Fools' Day joke...
write-only memory4 is characteristic curves, the 25120 "fully encoded, 9046 x N, Random Access, write-only-memory" data sheet included diagrams of "bit capacity vs. Temp.", "Iff vs. Vff", "Number of pins remaining vs. number of socket insert...
write-only memory5 is required a 6.3 VAC VFF supply, a +10V VCC, and VDD of 0V, +/- 2%.
Wrong Thing is n. A design, action, or decision that is clearly incorrect or inappropriate. Often capitalized; always emphasized in speech as if capitalized. The opposite of the {Right Thing}; more generally, anything that is not the Right T...
Wrong Thing2 is of the best', the merely good --- although good --- is nevertheless the Wrong Thing. "In C, the default is for module-level declarations to be visible everywhere, rather than just within the module. This is clearly the Wrong T...
wugga wugga is /wuh'g* wuh'g*/ n. Imaginary sound that a computer program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task. Compare {cruncha cruncha cruncha}, {grind} (sense 4).
WYSIWYG is /wiz'ee-wig/ adj. Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is What You Get", as opposed to one that uses more-or-less obscure commands which do not result in immediate visual feedback. The term can be mildly derogatory,...
WYSIWYG2 is {user-friendly} interfaces targeted at non-programmers; a hacker has no fear of obscure commands. On the other hand, EMACS was one of the very first WYSIWYG editors, replacing (actually, at first overlaying) the extremely obscure, ...
WYSIWYG3 is environment}. [Oddly enough, this term has already made it into the OED. --- ESR]*X /X/ n. 1. Used in various speech and writing contexts (also in lowercase) in roughly its algebraic sense of `unknown within a set defined by conte...
WYSIWYG4 is 680x0 stands for 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030, or 68040, and 80x86 stands for 80186, 80286 80386 or 80486 (note that a UNIX hacker might write these as 680[0-4]0 and 80[1-4]86 or 680?0 and 80?86 respectively; see {glob}). 2. [after ...
WYSIWYG5 is `W'] An over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on UNIX systems.
XOFF is /X'of/ n. Syn. {control-s}.
xor is /X'or/, /kzor/ conj. Exclusive or. `A xor B' means `A or B, but not both'. "I want to get cherry pie xor a banana split." This derives from the technical use of the term as a function on truth-values that is true if exactly one of it...
xref is /X'ref/ vt., n. Hackish standard abbreviation for `cross-reference'.
XXX is /X-X-X/ n. A marker that attention is needed. Commonly used in program comments to indicate areas that are kluged up or need to be. Some hackers liken `XXX' to the notional heavy-porn movie rating.
xyzzy is /X-Y-Z-Z-Y/, /X-Y-ziz'ee/, /ziz'ee/, or /ik-ziz'ee/ [from the ADVENT game] adj. The {canonical} `magic word'. This comes from {ADVENT}, in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures ...
xyzzy2 is appropriate time, you can move instantly between two otherwise distant points. If, therefore, you encounter some bit of {magic}, you might remark on this quite succinctly by saying simply "Xyzzy!" "Ordinarily you can't look at so...
xyzzy3 is if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you do it anyway." "Xyzzy!" Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undocumented no-op command on several OSes; in Data General's AOS/VS, for example, it would typically res...
xyzzy4 is if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. See also {plugh}.
YA- is [Yet Another] abbrev. In hackish acronyms this almost invariably expands to {Yet Another}, following the precedent set by UNIX `yacc(1)'. See {YABA}.
YABA is /ya'b*/ [Cambridge] n. Yet Another Bloody Acronym. Whenever some program is being named, someone invariably suggests that it be given a name that is acronymic. The response from those with a trace of originality is to remark ironical...
YABA2 is `YABA-compatible'. Also used in response to questions like "What is WYSIWYG?" See also {TLA}.
YAUN is /yawn/ [Acronym for `Yet Another UNIX Nerd'] n. Reported from the San Diego Computer Society (predominantly a microcomputer users' group) as a good-natured punning insult aimed at UNIX zealots.
Yellow Book is [proposed] n. The print version of this Jargon File; `The New Hacker's Dictionary', forthcoming from MIT Press, 1991. Includes all the material in the File, plus a Foreword by Guy L. Steele and a Preface by Eric S. Raymond. M...
Yellow Book2 is typeset and includes almost all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons by the Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate entry.
