JARGON FILE, VERSION 4.0.

0, 24 JUL 1996

This is the Jargon File, a comprehensive compendium of hacker slang illuminating

many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

This document (the Jargon File) is in the public domain, to be freely used,
shared, and modified. There are (by intention) no legal restraints on what you
can do with it, but there are traditions about its proper use to which many
hackers are quite strongly attached. Please extend the courtesy of proper
citation when you quote the File, ideally with a version number, as it will
change and grow over time. (Examples of appropriate citation form: "Jargon File
4.0.0" or "The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 4.0.0, 24 JUL 1996".)

The Jargon File is a common heritage of the hacker culture. Over the years a
number of individuals have volunteered considerable time to maintaining the File
and been recognized by the net at large as editors of it. Editorial
responsibilities include: to collate contributions and suggestions from others;
to seek out corroborating information; to cross-reference related entries; to
keep the file in a consistent format; and to announce and distribute updated
versions periodically. Current volunteer editors include:

Eric Raymond [email protected]

Although there is no requirement that you do so, it is considered good form to

check with an editor before quoting the File in a published work or commercial
product. We may have additional information that would be helpful to you and can
assist you in framing your quote to reflect not only the letter of the File but
its spirit as well.

All contributions and suggestions about this file sent to a volunteer editor are
gratefully received and will be regarded, unless otherwise labelled, as freely
given donations for possible use as part of this public-domain file.

From time to time a snapshot of this file has been polished, edited, and
formatted for commercial publication with the cooperation of the volunteer
editors and the hacker community at large. If you wish to have a bound paper
copy of this file, you may find it convenient to purchase one of these. They
often contain additional material not found in on-line versions. The two
'authorized' editions so far are described in the Revision History section;
there may be more in the future.

Introduction

This document is a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of

computer hackers. Though some technical material is included for background and
flavor, it is not a technical dictionary; what we describe here is the language
hackers use among themselves for fun, social communication, and technical
debate.

The 'hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures

that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared experiences, shared
roots, and shared values. It has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics,
in-jokes, taboos, and dreams. Because hackers as a group are particularly
creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of 'normal' values and
working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an
intentional culture less than 40 years old.

As usual with slang, the special vocabulary of hackers helps hold their culture
together — it helps hackers recognize each other's places in the community and
expresses shared values and experiences. Also as usual, *not* knowing the slang
(or using it inappropriately) defines one as an outsider, a mundane, or (worst
of all in hackish vocabulary) possibly even a suit. All human cultures use
slang in this threefold way — as a tool of communication kluge,
and of inclusion, and of exclusion.

Among hackers, though, slang has a subtler aspect, paralleled perhaps in the
slang of jazz musicians and some kinds of fine artists but hard to detect in
most technical or scientific cultures; parts of it are code for shared states of
*consciousness*. There is a whole range of altered states and problem-solving
mental stances basic to high-level hacking which don't fit into conventional
linguistic reality any better than a Coltrane solo or one of Maurits Escher's
'trompe l'oeil' compositions (Escher is a favorite of hackers), and hacker slang
encodes these subtleties in many unobvious ways. As a simple example, take the
distinction between a kluge and an elegant solution, and the differing
connotations attached to each. The distinction is not only of engineering
significance; it reaches right back into the nature of the generative processes
in program design and asserts something important about two different kinds of
relationship between the hacker and the hack. Hacker slang is unusually rich in
implications of this kind, of overtones and undertones that illuminate the
hackish psyche.

But there is more. Hackers, as a rule, love wordplay and are very conscious and
inventive in their use of language. These traits seem to be common in young
children, but the conformity-enforcing machine we are pleased to call an
educational system bludgeons them out of most of us before adolescence. Thus,
linguistic invention in most subcultures of the modern West is a halting and
largely unconscious process. Hackers, by contrast, regard slang formation and
use as a game to be played for conscious pleasure. Their inventions thus display
an almost unique combination of the neotenous enjoyment of language-play with
the discrimination of educated and powerful intelligence. Further, the
electronic media which knit them together are fluid, 'hot' connections, well
adapted to both the dissemination of new slang and the ruthless culling of weak
and superannuated specimens. The results of this process give us perhaps a
uniquely intense and accelerated view of linguistic evolution in action.

Hacker slang also challenges some common linguistic and anthropological

assumptions. For example, it has recently become fashionable to speak of
'low-context' versus 'high-context' communication, and to classify cultures by
the preferred context level of their languages and art forms. It is usually
claimed that low-context communication (characterized by precision, clarity, and
completeness of self-contained utterances) is typical in cultures which value
logic, objectivity, individualism, and competition; by contrast, high-context
communication (elliptical, emotive, nuance-filled, multi-modal, heavily coded)
is associated with cultures which value subjectivity, consensus, cooperation,
and tradition. What then are we to make of hackerdom, which is themed around
extremely low-context interaction with computers and exhibits primarily
"low-context" values, but cultivates an almost absurdly high-context slang
style?

The intensity and consciousness of hackish invention make a compilation of

hacker slang a particularly effective window into the surrounding culture —
and, in fact, this one is the latest version of an evolving compilation called
the 'Jargon File', maintained by hackers themselves for over 15 years. This one
(like its ancestors) is primarily a lexicon, but also includes topic entries
which collect background or sidelight information on hacker culture that would
be awkward to try to subsume under individual slang definitions.

Though the format is that of a reference volume, it is intended that the

material be enjoyable to browse. Even a complete outsider should find at least a
chuckle on nearly every page, and much that is amusingly thought-provoking. But
it is also true that hackers use humorous wordplay to make strong, sometimes
combative statements about what they feel. Some of these entries reflect the
views of opposing sides in disputes that have been genuinely passionate; this is
deliberate. We have not tried to moderate or pretty up these disputes; rather we
have attempted to ensure that *everyone's* sacred cows get gored, impartially.
Compromise is not particularly a hackish virtue, but the honest presentation of
divergent viewpoints is.

The reader with minimal computer background who finds some references
incomprehensibly technical can safely ignore them. We have not felt it either
necessary or desirable to eliminate all such; they, too, contribute flavor, and
one of this document's major intended audiences — fledgling hackers already
partway inside the culture — will benefit from them.

A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor is included in Appendix

A, Hacker Folklore. The 'outside' reader's attention is particularly
directed to Appendix B, A Portrait of J. Random Hacker.
Appendix C, the Bibliography, lists some non-technical works which have
either influenced or described the hacker culture.

Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one each individual must choose by

action to join), one should not be surprised that the line between description
and influence can become more than a little blurred. Earlier versions of the
Jargon File have played a central role in spreading hacker language and the
culture that goes with it to successively larger populations, and we hope and
expect that this one will do likewise.

Of Slang, Jargon, and Techspeak

Linguists usually refer to informal language as 'slang' and reserve the term
'jargon' for the technical vocabularies of various occupations. However, the
ancestor of this collection was called the `Jargon File', and hacker slang is
traditionally 'the jargon'. When talking about the jargon there is therefore no
convenient way to distinguish it from what a *linguist* would call hackers'
jargon — the formal vocabulary they learn from textbooks, technical papers,
and manuals.

To make a confused situation worse, the line between hacker slang and the
vocabulary of technical programming and computer science is fuzzy, and shifts
over time. Further, this vocabulary is shared with a wider technical culture of
programmers, many of whom are not hackers and do not speak or recognize hackish
slang.

Accordingly, this lexicon will try to be as precise as the facts of usage permit
about the distinctions among three categories:

* 'slang': informal language from mainstream English or non-technical

subcultures (bikers, rock fans, surfers, etc).

* 'jargon': without qualifier, denotes informal 'slangy' language peculiar to or

predominantly found among hackers — the subject of this lexicon.

* 'techspeak': the formal technical vocabulary of programming, computer science,

electronics, and other fields connected to hacking.

This terminology will be consistently used throughout the remainder of this

lexicon.

The jargon/techspeak distinction is the delicate one. A lot of techspeak

originated as jargon, and there is a steady continuing uptake of jargon into
techspeak. On the other hand, a lot of jargon arises from overgeneralization of
techspeak terms (there is more about this in the Jargon Construction section
below).

In general, we have considered techspeak any term that communicates primarily by

a denotation well established in textbooks, technical dictionaries, or standards
documents.

A few obviously techspeak terms (names of operating systems, languages, or

documents) are listed when they are tied to hacker folklore that isn't covered
in formal sources, or sometimes to convey critical historical background
necessary to understand other entries to which they are cross-referenced. Some
other techspeak senses of jargon words are listed in order to make the jargon
senses clear; where the text does not specify that a straight technical sense is
under discussion, these are marked with '[techspeak]' as an etymology. Some
entries have a primary sense marked this way, with subsequent jargon meanings
explained in terms of it.

We have also tried to indicate (where known) the apparent origins of terms. The
results are probably the least reliable information in the lexicon, for several
reasons. For one thing, it is well known that many hackish usages have been
independently reinvented multiple times, even among the more obscure and
intricate neologisms. It often seems that the generative processes underlying
hackish jargon formation have an internal logic so powerful as to create
substantial parallelism across separate cultures and even in different
languages! For another, the networks tend to propagate innovations so quickly
that `first use' is often impossible to pin down. And, finally, compendia like
this one alter what they observe by implicitly stamping cultural approval on
terms and widening their use.

Despite these problems, the organized collection of jargon-related oral history

for the new compilations has enabled us to put to rest quite a number of folk
etymologies, place credit where credit is due, and illuminate the early history
of many important hackerisms such as kluge, cruft, and foo. We believe
specialist lexicographers will find many of the historical notes more than
casually instructive.

Revision History

The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon from technical
cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), and others of the
old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN),
Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as 'jargon-1' or 'the File') was begun by
Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this time until the plug was finally
pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there.
Some terms in it date back considerably earlier (frob and some senses of
moby, for instance, go back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and are
believed to date at least back to the early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1
were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered 'Version 1'.

In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL
computer, FTPed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly
restricted to 'AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL
JARGON.

The file was quickly renamed JARGON (the ' ' caused versioning under
ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr.
Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of correcting the term
'jargon' to 'slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as the
Jargon File.

Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don
Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in
duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations).

The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was
prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages.

In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File
published in Stewart Brand's "CoEvolution Quarterly" (issue 29, pages 26—35)
with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the
Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper
publication.

A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was
edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as "The Hacker's Dictionary"
(Harper Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors
(Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as
did Richard M. Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now out of print) is
hereafter referred to as `Steele-1983' and those six as the Steele-1983
coauthors.

Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped

growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file
temporarily to facilitate the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions
caused the 'temporary' freeze to become permanent.

The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the
resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software
instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to
dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI
technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along
the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The
startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a
TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved ITS.

The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL
computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until 1991.
Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen
TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the interesting software work was
being done on the emerging BSD Unix standard.

In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the File were
dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at Digital
Equipment Corporation. The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to
other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was
a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its
influence was to be.

By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up
around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies obtained off the
ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT and Stanford; the
content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hacker language and humor.
Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous
expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials such as the AI Koans
in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter
of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace
of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously — but the Jargon File,
having passed from living document to icon, remained essentially untouched for
seven years.

This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of jargon-1 (a
few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after careful consultation with
the editors of Steele-1983). It merges in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text,
omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983
that are now also obsolete.

This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim is to cover
not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all the technical computing cultures
wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries now
derive from Usenet and represent jargon now current in the C and Unix
communities, but special efforts have been made to collect jargon from other
cultures including IBM PC programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the
IBM mainframe world.

Eric S. Raymond [email protected] maintains the new File with

assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. [email protected] ; these are the persons
primarily reflected in the File's editorial 'we', though we take pleasure in
acknowledging the special contribution of the other coauthors of Steele-1983.
Please email all additions, corrections, and correspondence relating to the
Jargon File to [email protected].

(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file *but are not guaranteed to
be correct* later than the revision date on the first line. *Don't* email us if
an attempt to reach your idol bounces — we have no magic way of checking
addresses or looking up people.)

The 2.9.6 version became the main text of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", by Eric
Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6.

The 3.0.0 version was published in September 1993 as the second edition of "The
New Hacker's Dictionary", again from MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-18154-1).

If you want the book, you should be able to find it at any of the major
bookstore chains. Failing that, you can order by mail from

The MIT Press

55 Hayward Street
Cambridge, MA 02142

or order by phone at (800)-356-0343 or (617)-625-8481.

The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version of the Jargon File
through and beyond paper publication, and will continue to make it available to
archives and public-access sites as a trust of the hacker community.

Here is a chronology of the high points in the recent on-line revisions:

Version 2.1.1, Jun 12 1990: the Jargon File comes alive again after a seven-year
hiatus. Reorganization and massive additions were by Eric S. Raymond, approved
by Guy Steele. Many items of UNIX, C, USENET, and microcomputer-based jargon
were added at that time.

Version 2.9.6, Aug 16 1991: corresponds to reproduction copy for book. This
version had 18952 lines, 148629 words, 975551 characters, and 1702 entries.

Version 2.9.8, Jan 01 1992: first public release since the book, including over
fifty new entries and numerous corrections/additions to old ones. Packaged with
version 1.1 of vh(1) hypertext reader. This version had 19509 lines, 153108
words, 1006023 characters, and 1760 entries.

Version 2.9.9, Apr 01 1992: folded in XEROX PARC lexicon. This version had 20298
lines, 159651 words, 1048909 characters, and 1821 entries.

Version 2.9.10, Jul 01 1992: lots of new historical material. This version had
21349 lines, 168330 words, 1106991 characters, and 1891 entries.

Version 2.9.11, Jan 01 1993: lots of new historical material. This version had
21725 lines, 171169 words, 1125880 characters, and 1922 entries.

Version 2.9.12, May 10 1993: a few new entries changes, marginal MUD/IRC
slang and some borderline techspeak removed, all in preparation for 2nd Edition
of TNHD. This version had 22238 lines, 175114 words, 1152467 characters, and
1946 entries.

Version 3.0.0, Jul 27 1993: manuscript freeze for 2nd edition of TNHD. This
version had 22548 lines, 177520 words, 1169372 characters, and 1961 entries.

Version 3.1.0, Oct 15 1994: interim release to test WWW conversion. This version
had 23197 lines, 181001 words, 1193818 characters, and 1990 entries.

Version 3.2.0, Mar 15 1995: Spring 1995 update. This version had 23822 lines,
185961 words, 1226358 characters, and 2031 entries.

Version 3.3.0, Jan 20 1996: Winter 1996 update. This version had 24055 lines,
187957 words, 1239604 characters, and 2045 entries.

Version 3.3.1, Jan 25 1996: Copy-corrected improvement on 3.3.0 shipped to MIT

Press as a step towards TNHD III. This version had 24147 lines, 188728 words,
1244554 characters, and 2050 entries.

Version 3.3.2, Mar 20 1996: A number of new entries pursuant on 3.3.2. This
version had 24442 lines, 190867 words, 1262468 characters, and 2061 entries.

Version 3.3.3, Mar 25 1996: Cleanup before TNHD III manuscript freeze. This
version had 24584 lines, 191932 words, 1269996 characters, and 2064 entries.

Version 4.0.0, Jul 25 1996: The actual TNHD III version after copy-edit. This
version had 24801 lines, 193697 words, 1281402 characters, and 2067 entries.

Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as major.minor.revision. Major

version 1 is reserved for the 'old' (ITS) Jargon File, jargon-1. Major version 2
encompasses revisions by ESR (Eric S. Raymond) with assistance from GLS (Guy L.
Steele, Jr.) leading up to and including the second paper edition. From now on,
major version number N.00 will probably correspond to the Nth paper edition.
Usually later versions will either completely supersede or incorporate earlier
versions, so there is generally no point in keeping old versions around.

Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and assistance, and to
the hundreds of Usenetters (too many to name here) who contributed entries and
encouragement. More thanks go to several of the old-timers on the Usenet group
alt.folklore.computers, who contributed much useful commentary and many
corrections and valuable historical perspective: Joseph M. Newcomer
[email protected] , Bernie Cosell [email protected] , Earl Boebert
[email protected] , and Joe Morris [email protected] .

We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished linguists. David
Stampe [email protected] and Charles Hoequist [email protected]
contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane [email protected] helped us
improve the pronunciation guides.

A few bits of this text quote previous works. We are indebted to Brian A.
LaMacchia [email protected] for obtaining permission for us to use
material from the "TMRC Dictionary"; also, Don Libes [email protected]
contributed some appropriate material from his excellent book "Life With UNIX".
We thank Per Lindberg [email protected] , author of the remarkable
Swedish-language 'zine "Hackerbladet", for bringing "FOO!" comics to our
attention and smuggling one of the IBM hacker underground's own baby jargon
files out to us. Thanks also to Maarten Litmaath for generously allowing the
inclusion of the ASCII pronunciation guide he formerly maintained. And our
gratitude to Marc Weiser of XEROX PARC [email protected] for
securing us permission to quote from PARC's own jargon lexicon and shipping us a
copy.

It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the major contributions of Mark

Brader [email protected] and Steve Summit [email protected] to the File
and Dictionary; they have read and reread many drafts, checked facts, caught
typos, submitted an amazing number of thoughtful comments, and done yeoman
service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Their rare combination of
enthusiasm, persistence, wide-ranging technical knowledge, and precisionism in
matters of language has been of invaluable help. Indeed, the sustained volume
and quality of Mr. Brader's input over several years and several different
editions has only allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of
margins.

Finally, George V. Reilly [email protected] helped with TeX arcana

and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions, and Eric Tiedemann
[email protected] contributed sage advice throughout on rhetoric,
amphigory, and philosophunculism.

How Jargon Works

 Jargon Construction

There are some standard methods of jargonification that became established quite
early (i.e., before 1970), spreading from such sources as the Tech Model
Railroad Club, the PDP-1 SPACEWAR hackers, and John McCarthy's original crew of
LISPers. These include verb doubling, soundalike slang, the '-P' convention,
overgeneralization, spoken inarticulations, and anthropomorphization. Each is
discussed below. We also cover the standard comparatives for design quality.

Of these six, verb doubling, overgeneralization, anthropomorphization, and

(especially) spoken inarticulations have become quite general; but soundalike
slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large universities, and the
'-P' convention is found only where LISPers flourish.

Verb Doubling

A standard construction in English is to double a verb and use it as an

exclamation, such as "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!". Most of these are names
for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise, sometimes sarcastic comment
on what the implied subject does. Also, a doubled verb is often used to
terminate a conversation, in the process remarking on the current state of
affairs or what the speaker intends to do next. Typical examples involve win,
lose, hack, flame, barf, chomp:

"The disk heads just crashed."

"Lose, lose."

"Mostly he talked about his latest crock. Flame, flame."

"Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!"

Some verb-doubled constructions have special meanings not immediately obvious

from the verb. These have their own listings in the lexicon.

The Usenet culture has one *tripling* convention unrelated to this; the names
of 'joke' topic groups often have a tripled last element. The first and
paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a "Muppet Show"
reference); other infamous examples have included:

alt.french.captain.borg.borg.borg

alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die

comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk

sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom

alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill

Soundalike slang

Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or
phrase into something more interesting. It is considered particularly
flavorful if the phrase is bent so as to include some other jargon word; thus
the computer hobbyist magazine "Dr. Dobb's Journal" is almost always referred to
among hackers as 'Dr. Frob's Journal' or simply 'Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind
that have been in fairly wide use include names for newspapers:

Boston Herald = Horrid (or Harried)

Boston Globe = Boston Glob

 Houston (or San Francisco) Chronicle = the Crocknicle (or the Comical)

New York Times = New York Slime

However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard
examples include:

Data General = Dirty Genitals

IBM 360 = IBM Three-Sickly

Government Property — Do Not Duplicate (on keys) =

Government Duplicity — Do Not Propagate

for historical reasons = for hysterical raisins

Margaret Jacks Hall (the CS building at Stanford) = Marginal Hacks Hall

This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to
in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker punning
jargon is intentionally transparent.

The '-P' convention

Turning a word into a question by appending the syllable 'P'; from the LISP
convention of appending the letter 'P' to denote a predicate (a boolean-valued
function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See
T and NIL.)

At dinnertime:

Q: "Foodp?"
A: "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!"

At any time:

Q: "State-of-the-world-P?"
A: (Straight) "I'm about to go home."
A: (Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state."

On the phone to Florida:

Q: "State-p Florida?"
A: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?"