Yet Another is adj. [From UNIX's `yacc(1)', `Yet Another Compiler- Compiler', a LALR parser generator] 1. Of your own work A humorous allusion often used in titles to acknowledge that the topic is not original, though the content is. As in `...
Yet Another2 is Simulated Annealing Algorithm'. 2. Of others' work Describes something of which there are far too many. See also {YA-}, {YABA}, {YAUN}.
You are not expected to understand this is cav. [UNIX] The canonical comment describing something {magic} or too complicated to bother explaining properly. From an infamous comment in the context-switching code of the V6 UNIX kernel.
You know you've been hacking too long when... is The set-up line for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about themselves. These include the following * not only do you check your email more often than your paper mail, but you remember ...
You know you've been hacking too long when...2 is postal one. * your {SO} kisses you on the neck and the first thing you think is "Uh, oh, {priority interrupt}." * you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're doing it in oct...
You know you've been hacking too long when...3 is value than your car. * in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10. * more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in some programming language. * you realize you have ...
You know you've been hacking too long when...4 is early version of this entry said "All but one of these have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer." The ringer ...
You know you've been hacking too long when...5 is made up out of whole cloth. Although more respondents picked that one out as fiction than any of the others, I also received multiple independent reports of its actually happening. --- ESR]
Your mileage may vary is cav. [from the standard disclaimer attached to EPA mileage ratings by American car manufacturers] 1. A ritual warning often found in UNIX freeware distributions. Translates roughly as "Hey, I tried to write this porta...
Your mileage may vary2 is system?" 2. A qualifier more generally attached to advice. "I find that sending flowers works well, but your mileage may vary."
Yow! is /yow/ [from "Zippy the Pinhead" comix] interj. A favored hacker expression of humorous surprise or emphasis. "Yow! Check out what happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display hack!" Compare {gurfle}.
yoyo mode is n. The state in which the system is said to be when it rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down. Interestingly (and perhaps not by coincidence), many hardware vendors give out free yoyos at Usenix exhibits....
yoyo mode2 is SIGPLAN '88. Tourists staying at one of Atlanta's most respectable hotels were subsequently treated to the sight of 200 of the country's top computer scientists testing yo-yo algorithms in the lobby.
Yu-Shiang Whole Fish is /yoo-shyang hohl fish/ n. obs. The character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 0001001), which with a loop in its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which ...
Yu-Shiang Whole Fish2 is covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang) sauce. Usage primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine, which could display this character on the screen. Tends to elicit incredulity from people who hear about it second-hand....
zap is 1. n. Spiciness. 2. vt. To make food spicy. 3. vt. To make someone `suffer' by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.)...
zap2 is correct; esp. used when the action is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies surgical precision. "Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again." In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are applied to programs...
zap3 is `superzap', whose file name is `IMASPZAP' (I M A SuPerZAP). 5. vt. To erase or reset. 6. To {fry} a chip with static electricity. "Uh oh --- I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk controller."
zapped is adj. Spicy. This term is used to distinguish between food that is hot (in temperature) and food that is *spicy*-hot. For example, the Chinese appetizer Bon Bon Chicken is a kind of chicken salad that is cold but zapped; by contrast,...
zapped2 is zapped. See also {{oriental food}}, {laser chicken}. See {zap}, senses 1 and 2.
zen is vt. To figure out something by meditation or by a sudden flash of enlightenment. Originally applied to bugs, but occasionally applied to problems of life in general. "How'd you figure out the buffer allocation problem?" "Oh, I zenned...
zen2 is time-extended version of zenning a system. Compare {hack mode}. See also {guru}.
zero is vt. 1. To set to 0. Usually said of small pieces of data, such as bits or words (esp. in the construction `zero out'). 2. To erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories, where `zeroing' need not involve actually w...
zero2 is zeroed. One may speak of something being `logically zeroed' rather than being `physically zeroed'. See {scribble}.
zero-content is adj. Syn. {content-free}.
zeroth is /zee'rohth/ adj. First. Among software designers, comes from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond...
zeroth2 is the digital devices known as `counters' count in this way. Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first chapter of a publication `chapter 0', especially if it is of an introductory nature (one of the classic instan...
zeroth3 is recent years this trait has also been observed among many pure mathematicians (who have an independent tradition of numbering from 0). Zero-based numbering tends to reduce {fencepost error}s, though it cannot eliminate them entir...
zigamorph is /zig'*-morf/ n. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or {fence} character. Usage primarily at IBM shops.
zip is [primarily MS-DOS] vt. To create a compressed archive from a group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm have been written. Commonly used as fol...
zip2 is See {arc}, {tar and feather}.
zipperhead is [IBM] n. A person with a closed mind.
zombie is [UNIX] n. A process that has died but has not yet relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process hasn't executed a `wait(2)' for it yet). These can be seen in `ps(1)' listings occasionally. Compare {orphan}.
zorch is /zorch/ 1. [TMRC] v. To attack with an inverse heat sink. 2. [TMRC] v. To travel, with v approaching c [that is, with velocity approaching lightspeed --- ESR]. 3. [MIT] v. To propel something very quickly. "The new comm software is ...
zorch2 is the network." 4. [MIT] n. Influence. Brownie points. Good karma. The intangible and fuzzy currency in which favors are measured. "I'd rather not ask him for that just yet; I think I've used up my quota of zorch with him for th...
zorch3 is ability. "I think I'll {punt} that change for now; I've been up for 30 hours and I've run out of zorch."
Zork is /zork/ n. The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy gaming; see {ADVENT}. Originally written on MIT-DM during the late 1970s, later distributed with BSD UNIX and commercialized as `The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom.
zorkmid is /zork'mid/ n. The canonical unit of currency in hacker-written games. This originated in {zork} but has spread to {nethack} and is referred to in several other games.= [^A-Za-z] (see {regexp}) =
'Snooze is /snooz/ [FidoNet] n. Fidonews, the weekly official on-line newsletter of FidoNet. As the editorial policy of Fidonews is "anything that arrives, we print", there are often large articles completely unrelated to FidoNet, which in tu...
(TM) is // [USENET] ASCII rendition of the trademark-superscript symbol appended to phrases that the author feels should be recorded for posterity, perhaps in future editions of this lexicon. Sometimes used ironically as a form of protest aga...
(TM)2 is algorithm patents and `look and feel' lawsuits. See also {UN*X}.
-oid is [from `android'] suff. 1. This suffix is used as in mainstream English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words...
-oid2 is mainstream English. For example, "He's a nerdoid" means that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't make the grade; a `modemoid' might be a 300-baud box (Real Modems run at 9600); a `computeroid' might be any {bitty box}. The ...
-oid3 is {chiclet keyboard}, but would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener as to the speaker's city of origin. 2. There is a more specific sense of `oid' as an indicator for `resembling an android' which in the past ha...
-oid4 is hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream (most notably in the term `trendoid' for victims of terminal hipness). This is probably traceable to the popularization of the term {droid} in "Star Wars" and its seque...
-oid5 is in science fiction for at least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have probably been making `-oid' jargon for almost that long [though GLS and I can personally confirm only that they were already common in the mid-197...
-ware is [from `software'] suff. Commonly used to form jargon terms for classes of software. For examples, see {careware}, {crippleware}, {crudware}, {freeware}, {fritterware}, {guiltware}, {liveware}, {meatware}, {payware}, {psychedelicwar...
/dev/null is /dev-nuhl/ [from the UNIX null device, used as a data sink] n. A notional `black hole' in any information space being discussed, used, or referred to. A controversial posting, for example, might end "Kudos to rasputin@kremlin.org...
120 reset is /wuhn-twen'tee ree'set/ [from 120 volts, U.S. wall voltage] n. To cycle power on a machine in order to reset or unjam it. Compare {Big Red Switch}, {power cycle}.
2 is infix. In translation software written by hackers, infix 2 often represents the syllable *to* with the connotation `translate to' as in dvi2ps (DVI to PostScript), int2string (integer to string), and texi2roff (Texinfo to [nt]roff).
@-party is /at'par`tee/ [from the @-sign in an Internet address] n. (alt. `@-sign party' /at'sin par`tee/) A semi-closed party thrown for hackers at a science-fiction convention (esp. the annual Worldcon); one must have a {network address} to...
@-party2 is someone who does. One of the most reliable opportunities for hackers to meet face to face with people who might otherwise be represented by mere phosphor dots on their screens. Compare {boink}.
@Begin is // See {\begin}.
\begin is // [from the LaTeX command] With \end, used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. For example \begin{flame} Predicate logic is the only good programming language. Anyone who woul...
\begin2 is all computers should be tredecimal instead of binary. \end{flame} The Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in an identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe). On USENET, this construct would more ...
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