[One of the best of these is a Gosperism. Once, when we were at a Chinese

restaurant, Bill Gosper wanted to know whether someone would like to share with
him a two-person-sized bowl of soup. His inquiry was: "Split-p soup?" — GLS]

Overgeneralization

A very conspicuous feature of jargon is the frequency with which techspeak items
such as names of program tools, command language primitives, and even assembler
opcodes are applied to contexts outside of computing wherever hackers find
amusing analogies to them. Thus (to cite one of the best-known examples) Unix
hackers often grep for things rather than searching for them. Many of the
lexicon entries are generalizations of exactly this kind.

Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as well. Many hackers

love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and
verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases (or vice versa).

For example, because

 porous = porosity
generous = generosity

hackers happily generalize:

mysterious = mysteriosity
ferrous = ferrosity
obvious = obviosity
dubious = dubiosity

Another class of common construction uses the suffix '-itude' to abstract a

quality from just about any adjective or noun. This usage arises especially in
cases where mainstream English would perform the same abstraction through
'-iness' or '-ingness'. Thus:

win = winnitude (a common exclamation)

loss = lossitude
cruft = cruftitude
lame = lameitude

Some hackers cheerfully reverse this transformation; they argue, for example,
that the horizontal degree lines on a globe ought to be called 'lats' — after
all, they're measuring latitude!

Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. E.g.: "All nouns can be verbed", "I'll
mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm grepping the files".
English as a whole is already heading in this direction (towards pure-positional
grammar like Chinese); hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve.

However, hackers avoid the unimaginative verb-making techniques characteristic

of marketroids, bean-counters, and the Pentagon; a hacker would never, for
example, 'productize', 'prioritize', or `securitize' things. Hackers have a
strong aversion to bureaucratic bafflegab and regard those who use it with
contempt.

Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. This is only a slight overgeneralization in

modern English; in hackish, however, it is good form to mark them in some
standard nonstandard way. Thus:

win = winnitude, winnage

disgust = disgustitude
hack = hackification

Further, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural forms. Some
of these go back quite a ways; the TMRC Dictionary includes an entry which
implies that the plural of 'mouse' is meeces, and notes that the defined
plural of 'caboose' is 'cabeese'. This latter has apparently been standard (or
at least a standard joke) among railfans (railroad enthusiasts) for many years.

On a similarly Anglo-Saxon note, almost anything ending in 'x' may form plurals
in '-xen' (see VAXen and boxen in the main text). Even words ending in
phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; e.g., 'soxen' for a bunch of
socks. Other funny plurals are `frobbotzim' for the plural of 'frobbozz' (see
frobnitz) and `Unices' and 'Twenices' (rather than 'Unixes' and 'Twenexes';
see Unix, TWENEX in main text). But note that 'Unixen' and 'Twenexen' are
never used; it has been suggested that this is because '-ix' and `-ex' are Latin
singular endings that attract a Latinate plural. Finally, it has been suggested
to general approval that the plural of `mongoose' ought to be 'polygoose'.

The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is generalization of

an inflectional rule that in English is either an import or a fossil (such as
the Hebrew plural ending '-im', or the Anglo-Saxon plural suffix '-en') to cases
where it isn't normally considered to apply.

This is not 'poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware of what
they are doing when they distort the language. It is grammatical creativity, a
form of playfulness. It is done not to impress but to amuse, and never at the
expense of clarity.

Spoken inarticulations

Words such as 'mumble', 'sigh', and 'groan' are spoken in places where their
referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested that this usage
derives from the impossibility of representing such noises on a comm link or in
electronic mail (interestingly, the same sorts of constructions have been
showing up with increasing frequency in comic strips). Another expression
sometimes heard is "Complain!", meaning "I have a complaint!"

Anthropomorphization

Semantically, one rich source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to

anthropomorphize hardware and software. This isn't done in a naive way; hackers
don't personalize their stuff in the sense of feeling empathy with it, nor do
they mystically believe that the things they work on every day are 'alive'. What
*is* common is to hear hardware or software talked about as though it has
homunculi talking to each other inside it, with intentions and desires. Thus,
one hears "The protocol handler got confused", or that programs "are trying" to
do things, or one may say of a routine that "its goal in life is to X". One even
hears explanations like "... and its poor little brain couldn't understand X,
and it died." Sometimes modelling things this way actually seems to make them
easier to understand, perhaps because it's instinctively natural to think of
anything with a really complex behavioral repertoire as 'like a person' rather
than `like a thing'.

Comparatives

Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be understood as members
of sets of comparatives. This is especially true of the adjectives and nouns
used to describe the beauty and functional quality of code. Here is an
approximately correct spectrum:

monstrosity brain-damage screw bug lose misfeature

crock kluge hack win feature elegance perfection

The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but never actually

attained. Another similar scale is used for describing the reliability of
software:

broken flaky dodgy fragile brittle

solid robust bulletproof armor-plated

Note, however, that 'dodgy' is primarily Commonwealth Hackish (it is rare in the
U.S.) and may change places with 'flaky' for some speakers.

Coinages for describing lossage seem to call forth the very finest in hackish
linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that hackers have even more
words for equipment failures than Yiddish has for obnoxious people.

Hacker Writing Style

We've already seen that hackers often coin jargon by overgeneralizing

grammatical rules. This is one aspect of a more general fondness for
form-versus-content language jokes that shows up particularly in hackish
writing. One correspondent reports that he consistently misspells 'wrong' as
'worng'. Others have been known to criticize glitches in Jargon File drafts by
observing (in the mode of Douglas Hofstadter) "This sentence no verb", or "Too
repetetetive", or "Bad speling", or "Incorrectspa cing." Similarly, intentional
spoonerisms are often made of phrases relating to confusion or things that are
confusing; 'dain bramage' for 'brain damage' is perhaps the most common
(similarly, a hacker would be likely to write "Excuse me, I'm cixelsyd today",
rather than "I'm dyslexic today"). This sort of thing is quite common and is
enjoyed by all concerned.

Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parentheses, much to the
dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so are
"Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is
going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to standard
American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period
inside the string quotes); however, it is counter-intuitive to hackers to
mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the
sorts of examples that can come up in discussions of programming, American-style
quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or
small pieces of code, extra characters can be a real pain in the neck.

Consider, for example, a sentence in a vi tutorial that looks like this:

Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd".

Standard usage would make this

Then delete a line from the file by typing "dd."

but that would be very bad — because the reader would be prone to type the
string d-d-dot, and it happens that in 'vi(1)' dot repeats the last command
accepted. The net result would be to delete *two* lines!

The Jargon File follows hackish usage throughout.

Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain,

though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons
having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still
accepted there. "Hart's Rules" and the "Oxford Dictionary for Writers and
Editors" call the hacker-like style 'new' or 'logical' quoting.

Another hacker habit is a tendency to distinguish between 'scare' quotes and

'speech' quotes; that is, to use British-style single quotes for marking and
reserve American-style double quotes for actual reports of speech or text
included from elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities describe this as
correct general usage, but mainstream American English has gone to using
double-quotes indiscriminately enough that hacker usage appears marked [and, in
fact, I thought this was a personal quirk of mine until I checked with Usenet
— ESR]. One further permutation that is definitely *not* standard is a hackish
tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes (single quotes) in pairs;
that is, 'like this'. This is modelled on string and character literal syntax in
some programming languages (reinforced by the fact that many character-only
terminals display the apostrophe in typewriter style, as a vertical single
quote).

One quirk that shows up frequently in the email style of Unix hackers in
particular is a tendency for some things that are normally all-lowercase
(including usernames and the names of commands and C routines) to remain
uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning of sentences. It is clear
that, for many hackers, the case of such identifiers becomes a part of their
internal representation (the 'spelling') and cannot be overridden without mental
effort (an appropriate reflex because Unix and C both distinguish cases and
confusing them can lead to lossage). A way of escaping this dilemma is simply
to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of sentences.

There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to the effect

that precision of expression is more important than conformance to traditional
rules; where the latter create ambiguity or lose information they can be
discarded without a second thought. It is notable in this respect that other
hackish inventions (for example, in vocabulary) also tend to carry very precise
shades of meaning even when constructed to appear slangy and loose. In fact, to
a hacker, the contrast between 'loose' form and 'tight' content in jargon is a
substantial part of its humor!

Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and emphasis conventions

adapted to single-font all-ASCII communications links, and these are
occasionally carried over into written documents even when normal means of font
changes, underlining, and the like are available.

One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS 'LOUD', and this becomes
such an ingrained synesthetic reflex that a person who goes to caps-lock while
in talk mode may be asked to "stop shouting, please, you're hurting my ears!".

Also, it is common to use bracketing with unusual characters to signify

emphasis. The asterisk is most common, as in "What the *hell*?" even though this
interferes with the common use of the asterisk suffix as a footnote mark. The
underscore is also common, suggesting underlining (this is particularly common
with book titles; for example, "It is often alleged that Joe Haldeman wrote
The Forever War as a rebuttal to Robert Heinlein's earlier novel of the future
military, Starship Troopers."). Other forms exemplified by "=hell=", "\hell/",
or "/hell/" are occasionally seen (it's claimed that in the last example the
first slash pushes the letters over to the right to make them italic, and the
second keeps them from falling over). Finally, words may also be emphasized L I
K E T H I S, or by a series of carets (^) under them on the next line of the
text.

There is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this* (which emphasizes

the phrase as a whole), and *emphasis* *like* *this* (which suggests the writer
speaking very slowly and distinctly, as if to a very young child or a mentally
impaired person). Bracketing a word with the '*' character may also indicate
that the writer wishes readers to consider that an action is taking place or
that a sound is being made. Examples: *bang*, *hic*, *ring*, *grin*, *kick*,
*stomp*, *mumble*.

One might also see the above sound effects as bang , hic ,
ring , grin , kick , stomp , mumble . This
use of angle brackets to mark their contents originally derives from conventions
used in BNF, but since about 1993 it has been reinforced by the HTML markup
used on the World Wide Web.

Angle-bracket enclosure is also used to indicate that a term stands for some
random member of a larger class (this is straight from BNF). Examples like
the following are common:

So this ethnic walks into a bar one day...

There is also an accepted convention for 'writing under erasure'; the text

Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman,

he's visiting from corporate HQ.

reads roughly as

"Be nice to this fool, er, gentleman...".

This comes from the fact that the digraph ^H is often used as a print
representation for a backspace. It parallels (and may have been influenced by)
the ironic use of 'slashouts' in science-fiction fanzines.

A related habit uses editor commands to signify corrections to previous text.

This custom is fading as more mailers get good editing capabilities, but one
occasionally still sees things like this:
 I've seen that term used on alt.foobar often.
Send it to Erik for the File.
Oops...s/Erik/Eric/.

The s/Erik/Eric/ says "change Erik to Eric in the preceding". This syntax is
borrowed from the Unix editing tools 'ed' and 'sed', but is widely recognized by
non-Unix hackers as well.

In a formula, '*' signifies multiplication but two asterisks in a row are a

shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN). Thus, one might write
2 ** 8 = 256.

Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the caret (^,
ASCII 1011110); one might write instead '2^8 = 256'. This goes all the way back
to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII `up-arrow' that later became the
caret; this was picked up by Kemeny and Kurtz's original BASIC, which in turn
influenced the design of the `bc(1)' and 'dc(1)' Unix tools, which have probably
done most to reinforce the convention on Usenet. The notation is mildly
confusing to C programmers, because '^' means bitwise exclusive-or in C. Despite
this, it was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of Usenet. It is used
consistently in this lexicon.

In on-line exchanges, hackers tend to use decimal forms or improper fractions

(`3.5' or '7/2') rather than 'typewriter style' mixed fractions (`3-1/2'). The
major motive here is probably that the former are more readable in a monospaced
font, together with a desire to avoid the risk that the latter might be read as
'three minus one-half'. The decimal form is definitely preferred for fractions
with a terminating decimal representation; there may be some cultural influence
here from the high status of scientific notation.

Another on-line convention, used especially for very large or very small
numbers, is taken from C (which derived it from FORTRAN). This is a form of
'scientific notation' using 'e' to replace '*10^'; for example, one year is
about 3e7 seconds long.

The tilde (~) is commonly used in a quantifying sense of `approximately'; that

is, '~50' means 'about fifty'.

On Usenet and in the MUD world, common C boolean, logical, and relational
operators such as '|', ' ', '||', ' ', '!', '==', '!=', ` ',
' ', ' =', and '= ' are often combined with English. The Pascal
not-equals, ' ', is also recognized, and occasionally one sees '/=' for
not-equals (from Ada, Common Lisp, and Fortran 90). The use of prefix '!' as a
loose synonym for 'not-' or 'no-' is particularly common; thus, '!clue' is read
'no-clue' or 'clueless'.

A related practice borrows syntax from preferred programming languages to

express ideas in a natural-language text. For example, one might see the
following:

In [email protected] J. R. Hacker wrote:

I recently had occasion to field-test the Snafu
Systems 2300E adaptive gonkulator. The price was
right, and the racing stripe on the case looked
kind of neat, but its performance left something
to be desired.

Yeah, I tried one out too.

#ifdef FLAME
Hasn't anyone told those idiots that you can't get
decent bogon suppression with AFJ filters at today's
net volumes?
 #endif /* FLAME */

I guess they figured the price premium for true

frame-based semantic analysis was too high.
Unfortunately, it's also the only workable approach.
I wouldn't recommend purchase of this product unless
you're on a *very* tight budget.

#include disclaimer.h
—

— Frank Foonly (Fubarco Systems)

In the above, the '#ifdef'/`#endif' pair is a conditional compilation syntax

from C; here, it implies that the text between (which is a flame) should be
evaluated only if you have turned on (or defined on) the switch FLAME. The
'#include' at the end is C for "include standard disclaimer here"; the 'standard
disclaimer' is understood to read, roughly, "These are my personal opinions and
not to be construed as the official position of my employer."

The top section in the example, with at the left margin, is an example of
an inclusion convention we'll discuss below.

More recently, following on the huge popularity of the World Wide Web,
pseudo-HTML markup has become popular for similar purposes:

flame
Your father was a hamster and your mother smelt of elderberries!
/flame

You'll even see this with an HTML-style modifier:

flame intensity="100%"
You seem well-suited for a career in government.
/flame

Hackers also mix letters and numbers more freely than in mainstream usage. In
particular, it is good hackish style to write a digit sequence where you intend
the reader to understand the text string that names that number in English. So,
hackers prefer to write `1970s' rather than 'nineteen-seventies' or '1970's'
(the latter looks like a possessive).

It should also be noted that hackers exhibit much less reluctance to use
multiply nested parentheses than is normal in English. Part of this is almost
certainly due to influence from LISP (which uses deeply nested parentheses (like
this (see?)) in its syntax a lot), but it has also been suggested that a more
basic hacker trait of enjoying playing with complexity and pushing systems to
their limits is in operation.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that many studies of on-line communication have

shown that electronic links have a de-inhibiting effect on people. Deprived of
the body-language cues through which emotional state is expressed, people tend
to forget everything about other parties except what is presented over that
ASCII link. This has both good and bad effects. A good one is that it encourages
honesty and tends to break down hierarchical authority relationships; a bad one
is that it may encourage depersonalization and gratuitous rudeness. Perhaps in
response to this, experienced netters often display a sort of conscious formal
politesse in their writing that has passed out of fashion in other spoken and
written media (for example, the phrase "Well said, sir!" is not uncommon).

Many introverted hackers who are next to inarticulate in person communicate with
considerable fluency over the net, perhaps precisely because they can forget on
an unconscious level that they are dealing with people and thus don't feel
stressed and anxious as they would face to face.

Though it is considered gauche to publicly criticize posters for poor spelling

or grammar, the network places a premium on literacy and clarity of expression.
It may well be that future historians of literature will see in it a revival of
the great tradition of personal letters as art.

Email Quotes and Inclusion Conventions

One area where conventions for on-line writing are still in some flux is the
marking of included material from earlier messages — what would be called
'block quotations' in ordinary English. From the usual typographic convention
employed for these (smaller font at an extra indent), there derived a practice
of included text being indented by one ASCII TAB (0001001) character, which
under Unix and many other environments gives the appearance of an 8-space
indent.

Early mail and netnews readers had no facility for including messages this way,
so people had to paste in copy manually. BSD 'Mail(1)' was the first message
agent to support inclusion, and early Usenetters emulated its style. But the TAB
character tended to push included text too far to the right (especially in
multiply nested inclusions), leading to ugly wraparounds. After a brief period
of confusion (during which an inclusion leader consisting of three or four
spaces became established in EMACS and a few mailers), the use of leading ' '
or ' ' became standard, perhaps owing to its use in 'ed(1)' to display tabs
(alternatively, it may derive from the ' ' that some early Unix mailers used
to quote lines starting with "From" in text, so they wouldn't look like the
beginnings of new message headers). Inclusions within inclusions keep their
' ' leaders, so the 'nesting level' of a quotation is visually apparent.

The practice of including text from the parent article when posting a followup
helped solve what had been a major nuisance on Usenet: the fact that articles do
not arrive at different sites in the same order. Careless posters used to post
articles that would begin with, or even consist entirely of, "No, that's wrong"
or "I agree" or the like. It was hard to see who was responding to what.
Consequently, around 1984, new news-posting software evolved a facility to
automatically include the text of a previous article, marked with " " or
whatever the poster chose. The poster was expected to delete all but the
relevant lines. The result has been that, now, careless posters post articles
containing the *entire* text of a preceding article, *followed* only by "No,
that's wrong" or "I agree".

Many people feel that this cure is worse than the original disease, and there
soon appeared newsreader software designed to let the reader skip over included
text if desired. Today, some posting software rejects articles containing too
high a proportion of lines beginning with ' ' — but this too has led to
undesirable workarounds, such as the deliberate inclusion of zero-content filler
lines which aren't quoted and thus pull the message below the rejection
threshold.

Because the default mailers supplied with Unix and other operating systems
haven't evolved as quickly as human usage, the older conventions using a leading
TAB or three or four spaces are still alive; however, -inclusion is now
clearly the prevalent form in both netnews and mail.

Inclusion practice is still evolving, and disputes over the 'correct' inclusion
style occasionally lead to holy wars.

Most netters view an inclusion as a promise that comment on it will immediately

follow. The preferred, conversational style looks like this,

relevant excerpt 1
response to excerpt
 relevant excerpt 2
response to excerpt
relevant excerpt 3
response to excerpt

or for short messages like this:

entire message
response to message

Thanks to poor design of some PC-based mail agents, one will occasionally see
the entire quoted message *after* the response, like this

entire message
response to message

but this practice is strongly deprecated.

Though ' ' remains the standard inclusion leader, '|' is occasionally used
for extended quotations where original variations in indentation are being
retained (one mailer even combines these and uses '| '). One also sees
different styles of quoting a number of authors in the same message: one
(deprecated because it loses information) uses a leader of ' ' for everyone,
another (the most common) is ' ', ' ', etc. (or
` ', ' ', etc., depending on line length and nesting
depth) reflecting the original order of messages, and yet another is to use a
different citation leader for each author, say ` ', ': ', '| ', '_ '
(preserving nesting so that the inclusion order of messages is still apparent,
or tagging the inclusions with authors' names). Yet *another* style is to use
each poster's initials (or login name) as a citation leader for that poster.

Occasionally one sees a '# ' leader used for quotations from authoritative
sources such as standards documents; the intended allusion is to the root prompt
(the special Unix command prompt issued when one is running as the privileged
super-user).

Hacker Speech Style

Hackish speech generally features extremely precise diction, careful word

choice, a relatively large working vocabulary, and relatively little use of
contractions or street slang. Dry humor, irony, puns, and a mildly flippant
attitude are highly valued — but an underlying seriousness and intelligence are
essential. One should use just enough jargon to communicate precisely and
identify oneself as a member of the culture; overuse of jargon or a breathless,
excessively gung-ho attitude is considered tacky and the mark of a loser.

This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally spoken by

scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical fields. In contrast
with the methods of jargon construction, it is fairly constant throughout
hackerdom.

It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative questions — or,
at least, that the people to whom they are talking are often confused by the
sense of their answers. The problem is that they have done so much programming
that distinguishes between

if (going) ...

and

if (!going) ...

that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it seems to be asking the
opposite question from "Are you going?", and so merits an answer in the opposite
sense. This confuses English-speaking non-hackers because they were taught to
answer as though the negative part weren't there. In some other languages
(including Russian, Chinese, and Japanese) the hackish interpretation is
standard and the problem wouldn't arise. Hackers often find themselves wishing
for a word like French 'si' or German 'doch' with which one could unambiguously
answer 'yes' to a negative question.

For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use double negatives,
even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows them. The thought of
uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be
misparsed as a negative tends to disturb them.

In a related vein, hackers sometimes make a game of answering questions

containing logical connectives with a strictly literal rather than colloquial
interpretation. A non-hacker who is indelicate enough to ask a question like
"So, are you working on finding that bug *now* or leaving it until later?" is
likely to get the perfectly correct answer "Yes!" (that is, "Yes, I'm doing it
either now or later, and you didn't ask which!").

International Style

Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage in American
English, we have made some effort to get input from abroad. Though the
hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of jargon from English
(often as transmitted to them by earlier Jargon File versions!), the local
variations are interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to
travelling hackers.

There are some references herein to 'Commonwealth hackish'. These are intended
to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in the English spoken in
Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, India, etc. — though
Canada is heavily influenced by American usage). There is also an entry on
Commonwealth Hackish reporting some general phonetic and vocabulary
differences from U.S. hackish.

Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia report that they often
use a mixture of English and their native languages for technical conversation.
Occasionally they develop idioms in their English usage that are influenced by
their native-language styles. Some of these are reported here.

On the other hand, English often gives rise to grammatical and vocabulary
mutations in the native language. For example, Italian hackers often use the
nonexistent verbs 'scrollare' (to scroll) and `deletare' (to delete) rather than
native Italian 'scorrere' and `cancellare'. Similarly, the English verb 'to
hack' has been seen conjugated in Swedish. European hackers report that this
happens partly because the English terms make finer distinctions than are
available in their native vocabularies, and partly because deliberate
language-crossing makes for amusing wordplay.

A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are parallel
with English idioms and thus comprehensible to English-speakers.

Crackers, Phreaks, and Lamers

From the late 1980s onward, a flourishing culture of local, MS-DOS-based

bulletin boards has been developing separately from Internet hackerdom. The BBS
culture has, as its seamy underside, a stratum of 'pirate boards' inhabited by
crackers, phone phreaks, and warez d00dz. These people (mostly teenagers
running PC-clones from their bedrooms) have developed their own characteristic
jargon, heavily influenced by skateboard lingo and underground-rock slang.

Though crackers often call themselves 'hackers', they aren't (they typically
have neither significant programming ability, nor Internet expertise, nor
experience with UNIX or other true multi-user systems). Their vocabulary has
little overlap with hackerdom's. Nevertheless, this lexicon covers much of it so
the reader will be able to understand what goes by on bulletin-board systems.

Here is a brief guide to cracker and warez d00dz usage:

* Misspell frequently. The substitutions

phone = fone
freak = phreak

are obligatory.

* Always substitute 'z's for 's's. (i.e. "codes" - "codez").

* Type random emphasis characters after a post line (i.e. "Hey Dudes!#!$#$!#!$").

* Use the emphatic 'k' prefix ("k-kool", "k-rad", "k-awesome") frequently.

* Abbreviate compulsively ("I got lotsa warez w/ docs").

* Substitute '0' for 'o' ("r0dent", "l0zer").

* TYPE ALL IN CAPS LOCK, SO IT LOOKS LIKE YOU'RE YELLING ALL THE TIME.

These traits are similar to those of B1FF, who originated as a parody of naive
BBS users. For further discussion of the pirate-board subculture, see lamer,
elite, leech, poser, cracker, and especially warez d00dz.

How to Use the Lexicon

Pronunciation Guide

Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listings for all entries that are
neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English nor obvious compounds
thereof. Slashes bracket phonetic pronunciations, which are to be interpreted
using the following conventions:

1. Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an accent or

back-accent follows each accented syllable (the back-accent marks
a secondary accent in some words of four or more syllables). If
no accent is given, the word is pronounced with equal
accentuation on all syllables (this is common for abbreviations).

2. Consonants are pronounced as in American English. The letter 'g'

is always hard (as in "got" rather than "giant"); 'ch' is soft
("church" rather than "chemist"). The letter 'j' is the sound
that occurs twice in "judge". The letter 's' is always as in
"pass", never a z sound. The digraph 'kh' is the guttural of
"loch" or "l'chaim". The digraph 'gh' is the aspirated g+h of
"bughouse" or "ragheap" (rare in English).

3. Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names;

thus (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aych el el/. /Z/
may be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.

4. Vowels are represented as follows:

/a/
back, that
/ah/
father, palm (see note)
/ar/
 far, mark
/aw/
flaw, caught
/ay/
bake, rain
/e/
less, men
/ee/
easy, ski
/eir/
their, software
/i/
trip, hit
/i:/
life, sky
/o/
block, stock (see note)
/oh/
flow, sew
/oo/
loot, through
/or/
more, door
/ow/
out, how
/oy/
boy, coin
/uh/
but, some
/u/
put, foot
/y/
yet, young
/yoo/
few, chew
/[y]oo/
/oo/ with optional fronting as in 'news' (/nooz/ or /nyooz/)

The glyph /*/ is used for the 'schwa' sound of unstressed or occluded vowels
(the one that is often written with an upside-down 'e'). The schwa vowel is
omitted in syllables containing vocalic r, l, m or n; that is, 'kitten' and
'color' would be rendered /kit'n/ and /kuhl'r/, not /kit'*n/ and /kuhl'*r/.

Note that the above table reflects mainly distinctions found in standard
American English (that is, the neutral dialect spoken by TV network announcers
and typical of educated speech in the Upper Midwest, Chicago, Minneapolis/St.
Paul and Philadelphia). However, we separate /o/ from /ah/, which tend to merge
in standard American. This may help readers accustomed to accents resembling
British Received Pronunciation.

The intent of this scheme is to permit as many readers as possible to map the
pronunciations into their local dialect by ignoring some subset of the
distinctions we make. Speakers of British RP, for example, can smash terminal
/r/ and all unstressed vowels. Speakers of many varieties of southern American
will automatically map /o/ to /aw/; and so forth. (Standard American makes a
good reference dialect for this purpose because it has crisp consonents and more
vowel distinctions than other major dialects, and tends to retain distinctions
between unstressed vowels. It also happens to be what your editor speaks.)

Entries with a pronunciation of '//' are written-only usages. (No, Unix weenies,
this does *not* mean 'pronounce like previous pronunciation'!)

Other Lexicon Conventions

Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than the
letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in mainstream
dictionaries), except that all entries beginning with nonalphabetic characters
are sorted after Z. The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug.

The beginning of each entry is marked by a colon (`:') at the left margin. This
convention helps out tools like hypertext browsers that benefit from knowing
where entry boundaries are, but aren't as context-sensitive as humans.

In pure ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see _ used to bracket
words which themselves have entries in the File. This isn't done all the time
for every such word, but it is done everywhere that a reminder seems useful that
the term has a jargon meaning and one might wish to refer to its entry.

In this all-ASCII version, headwords for topic entries are distinguished from
those for ordinary entries by being followed by "::" rather than ":"; similarly,
references are surrounded by "" and "" rather than "" and "".

Defining instances of terms and phrases appear in 'slanted type'. A defining

instance is one which occurs near to or as part of an explanation of it.

Prefixed ** is used as linguists do; to mark examples of incorrect usage.

We follow the 'logical' quoting convention described in the Writing Style

section above. In addition, we reserve double quotes for actual excerpts of text
or (sometimes invented) speech. Scare quotes (which mark a word being used in a
nonstandard way), and philosopher's quotes (which turn an utterance into the
string of letters or words that name it) are both rendered with single quotes.

References such as 'malloc(3)' and 'patch(1)' are to Unix facilities (some of

which, such as 'patch(1)', are actually freeware distributed over Usenet). The
Unix manuals use 'foo(n)' to refer to item foo in section (n) of the manual,
where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is
games, and n=8 (where present) is system administration utilities. Sections 4,
5, and 7 of the manuals have changed roles frequently and in any case are not
referred to in any of the entries.

Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized here:

abbrev. abbreviation

adj. adjective

adv. adverb

alt. alternate

cav. caveat

conj. conjunction

esp. especially

excl. exclamation

imp. imperative

interj. interjection

n. noun

obs. obsolete

pl. plural

poss. possibly
pref. prefix

prob. probably

prov. proverbial

quant. quantifier

suff. suffix

syn. synonym (or synonymous with)

v. verb (may be transitive or intransitive)

var. variant

vi. intransitive verb

vt. transitive verb

Where alternate spellings or pronunciations are given, alt. separates two

possibilities with nearly equal distribution, while var. prefixes one that is
markedly less common than the primary.

Where a term can be attributed to a particular subculture or is known to have

originated there, we have tried to so indicate. Here is a list of abbreviations
used in etymologies:

Amateur Packet Radio: A technical culture of ham-radio sites using AX.25 and
TCP/IP for wide-area networking and BBS systems.

Berkeley: University of California at Berkeley

BBN: Bolt, Beranek Newman

Cambridge: the university in England (*not* the city in Massachusetts where

MIT happens to be located!)

CMU: Carnegie-Mellon University

Commodore: Commodore Business Machines

DEC: The Digital Equipment Corporation

Fairchild: The Fairchild Instruments Palo Alto development group

FidoNet: See the FidoNet entry

IBM: International Business Machines

MIT: Massachusetts Institute of Technology; esp. the legendary MIT AI Lab

culture of roughly 1971 to 1983 and its feeder groups, including the Tech Model
Railroad Club

NRL: Naval Research Laboratories

NYU: New York University

OED: The Oxford English Dictionary

Purdue: Purdue University

SAIL: Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (at Stanford University)

SI: From Syst`eme International, the name for the standard conventions of
metric nomenclature used in the sciences
Stanford: Stanford University

Sun: Sun Microsystems

TMRC: Some MITisms go back as far as the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) at
MIT c. 1960. Material marked TMRC is from "An Abridged Dictionary of the TMRC
Language", originally compiled by Pete Samson in 1959

UCLA: University of California at Los Angeles

UK: the United Kingdom (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland)

Usenet: See the Usenet entry

WPI: Worcester Polytechnic Institute, site of a very active community of

PDP-10 hackers during the 1970s

WWW: The World-Wide-Web.

XEROX: PARC XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering
research in user interface design and networking

Yale: Yale University

Some other etymology abbreviations such as Unix and PDP-10 refer to

technical cultures surrounding specific operating systems, processors, or other
environments. The fact that a term is labelled with any one of these
abbreviations does not necessarily mean its use is confined to that culture. In
particular, many terms labelled 'MIT' and 'Stanford' are in quite general use.
We have tried to give some indication of the distribution of speakers in the
usage notes; however, a number of factors mentioned in the introduction conspire
to make these indications less definite than might be desirable.

A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed]. These are
usually generalizations suggested by editors or Usenet respondents in the
process of commenting on previous definitions of those entries. These are *not*
represented as established jargon.

Format For New Entries

You can mail submissions for the Jargon File to

[email protected].

All contributions and suggestions about the Jargon File will be considered
donations to be placed in the public domain as part of this File, and may be
used in subsequent paper editions. Submissions may be edited for accuracy,
clarity and concision.

Try to conform to the format already being used in the ASCII on-line version —
head-words separated from text by a colon (double colon for topic entries),
cross-references in curly brackets (doubled for topic entries), pronunciations
in slashes, etymologies in square brackets, single-space after definition
numbers and word classes, etc. Stick to the standard ASCII character set (7-bit
printable, no high-half characters or [nt]roff/TeX/Scribe escapes), as one of
the versions generated from the master file is an info document that has to be
viewable on a character tty.

We are looking to expand the File's range of technical specialties covered.

There are doubtless rich veins of jargon yet untapped in the scientific
computing, graphics, and networking hacker communities; also in numerical
analysis, computer architectures and VLSI design, language design, and many
other related fields. Send us your jargon!
We are *not* interested in straight technical terms explained by textbooks or
technical dictionaries unless an entry illuminates `underground' meanings or
aspects not covered by official histories. We are also not interested in 'joke'
entries — there is a lot of humor in the file but it must flow naturally out of
the explanations of what hackers do and how they think.

It is OK to submit items of jargon you have originated if they have spread to

the point of being used by people who are not personally acquainted with you. We
prefer items to be attested by independent submission from two different sites.

An HTML version of the File is available at http://www.ccil.org/jargon. Please

send us URLs for materials related to the entries, so we can enrich the File's
link structure.

The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and made available for browsing on
the World Wide Web, and will include a version number. Read it, pass it around,
contribute — this is *your* monument!

The Jargon Lexicon

abbrev

/*-breev'/, /*-brev'/ /n./ Common abbreviation for 'abbreviation'.

ABEND

/a'bend/, /*-bend'/ /n./ [ABnormal END] Abnormal termination (of software);

crash; lossage. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly
by hackers but seriously mainly by code grinder s. Usually capitalized, but
may appear as 'abend'. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is called
'abend' because it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday
when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German 'Abend' =
'Evening'.

accumulator

/n. obs./ 1. Archaic term for a register. On-line use of it as a synonym for
'register' is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for
quite a while and/or that the architecture under discussion is quite old. The
term in full is almost never used of microprocessor registers, for example,
though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in 'A' derive from
historical use of the term 'accumulator' (and not, actually, from 'arithmetic').
Confusingly, though, an 'A' register name prefix may also stand for 'address',
as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. 2. A register being used for
arithmetic or logic (as opposed to addressing or a loop index), especially one
being used to accumulate a sum or count of many items. This use is in context
of a particular routine or stretch of code. "The FOOBAZ routine uses A3 as an
accumulator." 3. One's in-basket (esp. among old-timers who might use sense 1).
"You want this reviewed? Sure, just put it in the accumulator." (See stack.)

ACK

/ak/ /interj./ 1. [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to
register one's presence (compare mainstream *Yo!*). An appropriate response to
ping or ENQ. 2. [from the comic strip "Bloom County"] An exclamation of
surprised disgust, esp. in "Ack pffft!" Semi-humorous. Generally this sense is
not spelled in caps (ACK) and is distinguished by a following exclamation point.
3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point
(see NAK). Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation
with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now".

There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you there?", often used
in email when earlier mail has produced no reply, or during a lull in _talk
mode_ to see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of
course NAK (sense 2), i.e., "I'm not here").

Acme

/n./ The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry

— where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson shop. Describing some X as an "Acme
X" either means "This is insanely great", or, more likely, "This looks
insanely great on paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself in
the foot with it." Compare pistol.

This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the
benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers' series of
"Roadrunner" cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was
forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Roadrunner. His attempts
usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices — rocket
jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were
usually delivered in large cardboard boxes, labeled prominently with the Acme
name. These devices invariably malfunctioned in violent and improbable ways.

acolyte

/n. obs./ [TMRC] An OSU privileged enough to submit data and programs to a
member of the priesthood.

ad-hockery

/ad-hok'*r-ee/ /n./ [Purdue] 1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain

programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent
behavior but are in fact entirely arbitrary. For example, fuzzy-matching of
input tokens that might be typing errors against a symbol table can make it look
as though a program knows how to spell. 2. Special-case code to cope with some
awkward input that would otherwise cause a program to choke, presuming normal
inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. Also called
'ad-hackery', 'ad-hocity' (/ad-hos'*-tee/), 'ad-crockery'. See also _ELIZA
effect_.

Ada

/n./ A Pascal -descended language that has been made mandatory for Department
of Defense software projects by the Pentagon. Hackers are nearly unanimous in
observing that, technically, it is precisely what one might expect given that
kind of endorsement by fiat; designed by committee, crockish, difficult to use,
and overall a disastrous, multi-billion-dollar boondoggle (one common
description is "The PL/I of the 1980s"). Hackers find Ada's exception-handling
and inter-process communication features particularly hilarious. Ada Lovelace
(the daughter of Lord Byron who became the world's first programmer while
cooperating with Charles Babbage on the design of his mechanical computing
engines in the mid-1800s) would almost certainly blanch at the use to which her
name has latterly been put; the kindest thing that has been said about it is
that there is probably a good small language screaming to get out from inside
its vast, elephantine bulk.

adger

/aj'r/ /vt./ [UCLA mutant of nadger, poss. from the middle name of an
infamous tenured graduate student] To make a bonehead move with consequences
that could have been foreseen with even slight mental effort. E.g., "He started
removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". Compare _dumbass
attack_.

admin

/ad-min'/ /n./ Short for 'administrator'; very commonly used in speech or

on-line to refer to the systems person in charge on a computer. Common
constructions on this include 'sysadmin' and 'site admin' (emphasizing the
administrator's role as a site contact for email and news) or 'newsadmin'
(focusing specifically on news). Compare postmaster, sysop, _system
mangler_.

ADVENT

/ad'vent/ /n./ The prototypical computer adventure game, first designed by Will
Crowther on the PDP-10 in the mid-1970s as an attempt at computer-refereed
fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods at
Stanford in 1976. Now better known as Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating
system permitted only six-letter filenames. See also vadding, Zork, and
Infocom.

This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style since expected in text
adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of
hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here" (for
some noun X). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You
are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The 'magic words'
xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game.

Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth Flint

Ridge cave system; it actually *has* a 'Colossal Cave' and a 'Bedquilt' as in
the game, and the 'Y2' that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference
to a secondary entrance.

AFAIK

// /n./ [Usenet] Abbrev. for "As Far As I Know".

AFJ

// /n./ Written-only abbreviation for "April Fool's Joke". Elaborate April

Fool's hoaxes are a long-established tradition on Usenet and Internet; see
kremvax for an example. In fact, April Fool's Day is the *only* seasonal
holiday consistently marked by customary observances on Internet and other
hacker networks.

AI

/A-I/ /n./ Abbreviation for 'Artificial Intelligence', so common that the full
form is almost never written or spoken among hackers.

AI-complete

/A-I k*m-pleet'/ /adj./ [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with 'NP-complete' (see

NP-)] Used to describe problems or subproblems in AI, to indicate that the
solution presupposes a solution to the 'strong AI problem' (that is, the
synthesis of a human-level intelligence). A problem that is AI-complete is, in
other words, just too hard.
Examples of AI-complete problems are 'The Vision Problem' (building a system
that can see as well as a human) and 'The Natural Language Problem' (building a
system that can understand and speak a natural language as well as a human).
These may appear to be modular, but all attempts so far (1996) to solve them
have foundered on the amount of context information and 'intelligence' they seem
to require. See also gedanken.

AI koans

/A-I koh'anz/ /pl.n./ A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created by

Danny Hillis at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture
(several are included under AI Koans in Appendix A). See also ha ha only
serious, mu, and hacker humor.

AIDS

/aydz/ /n./ Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome (`A*' is a glob pattern that
matches, but is not limited to, Apple or Amiga), this condition is quite often
the result of practicing unsafe SEX. See virus, worm, Trojan horse,
virgin.

AIDX

/ayd'k*z/ /n./ Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version of Unix, AIX,
especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000 series (some hackers think it
is funnier just to pronounce "AIX" as "aches"). A victim of the dreaded
"hybridism" disease, this attempt to combine the two main currents of the Unix
stream ( BSD and USG Unix) became a monstrosity to haunt system
administrators' dreams. For example, if new accounts are created while many
users are logged on, the load average jumps quickly over 20 due to silly
implementation of the user databases. For a quite similar disease, compare
HP-SUX. Also, compare Macintrash, Nominal Semidestructor, Open
DeathTrap, ScumOS, sun-stools.

airplane rule

/n./ "Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane

has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By analogy, in
both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity increases robustness.
It is correspondingly argued that the right way to build reliable systems is to
put all your eggs in one basket, after making sure that you've built a really
*good* basket. See also KISS Principle.

aliasing bug

/n./ A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does
dynamic allocation, esp. via 'malloc(3)' or equivalent. If several pointers
address (`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage
is freed or reallocated (and thus moved) through one alias and then referenced
through another, which may lead to subtle (and possibly intermittent) lossage
depending on the state and the allocation history of the malloc arena.
Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core, or by
use of higher-level languages, such as LISP, which employ a garbage collector
(see GC). Also called a stale pointer bug. See also precedence lossage,
smash the stack, fandango on core, memory leak, memory smash, overrun
screw, spam.

Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with C programming, it

was already in use in a very similar sense in the Algol-60 and FORTRAN
communities in the 1960s.
all-elbows

/adj./ [MS-DOS] Of a TSR (terminate-and-stay-resident) IBM PC program, such as

the N pop-up calendar and calculator utilities that circulate on BBS systems:
unsociable. Used to describe a program that rudely steals the resources that it
needs without considering that other TSRs may also be resident. One
particularly common form of rudeness is lock-up due to programs fighting over
the keyboard interrupt. See rude, also mess-dos.

alpha particles

/n./ See bit rot.

alt

/awlt/ 1. /n./ The alt shift key on an IBM PC or clone keyboard; see _bucky
bits_, sense 2 (though typical PC usage does not simply set the 0200 bit). 2.
/n./ The 'clover' or 'Command' key on a Macintosh; use of this term usually
reveals that the speaker hacked PCs before coming to the Mac (see also _feature
key_). Some Mac hackers, confusingly, reserve 'alt' for the Option key (and it
is so labeled on some Mac II keyboards). 3. /n.,obs/. [PDP-10; often
capitalized to ALT] Alternate name for the ASCII ESC character (ASCII 0011011),
after the keycap labeling on some older terminals; also 'altmode' (/awlt'mohd/).
This character was almost never pronounced 'escape' on an ITS system, in
TECO, or under TOPS-10 — always alt, as in "Type alt alt to end a TECO
command" or "alt-U onto the system" (for "log onto the [ITS] system"). This
usage probably arose because alt is more convenient to say than 'escape',
especially when followed by another alt or a character (or another alt *and* a
character, for that matter). 4. The alt hierarchy on Usenet, the tree of
newsgroups created by users without a formal vote and approval procedure. There
is a myth, not entirely implausible, that alt is acronymic for "anarchists,
lunatics, and terrorists"; but in fact it is simply short for "alternative".

alt bit

/awlt bit/ [from alternate] /adj./ See meta bit.

altmode

/n./ Syn. alt sense 3.

Aluminum Book

/n./ [MIT] "Common LISP: The Language", by Guy L. Steele Jr. (Digital Press,
first edition 1984, second edition 1990). Note that due to a technical screwup
some printings of the second edition are actually of a color the author
describes succinctly as "yucky green". See also book titles.

amoeba

/n./ Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer.

amp off

/vt./ [Purdue] To run in background. From the Unix shell ' ' operator.

amper
/n./ Common abbreviation for the name of the ampersand (` ', ASCII 0100110)
character. See ASCII for other synonyms.

angle brackets

/n./ Either of the characters ' ' (ASCII 0111100) and ' ' (ASCII 0111110)
(ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). Typographers in the Real World use
angle brackets which are either taller and slimmer (the ISO 'Bra' and 'Ket'
characters), or significantly smaller (single or double guillemets) than the
less-than and greater-than signs. See broket, ASCII.

angry fruit salad

/n./ A bad visual-interface design that uses too many colors. (This term
derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors found in canned fruit
salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from interface designers using color
window systems such as X; there is a tendency to create displays that are
flashy and attention-getting but uncomfortable for long-term use.

annoybot

/*-noy-bot/ /n./ [IRC] See robot.

ANSI

/an'see/ 1. /n./ [techspeak] The American National Standards Institute. ANSI,

along with the International Organization for Standards (ISO), standardized the
C programming language (see K R, Classic C), and promulgates many other
important software standards. 2. /n./ [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be
'ANSI' if it meets the ANSI X.364 standard for terminal control. Unfortunately,
this standard was both over-complicated and too permissive. It has been retired
and replaced by the ECMA-48 standard, which shares both flaws. 3. /n./ [BBS
jargon] The set of screen-painting codes that most MS-DOS and Amiga computers
accept. This comes from the ANSI.SYS device driver that must be loaded on an
MS-DOS computer to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS
ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X.364 terminal standard. For
example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold highlight on large machines, but in
IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on 'intense' (bright) colors. Also, in BBS-land,
the term 'ANSI' is often used to imply that a particular computer uses or can
emulate the IBM high-half character set from MS-DOS. Particular use depends on
context. Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is used with the color
codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and 'IBM characters' tend to go together.

AOS

1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay'os/ (West Coast) /vt. obs./ To increase the amount
of something. "AOS the campfire." [based on a PDP-10 increment instruction]
Usage: considered silly, and now obsolete. Now largely supplanted by bump.
See SOS. 2. /n./ A Multics-derived OS supported at one time by Data
General. This was pronounced /A-O-S/ or /A-os/. A spoof of the standard AOS
system administrator's manual ("How to Load and Generate your AOS System") was
created, issued a part number, and circulated as photocopy folklore; it was
called "How to Goad and Levitate your CHAOS System". 3. /n./ Algebraic
Operating System, in reference to those calculators which use infix instead of
postfix (reverse Polish) notation. 4. A BSD-like operating system for the IBM
RT.

Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a PDP-10 instruction that took
any memory location in the computer and added 1 to it; AOS meant 'Add One and do
not Skip'. Why, you may ask, does the 'S' stand for 'do not Skip' rather than
for 'Skip'? Ah, here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight
such instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction if the
result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if the result was
Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped if the result was Not 0; AOSA
added 1 and then skipped Always; and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when to
skip, so it never skipped.

For similar reasons, AOJ meant 'Add One and do not Jump'. Even more bizarre,
SKIP meant 'do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the next instruction, you had
to say 'SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant 'do not JUMP'; the unconditional form was
JUMPA. However, hackers never did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the
JRST (Jump and ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster and so
was invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of assembler programming.

app

/ap/ /n./ Short for 'application program', as opposed to a systems program.

Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing developers to create for their
environments so they can sell more boxes. Hackers tend not to think of the
things they themselves run as apps; thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes
compilers, program editors, games, and messaging systems, though a user would
consider all those to be apps. (Broadly, an app is often a self-contained
environment for performing some well-defined task such as 'word processing';
hackers tend to prefer more general-purpose tools.) See killer app; oppose
tool, operating system.

arena

[Unix] /n./ The area of memory attached to a process by 'brk(2)' and 'sbrk(2)'
and used by 'malloc(3)' as dynamic storage. So named from a 'malloc: corrupt
arena' message emitted when some early versions detected an impossible value in
the free block list. See overrun screw, aliasing bug, memory leak,
memory smash, smash the stack.

arg

/arg/ /n./ Abbreviation for 'argument' (to a function), used so often as to

have become a new word (like 'piano' from 'pianoforte'). "The sine function
takes 1 arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either 1 or 2 args." Compare
param, parm, var.

ARMM

/n./ [acronym, 'Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation'] A Usenet robot

created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio. ARMM was intended to automatically
cancel posts from anonymous-posting sites. Unfortunately, the robot's
recognizer for anonymous postings triggered on its own automatically-generated
control messages! Transformed by this stroke of programming ineptitude into a
monster of Frankensteinian proportions, it broke loose on the night of March 31,
1993 and proceeded to spam news.admin.policy with a recursive explosion of
over 200 messages.

ARMM's bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which mechanically

added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This
produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and
each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer.

Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages crashed

at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for their Usenet
feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also
establishing the term despew), and it has since been widely cited as a
cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and
incompetence can wreak on a network. Compare Great Worm, the; sorcerer's
apprentice mode See also software laser, network meltdown.

armor-plated

/n./ Syn. for bulletproof.

asbestos

/adj./ Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from flames;

also in other highly flame-suggestive usages. See, for example, asbestos
longjohns and asbestos cork award.

asbestos cork award

/n./ Once, long ago at MIT, there was a flamer so consistently obnoxious that
another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said
flamer had been nominated for the 'asbestos cork award'. (Any reader in doubt
as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under
flame.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the
heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity — but there is no
agreement on *which* few.

asbestos longjohns

/n./ Notional garments donned by Usenet posters just before emitting a remark
they expect will elicit flamage. This is the most common of the asbestos
coinages. Also 'asbestos underwear', 'asbestos overcoat', etc.

ASCII

: /as'kee/ /n./ [acronym: American Standard Code for Information Interchange]

The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The modern
version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including an
early version of ASCII) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of
lowercase letters — a major win — but it did not provide for accented
letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S
or the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be
worse, though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how.

Computers are much pickier and less flexible about spelling than humans; thus,
hackers need to be very precise when talking about characters, and have
developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for them. Every character
has one or more names — some formal, some concise, some silly. Common jargon
names for ASCII characters are collected here. See also individual entries for
bang, excl, open, ques, semi, shriek, splat, twiddle, and
Yu-Shiang Whole Fish.

This list derives from revision 2.3 of the Usenet ASCII pronunciation guide.
Single characters are listed in ASCII order; character pairs are sorted in by
first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of
popularity, followed by names that are reported but rarely seen; official
ANSI/CCITT names are surrounded by brokets: . Square brackets mark the
particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL. The abbreviations "l/r" and
"o/c" stand for left/right and "open/close" respectively. Ordinary
parentheticals provide some usage information.

! Common: bang; pling; excl; shriek; exclamation mark . Rare:

factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey; wham; eureka;
[spark-spot]; soldier.
" Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark; double-glitch;
quotation marks ; dieresis ; dirk; [rabbit-ears]; double prime.

# Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch; hex;
[mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash; square , pig-pen;
tictactoe; scratchmark; thud; thump; splat.

$ Common: dollar; dollar sign . Rare: currency symbol; buck; cash;

string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of ASCII ESC); ding; cache;
[big money].

% Common: percent; percent sign ; mod; grapes. Rare:

[double-oh-seven].

Common: ampersand ; amper; and. Rare: address (from C);

reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from 'sh(1)'); pretzel;
amp. [INTERCAL called this 'ampersand'; what could be sillier?]

' Common: single quote; quote; apostrophe . Rare: prime; glitch;

tick; irk; pop; [spark]; closing single quotation mark ; acute
accent .

() Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close; paren/thesis;

o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r banana. Rare: so/already;
lparen/rparen; opening/closing parenthesis ; o/c round bracket, l/r
round bracket, [wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear.

* Common: star; [splat]; asterisk . Rare: wildcard; gear; dingle;

mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see glob); Nathan Hale.

+ Common: plus ; add. Rare: cross; [intersection].

, Common: comma . Rare: cedilla ; [tail].

- Common: dash; hyphen ; minus . Rare: [worm]; option; dak;

bithorpe.

. Common: dot; point; period ; decimal point . Rare: radix

point; full stop; [spot].

/ Common: slash; stroke; slant ; forward slash. Rare: diagonal;

solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].

: Common: colon . Rare: dots; [two-spot].

; Common: semicolon ; semi. Rare: weenie; [hybrid], pit-thwong.

Common: less/greater than ; bra/ket; l/r angle; l/r angle

bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/into, towards; read from/write to;
suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out; crunch/zap (all from UNIX);
[angle/right angle].

= Common: equals ; gets; takes. Rare: quadrathorpe; [half-mesh].

? Common: query; question mark ; ques. Rare: whatmark; [what];

wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback.

@ Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl; [whirlpool];

cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage; commercial at .

V Rare: [book].
[] Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket; opening/closing bracket ;
bracket/unbracket. Rare: square/unsquare; [U turn/U turn back].

\ Common: backslash; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh; backslant;

backwhack. Rare: bash; reverse slant ; reversed virgule; [backslat].

^ Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; circumflex . Rare: chevron;

[shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal).

_ Common: underline ; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score;

backarrow; skid; [flatworm].

` Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; grave
accent ; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle;
back tick; back glitch; push; opening single quotation mark ;
quasiquote.

{} Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace;
l/r curly bracket/brace; opening/closing brace . Rare: brace/unbrace;
curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].

| Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: vertical
line ; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike].

~ Common: tilde ; squiggle; twiddle; not. Rare: approx; wiggle;

swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].

The pronunciation of '#' as 'pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea;
Commonwealth Hackish has its own, rather more apposite use of 'pound sign'
(confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic happens to replace '#';
thus Britishers sometimes call '#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard 'pound', compounding
the American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned commercial
practice of using a '#' suffix to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The
character is usually pronounced 'hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture
wars over the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has
led to the ha ha only serious suggestion that it be pronounced 'shibboleth'
(see Judges 12.6 in a Christian Bible).

The 'uparrow' name for circumflex and 'leftarrow' name for underline are
historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had these
graphics in those character positions rather than the modern punctuation
characters.

The 'swung dash' or 'approximation' sign is not quite the same as tilde in
typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare angle brackets).

Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The '#', '$', ' ', and ' '
characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities
because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants
(in particular, '#' in many assembler-programming cultures, '$' in the 6502
world, ' ' at Texas Instruments, and ' ' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and
some Z80 machines). See also splat.

The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's other
major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more and more like a
serious misfeature as the use of international networks continues to increase
(see software rot). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody
the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that characters
have 7 bits; this is a a major irritant to people who want to use a character
set suited to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this
problem by proliferating 'national' character sets produce an evolutionary
pressure to use a *smaller* subset common to all those in use.
ASCII art

/n./ The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly
'|', '-', '/', '\', and '+'). Also known as 'character graphics' or 'ASCII
graphics'; see also boxology. Here is a serious example:

o----)||(--+--| ----+ +---------o + D O

L )||( | | | C U
A I )||( +-- |-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T
C N )||( | | | | P
E )||( +-- |-+--)---+--)|--+-o U
)||( | | | GND T
o----)||(--+--| ----+----------+

A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit feeding a capacitor

input filter circuit

And here are some very silly examples:

|\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___

| | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \
| | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \
| (o)(o) U / \
C _) (_) \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/
| ,___| (oo) \/ \/
| / \/-------\ U (_)
/____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo )
/ \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\

//-o-\\
____---=======---____
====___\ /.. ..\ /___==== Klingons rule OK!
// ---\__O__/--- \\
\_\ /_/

There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the standard character
names in the fashion of a rebus.

+--------------------------------------------------------+
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
" A Bee in the Carrot Patch "

Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire flourishing
subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are reproduced in the silly
examples above, here are three more:

(_) (_) (_)

(\/) ($$) (**)
/-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/
/ | 666 || / |=====|| / | ||
* ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----||
 ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love

Finally, here's a magnificent example of ASCII art depicting an Edwardian train

station in Dunedin, New Zealand:

.-. i () | () i .-.
|_| .^. /_\ LJ=======LJ /_\ .^. |_|
._/___\._./___\_._._._._.L_J_/.-. .-.\_L_J._._._._._/___\._./___\._._._
., |-,-| ., L_J |_| [I] |_| L_J ., |-,-| ., .,
JL |-O-| JL L_J%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%L_J JL |-O-| JL JL
IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII|_|=======H=======|_|IIIIII_HH_'-'-'_HH_IIIIII_HH_
-------[]-------[]-------[_]----\.=I=./----[_]-------[]-------[]--------[]-
_/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ [_] []_/_L_J_\_[] [_] _/\_ ||\\_I_//|| _/\_ ||\
|_| ||=/_|_\=|| |_|_|_| _L_L_J_J_ |_|_|_| ||=/_|_\=|| |_| ||-
|_| |||_|_||| |_[___]_--_===_--_[___]_| |||_|_||| |_| |||
IIIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIL___J__II__|_|__II__L___JIIIII[_]IIIII[_]IIIIIIII[_]
\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_[_]\II/[]\_\I/_/[]\II/[_]\_I_/ [_]\_I_/[_] \_I_/ [_]
./ \.L_J/ \L_J./ L_JI I[]/ \[]I IL_J \.L_J/ \L_J./ \.L_J
| |L_J| |L_J| L_J| |[]| |[]| |L_J |L_J| |L_J| |L_J
|_____JL_JL___JL_JL____|-|| |[]| |[]| ||-|_____JL_JL___JL_JL_____JL_J

There is a newsgroup, alt.ascii.art, devoted to this genre; however, see also

warlording.

ASCIIbetical order

/as'kee-be'-t*-kl or'dr/ /adj.,n./ Used to indicate that data is sorted in

ASCII collated order rather than alphabetical order. This lexicon is sorted in
something close to ASCIIbetical order, but with case ignored and entries
beginning with non-alphabetic characters moved to the end.

atomic

/adj./ [from Gk. 'atomos', indivisible] 1. Indivisible; cannot be split up.

For example, an instruction may be said to do several things 'atomically', i.e.,
all the things are done immediately, and there is no chance of the instruction
being half-completed or of another being interspersed. Used esp. to convey that
an operation cannot be screwed up by interrupts. "This routine locks the file
and increments the file's semaphore atomically." 2. [primarily techspeak]
Guaranteed to complete successfully or not at all, usu. refers to database
transactions. If an error prevents a partially-performed transaction from
proceeding to completion, it must be "backed out," as the database must not be
left in an inconsistent state.

Computer usage, in either of the above senses, has none of the connotations that
'atomic' has in mainstream English (i.e. of particles of matter, nuclear
explosions etc.).

attoparsec

/n./ About an inch. 'atto-' is the standard SI prefix for multiplication by

10^(-18). A parsec (parallax-second) is 3.26 light-years; an attoparsec is thus
3.26 * 10^(-18) light years, or about 3.1 cm (thus, 1
attoparsec/microfortnight equals about 1 inch/sec). This unit is reported to
be in use (though probably not very seriously) among hackers in the U.K. See
micro-.

autobogotiphobia
/aw'toh-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/ /n./ See bogotify.

automagically

/aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ /adv./ Automatically, but in a way that, for some reason

(typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too
trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. See magic. "The
C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokes 'cc(1)' to produce
an executable."

This term is quite old, going back at least to the mid-70s and probably much
earlier. The word 'automagic' occurred in advertising (for a shirt-ironing
gadget) as far back as the late 1940s.

avatar

/n./ Syn. 1. Among people working on virtual reality and cyberspace

interfaces, an "avatar" is an icon or representation of a user in a shared
virtual reality. The term is sometimes used on MUDs. 2. [CMU, Tektronix]
root, superuser. There are quite a few Unix machines on which the name of
the superuser account is 'avatar' rather than 'root'. This quirk was originated
by a CMU hacker who disliked the term 'superuser', and was propagated through an
ex-CMU hacker at Tektronix.

awk

/awk/ 1. /n./ [Unix techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging text data
developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan (the name derives
from their initials). It is characterized by C-like syntax, a declaration-free
approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and
field-oriented text processing. See also Perl. 2. n. Editing term for an
expression awkward to manipulate through normal regexp facilities (for
example, one containing a newline). 3. /vt./ To process data using 'awk(1)'.

back door

/n./ A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers

or maintainers. The motivation for such holes is not always sinister; some
operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts
intended for use by field service technicians or the vendor's maintenance
programmers. Syn. trap door; may also be called a 'wormhole'. See also iron
box, cracker, worm, logic bomb.

Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than anyone
expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. Ken Thompson's 1983
Turing Award lecture to the ACM admitted the existence of a back door in early
Unix versions that may have qualified as the most fiendishly clever security
hack of all time. In this scheme, the C compiler contained code that would
recognize when the 'login' command was being recompiled and insert some code
recognizing a password chosen by Thompson, giving him entry to the system
whether or not an account had been created for him.

Normally such a back door could be removed by removing it from the source code
for the compiler and recompiling the compiler. But to recompile the compiler,
you have to *use* the compiler — so Thompson also arranged that the compiler
would *recognize when it was compiling a version of itself*, and insert into the
recompiled compiler the code to insert into the recompiled 'login' the code to
allow Thompson entry — and, of course, the code to recognize itself and do the
whole thing again the next time around! And having done this once, he was then
able to recompile the compiler from the original sources; the hack perpetuated
itself invisibly, leaving the back door in place and active but with no trace in
the sources.

The talk that suggested this truly moby hack was published as "Reflections on
Trusting Trust", "Communications of the ACM 27", 8 (August 1984), pp. 761—763
(text available at http://www.acm.org/classics). Ken Thompson has since
confirmed that this hack was implemented and that the Trojan Horse code did
appear in the login binary of a Unix Support group machine. Ken says the
crocked compiler was never distributed. Your editor has heard two separate
reports that suggest that the crocked login did make it out of Bell Labs,
notably to BBN, and that it enabled at least one late-night login across the
network by someone using the login name 'kt'.

backbone cabal

/n./ A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great

Renaming and reined in the chaos of Usenet during most of the 1980s. The
cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight.

backbone site

/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 1993, when
this sense of the term was beginning to pass out of general use due to wide
availability of cheap Internet connections, included uunet and the mail machines
at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio
State University, and the University of Texas. Compare rib site, leaf site.

[1996 update: This term is seldom heard any more. The UUCP network world that
gave it meaning has nearly disappeared; everyone is on the Internet now and
network traffic is distributed in very different patterns. — ESR]

backgammon

: See bignum (sense 3), moby (sense 4), and pseudoprime.

background

/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 list of
nodes and links; I'm working on the 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 activity). Some people prefer to use the term for
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 background is detached from the terminal where it

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

/interj./ Whoa! Back up. Used to suggest that someone just said or did
something wrong. Common among APL programmers.
backward combatability

/bak'w*rd k*m-bat'*-bil'*-tee/ /n./ [CMU, Tektronix: from 'backward

compatibility'] A property of hardware or software revisions in which previous
protocols, formats, layouts, etc. are irrevocably discarded in favor of 'new and
improved' protocols, formats, and layouts, leaving the previous ones not merely
deprecated but actively defeated. (Too often, the old and new versions cannot
definitively be distinguished, such that lingering instances of the previous
ones yield crashes or other infelicitous effects, as opposed to a simple
"version mismatch" message.) A backwards compatible change, on the other hand,
allows old versions to coexist without crashes or error messages, but too many
major changes incorporating elaborate backwards compatibility processing can
lead to extreme software bloat. See also flag day.

BAD

/B-A-D/ /adj./ [IBM: acronym, 'Broken As Designed'] Said of a program that is

bogus because of bad design and misfeatures rather than because of bugginess.
See working as designed.

Bad Thing

/n./ [from the 1930 Sellar Yeatman parody "1066 And All That"] 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 couriers
would be a Bad Thing". Oppose Good 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 Things. This has apparently created a mainstream
idiom on the British side of the pond.

bag on the side

/n./ [prob. originally related to a colostomy bag] 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 is ugly, inelegant, or bloated. Also
/v./ 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

/bag'bi:t-*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
person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by
failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: loser, cretin,
chomper. 3. 'bite the bag' /vi./ To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps
crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the
bag." The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene,
possibly referring to the scrotum, but in their current usage they have become
almost completely sanitized.

ITS's 'lexiphage' program was the first and to date only known example of a
program *intended* to be a bagbiter.

bagbiting
/adj./ Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me
compute the factorial of a negative number." Compare losing, cretinous,
bletcherous, 'barfucious' (under barfulous) and 'chomping' (under chomp).

balloonian variable

/n./ [Commodore users; perh. a deliberate phonetic mangling of 'boolean

variable'?] Any variable that doesn't actually hold or control state, but must
nevertheless be declared, checked, or set. A typical balloonian variable
started out as a flag attached to some environment feature that either became
obsolete or was planned but never implemented. Compatibility concerns (or
politics attached to same) may require that such a flag be treated as though it
were live.

bamf

/bamf/ 1. [from X-Men comics; originally "bampf"] /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 dramatic entrance or exit. 2. The sound of magical transformation,
used in virtual reality fora like MUDs. 3. In MUD circles, "bamf" is also used
to refer to the act by which a MUD server sends a special notification to the
MUD client to switch its connection to another server ("I'll set up the old site
to just bamf people over to our new location."). 4. Used by MUDders on occasion
in a more general sense related to sense 3, to refer to directing someone to
another location or resource ("A user was asking about some technobabble so I
bamfed them to http://www.ccil.org/jargon/jargon.html.")

banana label

/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

/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 problem' of an algorithm with poorly 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 describes a banana problem in a Dissociated Press
implementation. Also, see one-banana problem for a superficially similar but
unrelated usage.

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, but I missed some of the detail
— not enough 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

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; but the spread of Unix has carried 'bang' with 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 purposes), but if one
wanted to specify the 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 that one has perpetrated a thinko immediately after one
has been called on it.

bang on

/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 for release." The term pound on is synonymous.

bang path

/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!barbox!me directs people to route their mail 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 became
commonplace, people often published 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, ihnp4!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths of 8 to
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
Internet address, network, the, and sitename.

banner

/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 burst (tear apart) fanfold paper to separate 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 screen containing a logo
and/or author credits and/or a copyright notice.

bar

/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

/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
bashing needed to create these basic tools 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 compiler back ends that will give the
new machine a 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
optimization that rely on crocks such as overlapping instructions (or, as in the
famous case described in The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer (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 as the
relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed, but is
still found in heavily constrained environments such as industrial embedded
systems, and in the code of hackers who just can't let go of that low-level
control. See Real Programmer.

In the world of personal computing, bare metal programming (especially in sense

1 but sometimes also in sense 2) is often considered a Good Thing, or at least
a necessary evil (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 BIOS or OS interface and writing the 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 well are held in high regard.

barf

/barf/ /n.,v./ [from mainstream slang meaning 'vomit'] 1. /interj./ Term of

disgust. This is the closest hackish equivalent of the Valspeak "gag me with a
spoon". (Like, euwww!) See bletch. 2. /vi./ To say "Barf!" or emit some
similar expression of disgust. "I showed him my latest 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, perhaps with a suitable error
message, perhaps not. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to
divide by 0." (That is, the division 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 out the old one." See choke, gag. In
Commonwealth Hackish, 'barf' is generally replaced by 'puke' or 'vom'. barf is
sometimes also used as a metasyntactic variable, like foo or bar.

barfmail

/n./ Multiple bounce messages accumulating to the level of serious annoyance,

or worse. The sort of thing that happens when an inter-network mail gateway
goes down or wonky.

barfulation

/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

/bar'fyoo-l*s/ /adj./ (alt. 'barfucious', /bar-fyoo-sh*s/) Said of something

that would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons.

barney

/n./ In Commonwealth hackish, 'barney' is to fred (sense #1) as bar is to

foo. That is, people who commonly use 'fred' as their first metasyntactic
variable will often use 'barney' second. The reference is, of course, to Fred
Flintstone and Barney Rubble in the Flintstones cartoons.
baroque

/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.
"Metafont even has features to introduce random variations to its letterform
output. Now *that* is baroque!" See also rococo.

BASIC

/bay'-sic/ /n./ [acronym: Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] 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. Edsger W. Dijkstra observed in "Selected
Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective" that "It is practically
impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior
exposure to BASIC: as potential programmers they are mentally mutilated beyond
hope of regeneration." This is another case (like Pascal) of the cascading
lossage that happens when a language 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 (a) is very painful, and
(b) encourages bad habits that will make it harder to use more powerful
languages well. 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.

[1995: Some languages called 'BASIC' aren't quite this nasty any more, having
acquired Pascal- and C-like procedures and control structures and shed their
line numbers. — ESR]

batch

/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 are
often referred to as 'batch mode' 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 for all those bills; I guess they'll turn the
electricity back on next week..." 3. 'batching up': 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 center."

bathtub curve

/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
system's lifetime, then rising again as it 'tires out'. See also burn-in
period, infant mortality.

baud

/bawd/ /n./ [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 with no framing or stop bits. Most hackers are aware of these
nuances but blithely ignore them.

Historical note: 'baud' was originally a unit of telegraph signalling speed, set
at one pulse per second. It was proposed at the International Telegraph
Conference of 1927, and named after J.M.E. Baudot (1845—1903), the French
engineer who constructed the first successful teleprinter.

baud barf

/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 disrupts the connection. Baud barf is not 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 identify particular speeds.

baz

/baz/ /n./ 1. The third metasyntactic variable "Suppose we have three

functions: FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls BAZ...." (See also
fum) 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'.

Earlier versions of this lexicon derived 'baz' as a Stanford corruption of

bar. However, Pete Samson (compiler of the TMRC lexicon) reports it was
already current when he joined TMRC in 1958. He says "It came from "Pogo".
Albert the Alligator, when vexed or outraged, would shout 'Bazz Fazz!' or
'Rowrbazzle!' The club layout was said to model the (mythical) New England
counties of Rowrfolk and Bassex (Rowrbazzle mingled with
(Norfolk/Suffolk/Middlesex/Essex)."

bboard

/bee'bord/ /n./ [contraction of 'bulletin board'] 1. Any electronic bulletin

board; esp. used of BBS systems running on personal micros, less frequently of
a Usenet newsgroup (in fact, use of this term for a newsgroup generally marks
one either as a newbie fresh in from the 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 an old-fashioned, non-electronic cork-and-thumbtack
memo board. At CMU, 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, the better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone,
as in (at CMU) "Don't post for-sale ads on general".

BBS

/B-B-S/ /n./ [abbreviation, 'Bulletin Board System'] 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 groups.
Thousands of local BBS systems are in operation throughout the 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 the low-rent
district of the hacker culture, 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. See also bboard.

beam
/vt./ [from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"] 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

/n./ [Mac users] See command key.

beep

/n.,v./ Syn. feep. This term is techspeak under MS-DOS and OS/2, and seems
to be generally preferred among micro hobbyists.

beige toaster

/n./ A Macintosh. See toaster; compare Macintrash, maggotbox.

bells and whistles

/n./ [by analogy with the toyboxes on theater organs] 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.
Distinguished from chrome, which is intended 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

/n./ A standard elaborated form of bells and whistles; typically said with a
pronounced and ironic accent on the 'gongs'.

benchmark

[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 Gabriel LISP benchmarks (see gabriel), the SPECmark suite, and
LINPACK. See also machoflops, MIPS, smoke and mirrors.

Berkeley Quality Software

/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, incomplete, or
incorrect documentation, has 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.

Note to British and Commonwealth readers: that's /berk'lee/, not /bark'lee/ as

in British Received Pronunciation.

berklix

/berk'liks/ /n.,adj./ [contraction of 'Berkeley Unix'] See BSD. Not used at

Berkeley itself. May be more common among suits attempting to sound like
cognoscenti than among hackers, who usually just say 'BSD'.
Berzerkeley

/b*r-zer'klee/ /n./ [from 'berserk', via the name of a now-deceased record

label] Humorous distortion of 'Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices or
products of the BSD Unix hackers. See software bloat, Missed'em-five,
Berkeley Quality Software.

Mainstream 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

/bay't*/, /be't*/ or (Commonwealth) /bee't*/ /n./ 1. Mostly working, but still

under test; usu. used with 'in': 'in beta'. In the Real World, systems
(hardware or software) software often go through two stages of release testing:
Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Beta releases are generally made to a
group of lucky (or unlucky) trusted customers. 2. Anything that is new and
experimental. "His girlfriend is in beta" means that he is still testing for
compatibility and reserving judgment. 3. Flaky; dubious; suspect (since beta
software is notoriously buggy).

Historical note: More formally, to beta-test is to test a pre-release

(potentially unreliable) version of a piece of software by making it available
to selected (or self-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
component test phase; 'Beta Test' was initial 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 the engineering model
functioned as specified. The C-test (corresponding to today's beta) was the
B-test performed on early samples of the production design.

BFI

/B-F-I/ /n./ See brute force and ignorance. Also encountered in the variants
'BFMI', 'brute force and *massive* ignorance' and 'BFBI' 'brute force and bloody
ignorance'.

bible

/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

/n./ The act said to have been performed on trademarks (such as PostScript,
NeXT, NeWS, VisiCalc, FrameMaker, TK!solver, EasyWriter) that have been raised
above the ruck of common coinage by nonstandard capitalization. Too many
marketroid types think this sort of thing is really cute, even the 2,317th
time they do it. Compare studlycaps.

B1FF

/bif/ [Usenet] (alt. 'BIFF') /n./ The most famous pseudo, and the
prototypical newbie. Articles from B1FF feature all uppercase letters
sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, 'cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD
OLD BIFF CUZ HE"S A K00L DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ 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 naivete.
B1FF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. B1FF's location is a
mystery, as his articles appear to come from a variety of sites. However,
BITNET seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that B1FF is a
denizen of BITNET is supported by B1FF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail
address: [email protected].

[1993: Now It Can Be Told! My spies inform me that B1FF was originally created
by Joe Talmadge [email protected] , also the author of the infamous and
much-plagiarized "Flamer's Bible". The BIFF filter he wrote was later passed to
Richard Sexton, who posted BIFFisms much more widely. Versions have since been
posted for the amusement of the net at large. — ESR]

biff

/bif/ /vt./ To notify someone of incoming mail. From the BSD utility
'biff(1)', which was in turn named after a friendly golden Labrador who used to
chase frisbees in the halls at UCB while 4.2BSD was in development. There was a
legend that it had a habit of barking whenever the mailman came, but the author
of 'biff' says this is not true. No relation to B1FF.

Big Gray Wall

/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, multivendor
networking, and programming tools. 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.
Often contracted to 'Gray Wall'.

big iron

/n./ Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of

number-crunching supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more
conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval; compare heavy
metal, oppose dinosaur.

Big Red Switch

/n./ [IBM] 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 Red Switch."
Sources at IBM report that, in tune with the company's passion for TLAs, this
is often abbreviated 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 actually fired a non-conducting bolt into the main power feed; the
BRSes on more recent mainframes 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 power cycle, three-finger
salute, 120 reset; see also scram switch.

Big Room, the

/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 phone
right now, he's somewhere out in the Big Room."

big win
/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

/adj./ [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] 1.
Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given multi-byte numeric
representation, the most significant byte 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 late 1995, are big-endian. Big-endian byte order is also
sometimes called 'network order'. See little-endian, middle-endian, NUXI
problem, swab. 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. In the U.K.
the Joint Networking Team had decided to do it the other way round before the
Internet domain standard was established. Most gateway sites have ad-hockery
in their mailers to handle this, but can still be confused. In particular, the
address [email protected] could be interpreted in JANET's big-endian way as
one in the U.K. (domain uk) or in the standard little-endian way as one in the
domain as (American Samoa) on the opposite side of the world.

bignum

/big'nuhm/ /n./ [orig. from MIT MacLISP] 1. [techspeak] A multiple-precision

computer representation for very large integers. 2. More generally, any very
large number. "Have you ever looked at the United States Budget? There's
bignums for you!" 3. [Stanford] In backgammon, large numbers on the dice
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
data called 'integer', but such computer integers are usually very limited in
size; usually they must be smaller than than 2^(31) (2,147,483,648) or (on a
bitty box) 2^(15) (32,768). If you want to work with numbers larger than
that, you have to use floating-point numbers, which are usually accurate to only
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). For
example, this value for 1000! was computed by the MacLISP system using bignums:

40238726007709377354370243392300398571937486421071
46325437999104299385123986290205920442084869694048
00479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669
94459099742450408707375991882362772718873251977950
59509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910
56393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476
63288983595573543251318532395846307555740911426241
74743493475534286465766116677973966688202912073791
43853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534
52422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155
86110369768013573042161687476096758713483120254785
89320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151
02734182797770478463586817016436502415369139828126
48102130927612448963599287051149649754199093422215
66832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975

60290095053761647584772842188967964624494516076535
34081989013854424879849599533191017233555566021394
50399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200
01588853514733161170210396817592151090778801939317
81141945452572238655414610628921879602238389714760
88506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780
88989396451826324367161676217916890977991190375403
12746222899880051954444142820121873617459926429565
81746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786
90611726015878352075151628422554026517048330422614
39742869330616908979684825901254583271682264580665
26769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348
34482599326604336766017699961283186078838615027946
59551311565520360939881806121385586003014356945272
24206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657
24501440282188525247093519062092902313649327349756
55139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623
77387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446
64025989949022222176590433990188601856652648506179
97023561938970178600408118897299183110211712298459
01641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819
37238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013
74285319266498753372189406942814341185201580141233
44828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278
28826986460278986432113908350621709500259738986355
42771967428222487575867657523442202075736305694988
25087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994
87170124451646126037902930912088908694202851064018
21543994571568059418727489980942547421735824010636
77404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230
56085590370062427124341690900415369010593398383577
79394109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
000000000000000000.

bigot

/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',
'Berkeley bigot'. Real bigots can be 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
truly said "You can tell a bigot, but you can't tell him much." Compare
weenie.

bit

/n./ [from the mainstream meaning and 'Binary digIT'] 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
computational quantity that can take on one of two 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 generally, a (possibly
incorrect) mental state 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.")

"I just need one bit from you" is a polite 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 speaks of setting and clearing bits. To toggle
or 'invert' a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to 0. See also
flag, trit, mode bit.

The term 'bit' first appeared in print in the computer-science sense in 1949,
and seems to have been coined by early computer scientist John Tukey. Tukey
records that it evolved over a lunch table as a handier alternative to 'bigit'
or 'binit'.

bit bang

/n./ Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly

tweaking a single output bit, in software, at the appropriate times. The
technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each
byte. Input is more interesting. And full duplex (doing input and output at
the same time) is one way to separate the real hackers from the wannabees.

Bit bang was used on certain early models of Prime computers, presumably when
UARTs were too expensive, and on archaic Z80 micros with a Zilog PIO but no SIO.
In an interesting instance of the cycle of reincarnation, this technique
returned to use in the early 1990s on some RISC architectures because it
consumes such an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes
sense not to have a UART. Compare cycle of reincarnation.

bit bashing

/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; these
include low-level device control, 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 (more usually the former). "The command
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

/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 bucket'.
On Unix, often used for /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 likely to end up in the bit bucket than junk 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 unwanted mail
responses: "Flames about this 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 landed
in the bit bucket." Compare black hole.

This term is used purely 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 hackers also report that trainees used to be 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 of 1 bits that go to the bit bucket must 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

/n./ See bit rot. People with a physics background tend to prefer this
variant for the analogy with particle decay. See also computron, quantum
bogodynamics.

bit rot

/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
theory explains that bits decay as if they 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 radionuclides in ceramic chip packages, for example, can
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 for
them). The notion long favored among 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

/n./ 1. (pejorative) An exercise in tuning (see tune) in which incredible

amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often
with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible. 2. Aimless small
modification to a program, esp. for some pointless 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

/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 device (see
EOU), so the only way to 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 pressed. In order to avoid making the thing 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.

Looking at the ASCII chart, we find:

bits 0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001
high bits=010 ! " # $ % ' ( )
high bits=011 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

This is why the characters !"#$% '() appear where they do on a Teletype
(thankfully, they didn't use shift-0 for space). This 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 electronic terminals became popular, in the early 1970s, 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 look like an office
typewriter. These 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, there was little pressure from the pioneering 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 were expected to use the equipment. The 'typewriter-paired'
standard became universal, 'bit-paired' hardware was quickly junked or relegated
to dusty corners, and both terms passed into disuse.

bitblt

/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 (the requirement to do the Right Thing in 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

/bit'net/ /n./ [acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] 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
communicate using 80-character EBCDIC card 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 was also
notorious as the apparent home of B1FF.

bits

/pl.n./ 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 have only a photocopy of the Jargon File; does anyone know where I can
get the bits?". See softcopy, source of all good bits See also bit.

bitty box

/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 on
or for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only personal
machines such as the Atari 800, Osborne, 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

/bik'see/ /n./ Variant emoticons 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

/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
beginnings) considered classic examples of black 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 technologies during the last twenty years
has made both the term 'black art' and what it describes less common than
formerly. See also voodoo programming.

black hole

/n./ What a piece of email or netnews has fallen into if it disappears

mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that is, without
returning a bounce message). "I think there's a black hole at foovax!"
conveys suspicion that 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

/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).

Black Screen of Death

n. [prob. related to the Floating Head of Death in a famous "Far Side"

cartoon.] A failure mode of Microsloth Windows. On an attempt to launch a DOS
box, a networked Windows system not uncommonly blanks the screen and locks up
the PC so hard that it requires a cold boot to recover. This unhappy
phenomenon is known as The Black Screen of Death.

Black Thursday

n. February 8th, 1996 — the day of the signing into law of the CDA, so
called by analogy with the catastrophic "Black Friday" in 1929 that began the
Great Depression.

blammo

/v./ [Oxford Brookes University and alumni, UK] To forcibly remove someone from
any interactive system, especially talker systems. The operators, who may remain
hidden, may 'blammo' a user who is misbehaving. Very similar to MIT gun; in
fact, the 'blammo-gun' is a notional device used to 'blammo' someone. While in
actual fact the only incarnation of the blammo-gun is the command used to
forcibly eject a user, operators speak of different levels of blammo-gun fire;
e.g., a blammo-gun to 'stun' will temporarily remove someone, but a blammo-gun
set to 'maim' will stop someone coming back on for a while.

blargh

/blarg/ /n./ [MIT] The opposite of ping, sense 5; an exclamation indicating

that one has absorbed or is emitting a quantum of unhappiness. Less common than
ping.

blast
1. /v.,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 the
message 'Unable to kill all processes. Blast them (y/n)?' would appear in the
command window upon logout.

blat

/n./ 1. Syn. blast, sense 1. 2. See thud.

bletch

/blech/ /interj./ [from Yiddish/German 'brechen', to vomit, poss. via

comic-strip exclamation 'blech'] Term of disgust. Often used in "Ugh, bletch".
Compare barf.

bletcherous

/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, cretinous, bagbiting, bogus, and random. 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 random, which have
richer and wider shades of meaning than any of the above.

blink

/vi.,n./ To use a navigator or off-line message reader to minimize time spent

on-line to a commercial network service. As of late 1994, this term was said to
be in wide use in the UK, but is rare or unknown in the US.

blinkenlights

/blink'*n-li:tz/ /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 in the
English-speaking world. One version ran in its entirety as follows:

ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS! Das computermachine ist nicht

fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk,
blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fuer gewerken 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 University and had
already gone international by the 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-is-fair-play, German hackers have developed 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. Fingergrabbing

and pressing the cnoeppkes from the 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
anderswhere! Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the
blinkenlights.

See also geef.

Old-time hackers sometimes get nostalgic for blinkenlights because they were so
much more fun to look at than a blank panel. Sadly, very few computers still
have them (the three LEDs on a PC keyboard certainly don't count). The obvious
reasons (cost of wiring, cost of front-panel cutouts, almost nobody needs or
wants to interpret machine-register states on the fly anymore) are only part of
the story. Another part of it is that radio-frequency leakage from the lamp
wiring was beginning to be a problem as far back as transistor machines. But
the most fundamental fact is that there are very few signals slow enough to
blink an LED these days! With slow CPUs, you could watch the bus register or
instruction counter tick, but at 33/66/150MHz it's all a blur.

blit

/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
table and copies the good parts up into high 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. Sometimes all-capitalized as 'BLIT': an early
experimental bit-mapped terminal designed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs, later
commercialized as the AT T 5620. (The folk etymology from 'Bell Labs
Intelligent Terminal' is incorrect. Its creators liked to claim that "Blit"
stood for the Bacon, Lettuce, and Interactive Tomato.)

blitter

/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 sine 1990 the trend is
away from them (however, see cycle of reincarnation). Syn. raster blaster.

blivet

/bliv'*t/ /n./ [allegedly from a World War II military term meaning "ten pounds
of manure in a five-pound bag"] 1. An intractable problem. 2. A crucial piece
of hardware that can't be fixed or replaced if it breaks. 3. A tool that has
been hacked over by so many incompetent 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. 6. In the
subjargon of computer security specialists, a denial-of-service attack performed
by hogging limited resources that have no access controls (for example, shared
spool space on a multi-user system).

This term has other meanings in other technical cultures; among experimental
physicists and 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 appears to depict a three-dimensional object until one realizes that
the parts fit together in an impossible way.

BLOB

1. /n./ [acronym: Binary Large OBject] Used by database people to refer to any
random large block of bits that needs to be stored in a database, such as a
picture or sound file. The essential point about a BLOB is that it's an object
that cannot be interpreted within the database itself. 2. /v./ To mailbomb
someone by sending a BLOB to him/her; esp. used as a mild threat. "If that
program crashes again, I'm going to BLOB the core dump to you."

block

/v./ [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). "Lunch is blocked on Phil's arrival."

block transfer computations

/n./ [from the television series "Dr. Who"] 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 an algorithm in theory, but isn't. (The Z80's
LDIR instruction, "Computed Block Transfer with increment", may also be
relevant)

Bloggs Family, the

/n./ An imaginary family consisting of Fred and Mary Bloggs and their children.
Used as a standard example in knowledge representation to show the difference
between extensional and intensional objects. For example, every occurrence of
"Fred Bloggs" is the same unique person, whereas occurrences of "person" may
refer to different people. Members of the Bloggs family have been known to pop
up in bizarre places such as the DEC Telephone Directory. Compare Mbogo, Dr.
Fred.

blow an EPROM

/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 arose because
the programming process for the Programmable Read-Only Memories (PROMs) that
preceded present-day Erasable Programmable Read-Only Memories (EPROMs) involved
intentionally blowing tiny electrical fuses on the chip. The usage lives on
(it's too vivid and expressive to discard) even though the write process on
EPROMs is nondestructive.

blow away

/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

/vi./ [prob. from mining and tunneling jargon] Of software, to fail

spectacularly; almost as serious as crash and burn. See blow past, blow
up, die horribly.

blow past

/vt./ To blow out despite a safeguard. "The server blew past the 5K reserve
buffer."

blow up

/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

/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
operation done on pre-paged versions of ITS, WAITS, 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 Than zero'.

Blue Book

/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
0-201-10179-3); the other three official guides are known as the Green Book,
the Red Book, and the White Book (sense 2). 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
0-201-11371-63 (this book also has green and red siblings). 3. Any of the 1988
standards issued by the CCITT's ninth plenary assembly. These include, among
other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See
also book titles.

blue box

/n./ 1. obs. Once upon a time, before all-digital switches made it possible for
the phone companies to move them out of band, one could actually hear the
switching tones used to route long-distance calls. Early phreakers built
devices called 'blue boxes' that could reproduce these tones, which could be
used to commandeer portions of the phone network. (This was not as hard as it
may sound; one early phreak acquired the sobriquet 'Captain Crunch' after he
proved that he could generate switching tones with a plastic whistle pulled out
of a box of Captain Crunch cereal!) There were other colors of box with more
specialized phreaking uses; red boxes, black boxes, silver boxes, etc. 2. /n./
An IBM machine, especially a large (non-PC) one.

Blue Glue

/n./ [IBM] 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 blue
boxes together." See fear and 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. reports that the CS department there has about 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

/n./ Term for 'police' nanobots 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. The
term 'Blue Goo' can be found in Dr. Seuss's "Fox In Socks" to refer to a
substance much like bubblegum. 'Would you like to chew blue goo, sir?'. See
nanotechnology.
blue wire

/n./ [IBM] Patch wires added to circuit boards at the factory to correct design
or fabrication problems. These may be necessary if there hasn't been time to
design and qualify another board version. Compare purple wire, red wire,
yellow wire.

blurgle

/bler'gl/ /n./ [UK] Spoken metasyntactic variable, to indicate some text that
is obvious from context, or which is already known. If several words are to be
replaced, blurgle may well be doubled or tripled. "To look for something in
several files use 'grep string blurgle blurgle'." In each case, "blurgle
blurgle" would be understood to be replaced by the file you wished to search.
Compare mumble, sense 7.

BNF

/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,
so that it must usually be learned by osmosis from other hackers. Consider this
BNF for a U.S. postal address:

postal-address ::= name-part street-address

zip-part

personal-part ::= name | initial "."

name-part ::= personal-part last-name

[ jr-part ] EOL | personal-part
name-part

street-address ::= [ apt ] house-num

street-name EOL

zip-part ::= town-name "," state-code

ZIP-code EOL

This translates into English as: "A postal-address consists of a name-part,

followed by a street-address part, followed by a zip-code part. A personal-part
consists of either a first name or an initial followed by a dot. A name-part
consists of either: a personal-part followed by a last name followed by an
optional 'jr-part' (Jr., Sr., or dynastic number) and end-of-line, or a personal
part followed by a name part (this rule illustrates the use of recursion in
BNFs, covering the case of people who use multiple first and middle names and/or
initials). A street address consists of an optional apartment specifier,
followed by a street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consists of
a town-name, followed by a comma, followed by a state code, followed by a
ZIP-code followed by an end-of-line." Note that many things (such as the format
of a personal-part, apartment specifier, or ZIP-code) are left unspecified.
These are presumed to be obvious from context or detailed somewhere nearby. See
also parse. 2. Any of a number number of variants and extensions of BNF
proper, possibly containing some or all of the regexp wildcards such as '*' or
'+'. In fact the example above isn't the pure form invented for the Algol-60
report; it uses '[]', which was introduced a few years later in IBM's PL/I
definition but is now universally recognized. 3. In science-fiction fandom, a
'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 terribly.
boa

[IBM] /n./ Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a dinosaur
pen. Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of their own
when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have been coiled for some
time. It is rumored within IBM that channel 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

/n./ 1. In-context synonym for bboard; sometimes used even for Usenet
newsgroups (but see usage note under bboard, sense 1). 2. An electronic
circuit board.

boat anchor

/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
space. 3. Obsolete but still working hardware, especially when used of an old
S100-bus hobbyist system; originally a term of annoyance, but became more and
more affectionate as the hardware became more and more obsolete.

bodysurf code

/n./ A program or segment of code written quickly in the heat of inspiration

without the benefit of formal design or deep thought. Like its namesake sport,
the result is too often a wipeout that leaves the programmer eating sand.

BOF

/B-O-F/ or /bof/ /n./ Abbreviation for the phrase "Birds Of a Feather"

(flocking together), an informal discussion group and/or bull session scheduled
on a conference program. It is not clear where or when this term originated,
but it is now associated with the USENIX conferences for Unix techies and was
already established there by 1984. It was used earlier than that at DECUS
conferences and is reported to have been common at SHARE meetings as far back as
the early 1960s.

BOFH

// /n./ Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system administrator with

absolutely no tolerance for lusers. "You say you need more filespace?
massive-global-delete Seems to me you have plenty left..." Many BOFHs
(and others who would be BOFHs if they could get away with it) hang out in the
newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, although there has also been created a
top-level newsgroup hierarchy (bofh.*) of their own.

Several people have written stories about BOFHs. The set usually considered
canonical is by Simon Travaglia and may be found at the Bastard Home Page,
http://prime-mover.cc.waikato.ac.nz/Bastard.html.

bogo-sort

/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
the air, picking them up at random, and then 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 force, Lasherism.

bogometer

/boh-gom'-*t-er/ /n./ A notional instrument for measuring bogosity. Compare

the 'wankometer' described in the wank entry; see also bogus.

bogon

/boh'gon/ /n./ [by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless

reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's 'Vogons'; see the
Bibliography in Appendix C and note that Arthur Dent actually mispronounces
'Vogons' as 'Bogons' at one point] 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see
quantum bogodynamics). For instance, "the Ethernet is emitting bogons 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 packet sent on
a network. 4. By synecdoche, 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 overtaken by its derivative senses 1—4. See also
bogosity, bogus; compare psyton, fat electrons, magic smoke.

The bogon has become the type case for a whole bestiary of nonce particle names,
including the 'clutron' or 'cluon' (indivisible particle of cluefulness,
obviously the antiparticle of the bogon) and the futon (elementary particle of
randomness, or sometimes of lameness). These are not so much live usages in
themselves as examples of a live meta-usage: that is, it has become a standard
joke or linguistic maneuver to "explain" otherwise mysterious circumstances by
inventing nonce particle names. And these imply nonce particle theories, with
all their dignity or lack thereof (we might note parenthetically that this is a
generalization from "(bogus particle) theories" to "bogus (particle
theories)"!). Perhaps such particles are the modern-day equivalents of trolls
and wood-nymphs as standard starting-points around which to construct
explanatory myths. Of course, playing on an existing word (as in the 'futon')
yields additional flavor. Compare magic smoke.

bogon filter

/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." See also bogosity, bogus.

bogon flux

/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". See quantum bogodynamics.

bogosity

/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
triggered". More extremely, "You just pinned my 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-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat.
2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see quantum bogodynamics.
See also bogon flux, bogon filter, bogus.

bogotify

/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
become bogotified and you had better not use 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 jargon. See also bogosity, bogus.

bogue out

/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

/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
problem for Turing Machines? That's totally 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 some, but not all, of the connotations of 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 of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the 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 gone
mainstream by 1985. A correspondent from 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

/bohr buhg/ /n./ [from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests
reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym
of heisenbug; see also mandelbug, schroedinbug.

boink

/boynk/ [Usenet: variously ascribed to the TV series "Cheers" "Moonlighting",

and "Soap"] 1. /v./ To have sex with; compare bounce, sense 3. (This is
mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant 'bonk' is more common.
2. /n./ After the original Peter Korn 'Boinkon' Usenet parties, used 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 @-party.
3. Var of 'bonk'; see bonk/oif.
bomb

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
'panic' or Amiga guru (sense 2), in which icons 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 Amiga guru meditation number.
MS-DOS machines tend to get locked up in this situation.

bondage-and-discipline language

/n./ 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 inadequate for
systems hacking or even vanilla 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

/bonk/, /oyf/ /interj./ In the MUD community, it has become traditional to

express pique or censure by 'bonking' the offending person. Convention holds
that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying 'oif!' and there is a myth to the
effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much
trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for
bonking and oifing. See also talk mode.

book titles

: 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 this
lexicon under their own entries. See Aluminum Book, Blue Book, Camel 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; see also rainbow series. Since
about 1983 this tradition has gotten a boost from the popular O'Reilly
Associates line of technical books, which usually feature some kind of exotic
animal on the cover.

boot

/v.,n./ [techspeak; from 'by one's bootstraps'] 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 the machine hasn't been down for long, or
that the boot is a bounce (sense 4) 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 also found in the variants 'cold boot' (from 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 other software still running: "If you're running 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 machine being booted: "I'll have to hard-boot this losing
Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." One often hard-boots by performing a
power cycle.

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 program was always very short (great efforts 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), to which it handed control;
this program in 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 the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, 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 feeder

/n./ Syn. for slopsucker, derived from the fishermen's and naturalists' term
for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial ooze.

bottom-up implementation

/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 action in
increasing detail until you get 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 primitive operations and then knitting them together.

bounce

/v./ 1. [perhaps by analogy to a bouncing check] 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 play volleyball. The
now-demolished D. C. Power Lab building used by the Stanford AI Lab in the
1970s had 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 would come
over the intercom the 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
'bouncing the mattress', but influenced by Roo's psychosexually loaded "Try
bouncing me, 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. [VM/CMS programmers] *Automatic* warm-start of
a machine after an error. "I logged on this morning and found it had bounced 7
times during the night" 6. [IBM] To power cycle a peripheral in order to reset
it.

bounce message

/n./ [Unix] 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, sense 1). Reasons might include a nonexistent or
misspelled username or a down relay site. Bounce messages can themselves
fail, with occasionally ugly results; see sorcerer's apprentice mode and
software laser. The terms 'bounce mail' and 'barfmail' are also common.
boustrophedon

/n./ [from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] An ancient method
of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is
actually philologists' techspeak and typesetters' jargon. Erudite hackers use
it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software and
moving-head printers. The adverbial form 'boustrophedonically' is also found
(hackers purely love constructions like this).

box

/n./ 1. A computer; esp. in the construction 'foo box' where foo is some
functional qualifier, like 'graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, 'Unix box',
'MS-DOS box', etc.) "We preprocess the data on Unix boxes before handing it up
to the mainframe." 2. [IBM] Without 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 pen. Typically used in expressions like the 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

/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:

/************************************************* * * This is a boxed

comment in C style * *************************************************/
Common variants of this style omit the asterisks in 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

/bok'sn/ /pl.n./ [by analogy with VAXen] 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

/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

/boh-zoh'tik/ or /boh-zo'tik/ /adj./ [from the name of a TV clown even more

losing than Ronald McDonald] Resembling or having the quality of a bozo; that
is, clownish, ludicrously wrong, unintentionally humorous. Compare wonky,
demented. Note that the noun 'bozo' occurs in slang, but the mainstream
adjectival form would be 'bozo-like' or (in New England) 'bozoish'.

BQS

/B-Q-S/ /adj./ Syn. Berkeley Quality Software.

brain dump

/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 in that
it saves a lot of useful state 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 fart

/n./ The actual result of a braino, as opposed to the mental glitch that is
the braino itself. E.g., typing 'dir' on a Unix box after a session with DOS.

brain-damaged

/adj./ 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
the person responsible must have suffered 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 monocase characters per file name? Now *that's*
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

/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

/bray'no/ /n./ Syn. for thinko. See also brain fart.

branch to Fishkill

/n./ [IBM: from the location of one of the corporation's facilities] Any
unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird
results. See jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.

bread crumbs

/n./ Debugging statements inserted into a program that emit output or log
indicators of the program's state to a file so you can see where it dies or
pin down the cause of surprising behavior. The term is probably a reference to
the Hansel and Gretel story from the Brothers Grimm; in several variants, a
character leaves a trail of bread crumbs so as not to get lost in the woods.

break

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. [techspeak] /vi./ To send an RS-232 break (two character
widths 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), delete or control-C does this. 5. 'break
break' may be said to interrupt a conversation (this is an example of verb
doubling). This usage comes from radio communications, which in turn probably
came from landline telegraph/teleprinter usage, as badly abused in the Citizen's
Band craze a few years ago.

break-even point

/n./ In the process of implementing a new computer language, the point at which
the language is sufficiently effective that one can implement the language in
itself. That is, for a new language called, hypothetically, FOOGOL, one has
reached break-even when one can write a demonstration compiler for FOOGOL in
FOOGOL, discard the original implementation language, and thereafter use working
versions of FOOGOL to develop newer ones. This is an important milestone; see
MFTL.

Since this entry was first written, several correspondents have reported that
there actually was a compiler for a tiny Algol-like language called Foogol
floating around on various VAXen in the early and mid-1980s. A FOOGOL
implementation is available at the Retrocomputing Museum
http://www.ccil.org/retro.

breath-of-life packet

/n./ [XEROX PARC] An Ethernet packet that contains bootstrap (see boot) code,
periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the 'breath of life'
into any computer on the network that has happened to crash. Machines depending
on such packets have sufficient hardware or firmware code to wait for (or
request) such a packet during the reboot process. See also dickless
workstation.

The notional 'kiss-of-death packet', with a function complementary to that of a

breath-of-life packet, is recommended for dealing with hosts that consume too
many network resources. Though 'kiss-of-death packet' is usually used in jest,
there is at least one documented instance of an Internet subnet with limited
address-table slots in a gateway machine in which such packets were routinely
used to compete for slots, rather like Christmas shoppers competing for scarce
parking spaces.

breedle

/n./ See feep.

bring X to its knees

/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 running
EMACS." Compare hog.

brittle

/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
abnormal but expected external stimuli; e.g., a file system 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 developed software, which displays
the quality far more often than it ought to. Oppose robust.
broadcast storm

/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; compare mail storm.

brochureware

/n./ Planned but non-existent product like vaporware, but with the added
implication that marketing is actively selling and promoting it (they've printed
brochures). Brochureware is often deployed as a strategic weapon; the idea is to
con customers into not committing to an existing product of the competition's.
It is a safe bet that when a brochureware product finally becomes real, it will
be more expensive than and inferior to the alternatives that had been available
for years.

broken

/adj./ 1. Not working properly (of programs). 2. Behaving strangely; especially

(when used of people) exhibiting extreme depression.

broken arrow

/n./ [IBM] 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,
simulated with '- /_', with the two center characters overstruck.

Note: to appreciate this term fully, it helps to know that 'broken arrow' is
also military jargon for an accident involving nuclear weapons....

BrokenWindows

/n./ Abusive hackerism for the crufty and elephantine X environment on

Sun machines; properly called 'OpenWindows'.

broket

/broh'k*t/ or /broh'ket`/ /n./ [by analogy with 'bracket': a 'broken bracket']

Either of the characters ' ' and ' ', when used as paired enclosing
delimiters. This word originated as a contraction of the phrase 'broken
bracket', that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle. (At MIT, and
apparently in the Real World as well, these are usually called angle
brackets.)

Brooks's Law

/prov./ "Adding manpower to a late software project makes it later" — a result

of the fact that the expected advantage from splitting work among N programmers
is O(N) (that is, proportional to N), but the complexity and communications cost
associated with coordinating and then 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 excellent early book on software engineering. 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 still does. See also
creationism, second-system effect, optimism.
browser

/n./ A program specifically designed to help users view and navigate hypertext,
on-line documentation, or a database. While this general sense has been present
in jargon for a long time, the proliferation of browsers for the World Wide Web
after 1992 has made it much more popular and provided a central or default
meaning of the word previously lacking in hacker usage. Nowadays, if someone
mentions using a 'browser' without qualification, one may assume it is a Web
browser.

BRS

/B-R-S/ /n./ Syn. Big Red Switch. This abbreviation is fairly common
on-line.

brute force

/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
applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The
term can also be used in reference to programming style: brute-force programs
are written in a heavyhanded, tedious way, full of repetition and devoid of any
elegance or useful abstraction (see also brute force and ignorance).

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 other cities. In what order
should the cities be visited 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 very stupid in that it considers even 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 already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to
consider, and for N = 1000 — well, see bignum). Sometimes, unfortunately,
there is no better general solution than brute force. 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 in
ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front.

Whether brute-force programming should actually be considered stupid or not

depends on the context; if the problem is not terribly big, the extra CPU time
spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time it would
take to develop a more 'intelligent' algorithm. Additionally, 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 have uttered the epigram "When
in doubt, use 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 in the success of that OS. Like so many other 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

/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 tends to encourage
this sort of thing. Characteristic of 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

/B-S-D/ /n./ [abbreviation for 'Berkeley Software 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 networking enhancements, and many other features. 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 still widely popular. Note
that BSD versions going back to 2.9 are often referred to by their version
numbers, without the BSD prefix. See 4.2, Unix, USG Unix.

BUAF

// /n./ [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Font — a special

form of ASCII art. Various programs exist for rendering text strings into
block, bloob, and pseudo-script fonts in cells between four and six character
cells on a side; this is smaller than the letters generated by older banner
(sense 2) programs. These are sometimes used to render one's name in a sig
block, and are critically referred to as 'BUAF's. See warlording.

BUAG

// /n./ [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] Big Ugly ASCII Graphic.

Pejorative term for ugly ASCII art, especially as found in sig blocks. For
some reason, mutations of the head of Bart Simpson are particularly common in
the least imaginative sig blocks. See warlording.

bubble sort

/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 into one
with a lower sort value. Because it is not very good relative to other methods
and is the one typically stumbled on by naive and untutored programmers,
hackers consider it the canonical example of a naive algorithm. The canonical
example of a really *bad* algorithm is bogo-sort. A bubble sort might be used
out of ignorance, but any use of bogo-sort could issue only from brain damage or
willful perversity.

bucky bits

/buh'kee bits/ /n./ 1. obs. The bits produced by the CONTROL and META shift
keys on a SAIL keyboard (octal 200 and 400 respectively), resulting in a 9-bit
keyboard character set. The MIT AI TV (Knight) keyboards extended this with TOP
and separate left and right CONTROL and META keys, resulting in a 12-bit
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 option
keys on a Macintosh.

It has long been rumored that 'bucky bits' were named for Buckminster Fuller
during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Actually, bucky bits were
invented by Niklaus Wirth when *he* was at Stanford in 1964—65; he first
suggested the idea of an EDIT key to set the 8th bit of an otherwise 7-bit ASCII
character). It seems that, unknown to Wirth, certain Stanford hackers had
privately nicknamed him 'Bucky' after a prominent portion of his dental anatomy,
and this nickname transferred to the bit. Bucky-bit commands were used in a
number of editors written at Stanford, including most notably TV-EDIT and NLS.

The term spread to MIT and CMU early and is now in general use. Ironically,
Wirth himself remained unaware of its derivation for nearly 30 years, until GLS
dug up this history in early 1993! See double bucky, quadruple bucky.

buffer chuck

/n./ Shorter and ruder syn. for buffer overflow.

buffer overflow

/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 and firehose syndrome),
or because the buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must
accumulate before a piece of it can be processed. For example, in a
text-processing tool that crunches a line at a time, a short line buffer can
result in lossage as input from a long line overflows the buffer and trashes
data beyond it. Good 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 must have overflowed." Or "If I answer that phone my buffer is going
to overflow." See also spam, overrun screw.

bug

/n./ An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of 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 hardware bug." "Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs"
(i.e., Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems).

Historical note: Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known
for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a
glitch in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual insect out from
between the contacts of one of its relays, and she 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 question (a moth) sat
in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center (NSWC). 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 (from September 9, 1947), reads "1545 Relay #70 Panel
F (moth) in relay. First actual case of bug being found". This wording
establishes that the term was already in use at the time in its current specific
sense — and Hopper herself reports that the term 'bug' was regularly applied to
problems in radar electronics during WWII.

Indeed, the use of 'bug' to mean an industrial defect was already established in
Thomas Edison's time, and a more specific and rather modern use can be found in
an electrical handbook from 1896 ("Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity", Theo.
Audel Co.) which says: "The term 'bug' is used to a limited extent to
designate any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric
apparatus." It further notes that the term is "said to have originated in
quadruplex telegraphy and have been transferred to all electric apparatus."

The latter observation may explain a common folk etymology of the term; that it
came from telephone company usage, in which "bugs in a telephone cable" were
blamed for noisy lines. Though this derivation seems to be mistaken, it may
well be a distorted memory of a joke first current among *telegraph* operators
more than a century ago!

Or perhaps not a joke. Historians of the field inform us that the term "bug"
was regularly used in the early days of telegraphy to refer to a variety of
semi-automatic telegraphy keyers that would send a string of dots if you held
them down. In fact, the Vibroplex keyers (which were among the most common of
this type) even had a graphic of a beetle on them! While the ability to send
repeated dots automatically was very useful for professional morse code
operators, these were also significantly trickier to use than the older manual
keyers, and it could take some practice to ensure one didn't introduce
extraneous dots into the code by holding the key down a fraction too long. In
the hands of an inexperienced operator, a Vibroplex "bug" on the line could mean
that a lot of garbled Morse would soon be coming your way.

Actually, use of 'bug' in the general sense of a 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 a variety of mythological monster which (to 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 happened:

"There is a bug in this ant farm!"

"What do you mean? I don't see any ants in it."

"That's the bug."

A careful discussion of the etymological issues can be found in a paper by Fred

R. Shapiro, 1987, "Entomology of the Computer Bug: History and Folklore",
American Speech 62(4):376-378.

[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 to check discovered that the bug was not there. While investigating
this in late 1990, 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 their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this
and agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the
Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money constraints has not yet been
exhibited. Thus, the process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug
fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true! — ESR]

bug-compatible

/adj./ Said of a design or revision that has been badly compromised by a

requirement to be compatible with fossils or misfeatures in other programs
or (esp.) previous releases of itself. "MS-DOS 2.0 used \ as a path separator to
be bug-compatible with some cretin's choice of / as an option character in 1.0."

bug-for-bug compatible

/n./ Same as bug-compatible, with the additional implication that much

tedious effort went into ensuring that each (known) bug was replicated.

bug-of-the-month club

/n./ [from "book-of-the-month club", a time-honored mail-order-marketing

technique in the U.S.] A mythical club which users of 'sendmail(1)' (the UNIX
mail daemon) belong to; this was coined on the Usenet newsgroup
comp.security.unix at a time when sendmail security holes, which allowed outside
crackers access to the system, were being uncovered at an alarming rate,
forcing sysadmins to update very often. Also, more completely, 'fatal security
bug-of-the-month club'.

buglix

/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 nearly so much venom. Compare AIDX, HP-SUX, Nominal
Semidestructor, Telerat, sun-stools.

bulletproof

/adj./ Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely robust;

lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception
condition — a rare and valued quality. Syn. armor-plated.

bum

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." In 1996, this term
and the practice it describes are semi-obsolete. In elder days, John McCarthy
(inventor of LISP) used to compare some efficiency-obsessed hackers among his
students to "ski bums"; thus, optimization became "program bumming", and
eventually just "bumming". 2. To squeeze out excess; to remove something in
order to improve 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 the jump instruction faster." Usage: now 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
'buttocks'.

bump

/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

/v./ [from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"] 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
a DISK FULL error and it's all our comm software's fault." This is mainstream
slang in some parts of England.

buried treasure

/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.
Used sarcastically, because what is found 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

/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 mortality).
2. A period of indeterminate 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 stage.

Historical note: the origin of "burn-in" (sense 1) is apparently the practice of

setting a new-model airplane's brakes on fire, then extinguishing the fire, in
order to make them hold better. This was done on the first version of the U.S.
spy-plane, the U-2.

burst page

/n./ Syn. banner, sense 1.

busy-wait

/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 till
Bill gets off the phone."

Technically, 'busy-wait' means to wait on an event by spinning 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.
This is a wasteful technique, best avoided on time-sharing systems where a
busy-waiting program may hog the processor.

buzz

/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 never gets out of catatonia, while a 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 continuity by applying
an AC rather than DC signal. 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

/B-W-Q/ /n./ [IBM: abbreviation, 'Buzz Word Quotient'] The percentage of

buzzwords in a speech or documents. Usually roughly proportional to bogosity.
See TLA.

by hand

/adv./ 1. 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 to include the text of the message I'm 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, reading that into an editor, locating the
top 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 file. Compare eyeball search. 2. By extension, writing code which does
something in an explicit or low-level way for which a presupplied library
routine ought to have been available. "This cretinous B-tree library doesn't
supply a decent iterator, so I'm having to walk the trees by hand."

byte

: /bi:t/ /n./ [techspeak] 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 6 or 7 bits, and the PDP-10 supported '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 was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design
phase for the IBM Stretch computer; 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 the System/360. The word was coined by mutating
the word 'bite' so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. See also
nybble.

bytesexual

/bi:t`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.

bzzzt, wrong

/bzt rong/ /excl./ [Usenet/Internet] From a Robin Williams routine in the movie
"Dead Poets Society" spoofing radio or TV quiz programs, such as *Truth or
Consequences*, where an incorrect answer earns one a blast from the buzzer and
condolences from the interlocutor. A way of expressing mock-rude disagreement,
usually immediately following an included quote from another poster. The less
abbreviated "*Bzzzzt*, wrong, but thank you for playing" is also common;
capitalization and emphasis of the buzzer sound varies.

C -

/n./ 1. The third letter of the English alphabet. 2. ASCII 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 commemoration of *its* parent,
BCPL. (BCPL was in turn descended from an earlier Algol-derived language, CPL.)
Before Bjarne 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
language in systems and microcomputer applications 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 language with all the readability and maintainability of assembly
language".
C Programmer's Disease

/n./ The tendency of the undisciplined C programmer to set arbitrary but

supposedly generous static limits on table sizes (defined, if you're lucky, by
constants in header files) rather than taking the trouble to do proper dynamic
storage allocation. If an application user later needs to put 68 elements into
a table of size 50, the afflicted programmer reasons that he or she can easily
reset the table size to 68 (or even as much as 70, to allow for future
expansion) and recompile. This gives the programmer the comfortable feeling of
having made the effort to satisfy the user's (unreasonable) demands, and often
affords the user multiple opportunities to explore the marvelous consequences of
fandango on core. In severe cases of the disease, the programmer cannot
comprehend why each fix of this kind seems only to further disgruntle the user.

C++

/C'-pluhs-pluhs/ /n./ Designed by Bjarne Stroustrup of AT T Bell Labs as a

successor to C. Now one of the languages of choice, although many hackers
still grumble that it is the successor to either Algol 68 or Ada (depending on
generation), and a prime example of second-system effect. Almost anything that
can be done in any language can be done in C++, but it requires a language
lawyer to know what is and what is not legal— the design is *almost* too large
to hold in even hackers' heads. Much of the cruft results from C++'s attempt
to be backward compatible with C. Stroustrup himself has said in his
retrospective book "The Design and Evolution of C++" (p. 207), "Within C++,
there is a much smaller and cleaner language struggling to get out." [Many
hackers would now add "Yes, and it's called Java" — ESR]

calculator

[Cambridge] /n./ Syn. for bitty box.

Camel Book

/n./ Universally recognized nickname for the book "Programming Perl", by Larry
Wall and Randal L. Schwartz, O'Reilly Associates 1991, ISBN 0-937175-64-1. The
definitive reference on Perl.

can

/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 sprocket!"
Synonymous with gun. It is said that the ASCII character with mnemonic CAN
(0011000) was used as a kill-job character on some early OSes. Alternatively,
this term may derive from mainstream slang 'canned' for being laid off or fired.

can't happen

The traditional program comment for code executed under a condition that should
never be true, for example a file size computed as negative. Often, such a
condition being true indicates data corruption or a faulty algorithm; it is
almost always handled by emitting a fatal error message and terminating or
crashing, since there is little else that can be done. Some case variant of
"can't happen" is also often the text emitted if the 'impossible' error actually
happens! Although "can't happen" events are genuinely infrequent in production
code, programmers wise enough to check for them habitually are often surprised
at how frequently they are triggered during development and how many headaches
checking for them turns out to head off. See also firewall code (sense 2).
candygrammar

/n./ A programming-language grammar that is mostly syntactic sugar; the term

is also a play on 'candygram'. COBOL, Apple's Hypertalk language, and a lot
of the so-called '4GL' database languages share this property. The usual intent
of such designs is that they be as English-like as possible, on the theory that
they will then be easier for unskilled people to program. This intention comes
to grief on the reality that syntax isn't what makes programming hard; it's the
mental effort and organization required to specify an algorithm precisely that
costs. Thus the invariable result is that 'candygrammar' languages are just as
difficult to program in as terser ones, and far more painful for the experienced
hacker.

[The overtones from the old Chevy Chase skit on Saturday Night Live should not
be overlooked. This was a "Jaws" parody. Someone lurking outside an apartment
door tries all kinds of bogus ways to get the occupant to open up, while ominous
music plays in the background. The last attempt is a half-hearted "Candygram!"
When the door is opened, a shark bursts in and chomps the poor occupant. There
is a moral here for those attracted to candygrammars. Note that, in many
circles, pretty much the same ones who remember Monty Python sketches, all it
takes is the word "Candygram!", suitably timed, to get people rolling on the
floor. — GLS]

canonical

/adj./ [historically, 'according to religious law'] 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
because they mean the same thing, but the 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 relaxation of the technical meaning,
acquired its 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.

Non-technical academics do 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 body of authentic works by that author (this 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 scholars to
investigate.

The word 'canon' has an interesting history. It derives ultimately from the
Greek 'kanon' (akin to the English 'cane') referring to a reed. Reeds were used
for measurement, and in Latin and later Greek the word 'canon' meant a rule or a
standard. The establishment of a canon of scriptures within Christianity was
meant to define a standard or a rule for the religion. The above non-techspeak
academic usages stem from this instance of a defined and accepted body of work.
Alongside this usage was the promulgation of 'canons' (`rules') for the
government of the Catholic Church. The techspeak usages ("according to
religious law") derive from this use of the Latin 'canon'.

Hackers invest 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 incessant use of jargon. Over his loud
objections, GLS and RMS made a point of using as much of it as possible 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 did he say?"
Steele: "Bob just used '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 religious law' is *not* the canonical meaning
of 'canonical'.

card walloper

/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

/keir'weir/ /n./ A variety of 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
crippleware, sense 2.

cargo cult programming

/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 some bug encountered
in the past, but usually 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 grew up in the
South Pacific after World War II. 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 the war. Hackish usage probably derives from 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).

cascade

/n./ 1. A huge volume of spurious error-message output produced by a compiler

with poor error recovery. Too frequently, one trivial syntax error (such as a
missing ')' or '_') throws the parser out of synch so that much of the remaining
program text is interpreted as garbaged or ill-formed. 2. A chain of Usenet
followups, each adding some trivial variation or riposte to the text of the
previous one, all of which is reproduced in the new message; an include war in
which the object is to create a sort of communal graffito.

case and paste

/n./ [from 'cut and paste'] 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
telephone switch are selected using 'case' 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 elsewhere. The term is condescending, implying that
the programmer is acting mindlessly rather than thinking carefully about what is
required to integrate the code for two similar cases.

At DEC, this is sometimes called 'clone-and-hack' coding.

casters-up mode

/n./ [IBM, prob. fr. slang belly up] Yet another synonym for 'broken' or
'down'. Usually connotes a major failure. A system (hardware or software)
which is 'down' may be already being restarted before the failure is noticed,
whereas one which is 'casters up' is usually a good excuse to take the rest of
the day off (as long as you're not responsible for fixing it).

casting the runes

/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 does.
Compare incantation, runes, examining the entrails; also see the AI koan
about Tom Knight in "AI Koans" (Appendix A).

A correspondent from England tells us that one of ICL's most talented systems
designers used to be called out occasionally to service machines which the
field circus had given up on. Since he knew the design inside out, he could
often find faults simply by listening to a quick outline of the symptoms. He
used to play on this by going to some site where the field circus had just spent
the last two weeks solid trying to find a fault, and spreading a diagram of the
system out on a table top. He'd then shake some chicken bones and cast them
over the diagram, peer at the bones intently for a minute, and then tell them
that a certain module needed replacing. The system would start working again
immediately upon the replacement.

cat

[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
browsing it carefully. Usage: considered silly. Rare outside Unix sites. See
also dd, BLT.

Among Unix fans, 'cat(1)' is considered an excellent example of user-interface

design, because it delivers the file contents without such verbosity as spacing
or headers between the files, and because it does not require the files 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, because of its woefully unobvious name. It is far more
often used to blast a file to standard output than to concatenate two files.
The name 'cat' for the former operation is just as unintuitive as, say, LISP's
cdr.

Of such oppositions are holy wars made....

catatonic

/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 as
you type, let alone do what you're asking 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.

cd tilde
/C-D til-d*/ /vi./ To go home. From the Unix C-shell and Korn-shell command
'cd ~', which takes one to one's '$HOME' (`cd' with no arguments happens to do
the same thing). By extension, may be used with other arguments; thus, over an
electronic chat link, 'cd ~coffee' would mean "I'm going to the coffee machine."

CDA

/C-D-A/ The "Communications Decency Act" of 1996, passed on Black Thursday

as section 502 of a major telecommunications reform bill. The CDA made it a
federal crime in the USA to send a communication which is "obscene, lewd,
lascivious, filthy, or indecent, with intent to annoy, abuse, threaten, or
harass another person." It also threatens with imprisonment anyone who
"knowingly" makes accessible to minors any message that "describes, in terms
patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards, sexual or
excretory activities or organs".

While the CDA was sold as a measure to protect minors from the putative evils of
pornography, the repressive political aims of the bill were laid bare by the
Hyde amendment, which intended to outlaw discussion of abortion on the Internet.

To say that this direct attack on First Amendment free-speech rights was not
well received on the Internet would be putting it mildly. A firestorm of
protest followed, including a February 29th mass demonstration by thousands of
netters who turned their home pages black for 48 hours. Several civil-rights
groups and computing/telecommunications companies sought an immediate injunction
to block enforcement of the CDA pending a constitutional challenge. This
injunction was granted on the likelihood that plaintiffs would prevail on the
merits of the case. At time of writing (Spring 1996), the fate of the CDA, and
its effect on the Internet, is still unknown. See also Exon.

To join the fight against the CDA (if it's still law) and other forms of
Internet censorship, visit the Center for Democracy and Technology Home Page at
http://www.cdt.org.

cdr

/ku'dr/ or /kuh'dr/ /vt./ [from LISP] 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 form 'cdr down', to trace down a
list of elements: "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. See also loop
through.

Historical note: The instruction format of the IBM 704 that hosted the original
LISP implementation featured two 15-bit fields called the 'address' and
'decrement' parts. The term 'cdr' was 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. GLS recalls, for example, a programming project
in which strings were represented as linked lists; the get-character and
skip-character operations were of course called CHAR and CHDR.

chad

/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 has
also been called 'chaff', 'computer confetti', and 'keypunch droppings'. This
use may now be mainstream; it has been reported seen (1993) in directions for a
card-based voting machine in California.
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, rather than punching out a
circle/rectangle; it was clear that if the Chadless keypunch didn't make them,
then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be 'chad'. There is a legend
that the word was originally acronymic, standing for "Card Hole Aggregate
Debris", but this has all the earmarks of a bogus folk etymology.

chad box

/n./ A metal box about the size of a lunchbox (or in some models a large
wastebasket), for collecting the chad (sense 2) that accumulated in Iron Age
card punches. You had to open the covers of the card punch periodically and
empty the chad box. The bit bucket was notionally the equivalent device in
the CPU enclosure, which was typically across the room in another great
gray-and-blue box.

chain

1. /vi./ [orig. from BASIC's 'CHAIN' statement] 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. Though this facility used to be common on 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'. 2. /n./ A series of linked data
areas within an operating system or application. 'Chain rattling' is the
process of repeatedly running through the linked data areas searching for one
which is of interest to the executing program. The implication is that there is
a very large number of links on the chain.

channel

/n./ [IRC] The basic unit of discussion on IRC. Once one joins a channel,
everything one types is read by others on that channel. Channels are named with
strings that begin with a '#' sign and can have topic descriptions (which are
generally irrelevant to the actual subject of discussion). Some notable
channels are '#initgame', '#hottub', and '#report'. At times of international
crisis, '#report' has hundreds of members, some of whom take turns listening to
various news services and typing in summaries of the news, or in some cases,
giving first-hand accounts of the action (e.g., Scud missile attacks in Tel Aviv
during the Gulf War in 1991).

channel hopping

/n./ [IRC, GEnie] To rapidly switch channels on IRC, or a GEnie chat board,
just as a social butterfly might hop from one group to another at a party. This
term may derive from the TV watcher's idiom, 'channel surfing'.

channel op

/chan'l op/ /n./ [IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on a particular
IRC channel; commonly abbreviated 'chanop' or 'CHOP'. These privileges
include the right to kick users, to change various status bits, and to make
others into CHOPs.

chanop

/chan'-op/ /n./ [IRC] See channel op.

char

/keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ /n./ Shorthand for 'character'. Esp. used by C
programmers, as 'char' is C's typename for character data.

charityware

/cha'rit-ee-weir`/ /n./ Syn. careware.

chase pointers

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 jargon
when used of human networks. "I'm 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 core dump
(sense 1), interactively or on a large piece of paper printed with hex runes,
following dynamic data-structures. Used only in a debugging context.

chawmp

/n./ [University of Florida] 16 or 18 bits (half of a machine word). This term

was used by FORTH hackers during the late 1970s/early 1980s; it is said to have
been archaic then, and may now be obsolete. It was coined in revolt against the
promiscuous use of 'word' for anything between 16 and 32 bits; 'word' has an
additional special meaning for FORTH hacks that made the overloading
intolerable. For similar reasons, /gaw'bl/ (spelled 'gawble' or possibly
'gawbul') was in use as a term for 32 or 48 bits (presumably a full machine
word, but our sources are unclear on this). These terms are more easily
understood if one thinks of them as faithful phonetic spellings of 'chomp' and
'gobble' pronounced in a Florida or other Southern U.S. dialect. For general
discussion of similar terms, see nybble.

check

/n./ A hardware-detected error condition, most commonly used to refer to actual

hardware failures rather than software-induced traps. E.g., a 'parity check' is
the result of a hardware-detected parity error. Recorded here because the word
often humorously extended to non-technical problems. For example, the term
'child check' has been used to refer to the problems caused by a small child who
is curious to know what happens when s/he presses all the cute buttons on a
computer's console (of course, this particular problem could have been prevented
with molly-guards).

chemist

/n./ [Cambridge] 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
patterns. May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry.

Chernobyl chicken

/n./ See laser chicken.

Chernobyl packet
/cher-noh'b*l pak'*t/ /n./ A network packet that induces a broadcast storm
and/or network meltdown, in memory of the April 1986 nuclear accident at
Chernobyl in Ukraine. The typical scenario involves an IP Ethernet datagram
that passes through a gateway with 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

/n./ [Commodore] 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 little bitty
boxes (see also PETSCII). 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"; the novel is now sold under that title), in which a
'chickenhead' is a mutant with below-average intelligence.

chiclet keyboard

/n./ A keyboard with a small, flat 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
keyboards.) Used esp. to describe the original 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 are not often seen on anything larger than
a digital watch any more.

chine nual

/sheen'yu-*l/ /n. obs./ [MIT] 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

/n./ Syn. Mongolian Hordes technique.

choad

/chohd/ /n./ Synonym for 'penis' used in alt.tasteless and popularized by the
denizens thereof. They say: "We think maybe it's from Middle English but we're
all too damned lazy to check the OED." [I'm not. It isn't. — ESR] This term is
alleged to have been inherited through 1960s underground comics, and to have
been recently sighted in the Beavis and Butthead cartoons. Speakers of the
Hindi, Bengali and Gujarati languages have confirmed that 'choad' is in fact an
Indian vernacular word equivalent to 'f**k'; it is therefore likely to have
entered English slang via the British Raj.

choke

/v./ 1. 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. 2. [MIT] More generally, to
fail at any endeavor, but with some flair or bravado; the popular definition is
"to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory."

chomp

/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
together and place the thumb against their 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" in the "Jargon Construction"
section of the 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 humble but humorous admission of some failure. 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

/n./ Someone or something that is chomping; a loser. See loser, bagbiter,

chomp.

CHOP

/chop/ /n./ [IRC] See channel op.

Christmas tree

/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

/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
different-colored light bulb, all turned on.)

chrome

/n./ [from automotive slang via wargaming] 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!"
Distinguished from bells and whistles by the fact that the latter are usually
added to gratify developers' own desires for featurefulness. Often used as a
term of contempt.

chug

/vi./ To run slowly; to grind or grovel. "The disk is chugging like crazy."

Church of the SubGenius

/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 of bizarre
imagery and references such as "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
[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 Rube Goldberg
device and holding a rope coming out of it. On the back cover, the device is in
shambles after she has (inevitably) pulled on the rope. See also book titles.
CI$
—
// /n./ Hackerism for 'CIS', CompuServe Information Service. The dollar sign
refers to CompuServe's rather steep line charges. Often used in sig blocks
just before a CompuServe address. Syn. Compu$erve.

Classic C

/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 ANSI X3J11 committee. Also 'C Classic'.

An analogous construction 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 used of product series in which the newer versions are considered
serious losers relative to the older ones.

clean

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 from the outside. The antonym is 'grungy' 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

/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'." 2. adj. Denotes extreme severity of a bug, discovered by a customer and
obviously missed earlier because of poor testing: "That's a CLM bug!"

clobber

/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

/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
fractions of a second; one good reason for this 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
/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
our product." 3. A blatant ripoff, most likely violating copyright, patent, or
trade secret protections: "Your product is a clone of my product." This use
implies legal action is pending. 4. 'PC clone:' a PC-BUS/ISA or EISA-compatible
80x86-based microcomputer (this use is sometimes spelled 'klone' or 'PClone').
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
'mission-critical' features such as support for 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".

clone-and-hack coding

/n./ [DEC] Syn. case and paste.

clover key

/n./ [Mac users] See feature key.

clustergeeking

/kluh'st*r-gee`king/ /n./ [CMU] Spending more time at a computer cluster doing

CS homework than most people spend breathing.

COBOL

/koh'bol/ /n./ [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] (Synonymous with evil.) A

weak, verbose, and flabby language used by card wallopers to do boring
mindless things on dinosaur mainframes. Hackers believe that all COBOL
programmers are suits or code grinders, and no self-respecting hacker will
ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered
without ritual expressions of disgust or horror. One popular one is Edsger W.
Dijkstra's famous observation that "The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its
teaching should, therefore, be regarded as a criminal offense." (from "Selected
Writings on Computing: A Personal Perspective") See also fear and loathing,
software rot.

COBOL fingers

/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 (see candygrammar); thus it is alleged that programming too much in
COBOL causes one's fingers to wear down to stubs by the endless typing. "I
refuse to type in all that source code again; it would give me COBOL fingers!"

code grinder

/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 its native habitat, the code grinder often removes the
suit jacket to reveal an underplumage 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 far from hackerdom as one can get and still 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-boundedness, brute
force, and utter lack of imagination. Compare card walloper; contrast
hacker, Real Programmer.

Code of the Geeks

/n./ see geek code.

code police

/n./ [by analogy with George Orwell's 'thought police'] 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
underline a claim that a particular style violation is dangerous, or ironically,
to suggest that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by
anal-retentive weenies. "Dike out that goto or the code police will get you!"
The ironic usage is perhaps more common.

codes

/n./ [scientific computing] Programs. This usage is common in people who hack
supercomputers and heavy-duty number-crunching, rare to unknown elsewhere (if
you say "codes" to hackers outside scientific computing, their first association
is likely to be "and cyphers").

codewalker

/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 with source
code may turn into codewalkers. As in "This new 'vgrind' feature would require
a codewalker to implement."

coefficient of X

/n./ Hackish speech makes 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 cannot really be
quantitative about, but 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
is one of presence or absence. The canonical 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 property is a ratio of two opposing factors: "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 overpowering your own).

'Foo index' and '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 would be less likely to speak of a 'high 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 friction. The choice between these terms is
often 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 index'.

cokebottle

/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 right
back about the 'altmode-altmode-cokebottle' 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 for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif
window manager, 'mwm(1)', has a reserved keystroke for switching to the default
set of keybindings and behavior. This keystroke is (believe it or not)
'control-meta-bang' (see bang). Since the exclamation point looks a lot like
an upside down Coke bottle, Motif hackers have begun referring to this keystroke
as 'cokebottle'. See also quadruple bucky.

cold boot

/n./ See boot.

COME FROM

/n./ A semi-mythical language construct dual to the 'go to'; 'COME FROM'
label would cause the referenced label to act as a sort of trapdoor, so
that if the program ever reached it control would quietly and automagically be
transferred to the statement following the 'COME FROM'. 'COME FROM' was first
proposed in R. Lawrence Clark's "A Linguistic Contribution to GOTO-less
programming", which appeared in a 1973 Datamation issue (and was reprinted in
the April 1984 issue of "Communications of the ACM"). This parodied the
then-raging 'structured programming' holy wars (see considered harmful).
Mythically, some variants are the 'assigned COME FROM' and the 'computed COME
FROM' (parodying some nasty control constructs in FORTRAN and some extended
BASICs). Of course, multi-tasking (or non-determinism) could be implemented by
having more than one 'COME FROM' statement coming from the same label.

In some ways the FORTRAN 'DO' looks like a 'COME FROM' statement. After the
terminating statement number/`CONTINUE' is reached, control continues at the
statement following the DO. Some generous FORTRANs would allow arbitrary
statements (other than 'CONTINUE') for the statement, leading to examples like:

DO 10 I=1,LIMIT C imagine many lines of code here, leaving the C

original DO statement lost in the spaghetti... WRITE(6,10) I,FROB(I)
10 FORMAT(1X,I5,G10.4)

in which the trapdoor is just after the statement labeled 10. (This is
particularly surprising because the label doesn't appear to have anything to do
with the flow of control at all!)

While sufficiently astonishing to the unsuspecting reader, this form of 'COME

FROM' statement isn't completely general. After all, control will eventually pass
to the following statement. The implementation of the general form was left to
Univac FORTRAN, ca. 1975 (though a roughly similar feature existed on the IBM 7040
ten years earlier). The statement 'AT 100' would perform a 'COME FROM 100'. It was
intended strictly as a debugging aid, with dire consequences promised to anyone
so deranged as to use it in production code. More horrible things had already been
perpetrated in production languages, however; doubters need only contemplate the
'ALTER' verb in COBOL.

'COME FROM' was supported under its own name for the first time 15 years later,
in C-INTERCAL (see INTERCAL, retrocomputing); knowledgeable observers are
still reeling from the shock.
comm mode

/kom mohd/ /n./ [ITS: from the feature supporting on-line chat; the term may
spelled with one or two m's] Syn. for talk mode.

command key

/n./ [Mac users] Syn. feature key.

comment out

/vt./ To surround a section of code with comment delimiters or to prefix every

line in the section with a comment marker; this prevents it from being compiled
or interpreted. Often done when the code is redundant or obsolete, but is being
left in the source to make the intent of the active code clearer; also when the
code in that section is broken and you want to bypass it in order to debug some
other part of the code. Compare condition out, usually the preferred
technique in languages (such as C) that make it possible.

Commonwealth Hackish

: /n./ Hacker jargon as spoken in English outside the U.S., esp. in the
British Commonwealth. It is reported that Commonwealth speakers are more likely
to pronounce truncations like 'char' and 'soc', etc., as spelled (/char/,
/sok/), as opposed to American /keir/ and /sohsh/. Dots in newsgroup names
(especially two-component names) tend to be pronounced more often (so soc.wibble
is /sok dot wib'l/ rather than /sohsh wib'l/). The prefix meta may be
pronounced /mee't*/; similarly, Greek letter beta is usually /bee't*/, zeta is
usually /zee't*/, and so forth. Preferred metasyntactic variables include
blurgle, 'eek', 'ook', 'frodo', and 'bilbo'; wibble, 'wobble', and in
emergencies 'wubble'; 'flob', 'banana', 'tom', 'dick', 'harry', 'wombat',
'frog', fish, and so on and on (see foo, sense 4).

Alternatives to verb doubling include suffixes '-o-rama', 'frenzy' (as in

feeding frenzy), and 'city' (examples: "barf city!" "hack-o-rama!" "core dump
frenzy!"). Finally, note that the American terms 'parens', 'brackets', and
'braces' for (), [], and _ are uncommon; Commonwealth hackish prefers
'brackets', 'square brackets', and 'curly brackets'. Also, the use of 'pling'
for bang is common outside the United States.

See also attoparsec, calculator, chemist, console jockey, fish,

go-faster stripes, grunge, hakspek, heavy metal, leaky heap, lord
high fixer, loose bytes, muddie, nadger, noddy, psychedelicware,
plingnet, raster blaster, RTBM, seggie, spod, sun lounge, terminal
junkie, tick-list features, weeble, weasel, YABA, and notes or
definitions under Bad Thing, barf, bogus, bum, chase pointers, cosmic
rays, crippleware, crunch, dodgy, gonk, hamster, hardwarily,
mess-dos, nybble, proglet, root, SEX, tweak, and xyzzy.

compact

/adj./ Of a design, describes the valuable property that it can all be

apprehended at once in one's head. This generally means the thing created from
the design can be used with greater facility and fewer errors than an equivalent
tool that is not compact. Compactness does not imply triviality or lack of
power; for example, C is compact and FORTRAN is not, but C is more powerful than
FORTRAN. Designs become non-compact through accreting features and cruft
that don't merge cleanly into the overall design scheme (thus, some fans of
Classic C maintain that ANSI C is no longer compact).
compiler jock

/n./ See jock (sense 2).

compress

[Unix] /vt./ When used without a qualifier, generally refers to crunching of

a file using a particular C implementation of compression by James A. Woods et
al. and widely circulated via Usenet; use of crunch itself in this sense is
rare among Unix hackers. Specifically, compress is built around the
Lempel-Ziv-Welch algorithm as described in "A Technique for High Performance
Data Compression", Terry A. Welch, "IEEE Computer", vol. 17, no. 6 (June 1984),
pp. 8—19.

Compu$erve

/n./ See CI$. Synonyms CompuSpend and Compu$pend are also reported.

computer confetti

/n./ Syn. chad. Though this term is common, this use of punched-card chad is
not a good idea, as the pieces are stiff and have sharp corners that could
injure the eyes. GLS reports that he once attended a wedding at MIT during which
he and a few other guests enthusiastically threw chad instead of rice. The groom
later grumbled that he and his bride had spent most of the evening trying to get
the stuff out of their hair.

computer geek

/n./ 1. One who eats (computer) bugs for a living. One who fulfills all the
dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous,
pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater. Cannot be
used by outsiders without implied insult to all hackers; compare black-on-black
vs. white-on-black usage of 'nigger'. A computer geek may be either a
fundamentally clueless individual or a proto-hacker in larval stage. Also
called 'turbo nerd', 'turbo geek'. See also propeller head, clustergeeking,
geek out, wannabee, terminal junkie, spod, weenie. 2. Some
self-described computer geeks use this term in a positive sense and protest
sense 1 (this seems to have been a post-1990 development). For one such
argument, see http://samsara.circus.com/~omni/geek.html.

computron

/kom'pyoo-tron`/ /n./ 1. A notional unit of computing power combining

instruction speed and storage capacity, dimensioned roughly in
instructions-per-second times megabytes-of-main-store times
megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That machine can't run GNU Emacs, it doesn't have
enough computrons!" This usage is usually found in metaphors that treat
computing power as a fungible commodity good, like a crop yield or diesel
horsepower. See bitty box, Get a real computer!, toy, crank. 2. A
mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit quantity of computation or
information, in much the same way that an electron bears one unit of electric
charge (see also bogon). An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons
has been developed based on the physical fact that the molecules in a solid
object move more rapidly as it is heated. It is argued that an object melts
because the molecules have lost their information about where they are supposed
to be (that is, they have emitted computrons). This explains why computers get
so hot and require air conditioning; they use up computrons. Conversely, it
should be possible to cool down an object by placing it in the path of a
computron beam. It is believed that this may also explain why machines that
work at the factory fail in the computer room: the computrons there have been
all used up by the other hardware. (This theory probably owes something to the
"Warlock" stories by Larry Niven, the best known being "What Good is a Glass
Dagger?", in which magic is fueled by an exhaustible natural resource called
'mana'.)

con

[from SF fandom] /n./ A science-fiction convention. Not used of other sorts of

conventions, such as professional meetings. This term, unlike many others of
SF-fan slang, is widely recognized even by hackers who aren't fans. "We'd been
corresponding on the net for months, then we met face-to-face at a con."

condition out

/vt./ To prevent a section of code from being compiled by surrounding it with a

conditional-compilation directive whose condition is always false. The
canonical examples of these directives are '#if 0' (or '#ifdef notdef', though
some find the latter bletcherous) and '#endif' in C. Compare comment out.

condom

/n./ 1. The protective plastic bag that accompanies 3.5-inch microfloppy

diskettes. Rarely, also used of (paper) disk envelopes. Unlike the write
protect tab, the condom (when left on) not only impedes the practice of SEX
but has also been shown to have a high failure rate as drive mechanisms attempt
to access the disk — and can even fatally frustrate insertion. 2. The
protective cladding on a light pipe. 3. 'keyboard condom': A flexible,
transparent plastic cover for a keyboard, designed to provide some protection
against dust and programming fluid without impeding typing. 4. 'elephant
condom': the plastic shipping bags used inside cardboard boxes to protect
hardware in transit. 5. /n. obs./ A dummy directory '/usr/tmp/sh', created to
foil the Great Worm by exploiting a portability bug in one of its parts. So
named in the title of a comp.risks article by Gene Spafford during the Worm
crisis, and again in the text of "The Internet Worm Program: An Analysis",
Purdue Technical Report CSD-TR-823. See Great Worm, the.

confuser

/n./ Common soundalike slang for 'computer'. Usually encountered in compounds

such as 'confuser room', 'personal confuser', 'confuser guru'. Usage: silly.

connector conspiracy

/n./ [probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10 (one model
of the PDP-10), none of whose connectors matched anything else] The tendency
of manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors of anything) to
come up with new products 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 the design and thus effectively locked third parties out of competition
for the lucrative Massbus peripherals market. This policy 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 stuck with dying, obsolescent disk
and tape drives with low capacity and high power requirements.

(A closely related phenomenon, with a slightly different intent, is the habit

manufacturers have of inventing new screw heads so that only Designated Persons,
possessing the magic screwdrivers, can remove covers and make repairs or install
options. A good 1990s example is the use of Torx screws for cable-TV set-top
boxes. Older Apple Macintoshes took this one step further, requiring not only a
hex wrench but a specialized case-cracking tool to open the box.)
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 so many of them to choose from!" Compare backward combatability.

cons

/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
example".

In LISP itself, 'cons' is the most 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 binary trees of any shape and complexity.
Hackers think of it as a sort of universal constructor, and that is where the
jargon meanings spring from.

considered harmful

/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 (text at http://www.acm.org/classics). Amusingly, the ACM
considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will (by 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". The
structured-programming wars eventually blew 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

: /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 guarded
by passwords instead, and the console 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, the main screen and keyboard (as
opposed to character-only terminals talking to a serial port). Typically only
the console can do real graphics or run X. See also CTY.

console jockey

/n./ See terminal junkie.

content-free

/adj./ [by analogy with techspeak 'context-free'] 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 styles
that exalt form over substance or are 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 paper." (See also four-color glossies.)
"He gave a talk on the implications of electronic networks for postmodernism and
the fin-de-siecle aesthetic. It was content-free."
control-C

/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
break!"

control-O

/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 that
topic; a standard response to someone who is flaming. Considered silly. Compare
control-S.

control-Q

/vi./ "Resume." From the ASCII DC1 or XON character (the pronunciation
/X-on/ is therefore also used), used to undo a previous control-S.

control-S

/vi./ "Stop talking for a second." From the ASCII DC3 or XOFF character (the
pronunciation /X-of/ is therefore also used). Control-S differs from
control-O in that the person is asked to stop talking (perhaps because you are
on the phone) but will be allowed to continue when you're ready to listen to him
— as opposed to control-O, which has more of the meaning of "Shut up."
Considered silly.

Conway's Law

/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".

The law was named after Melvin Conway, an 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.)

There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: "If a group of N persons
implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone in the group has
to be the manager."

cookbook

/n./ [from amateur electronics and radio] 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 (Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-10179-3), also known as the Blue Book which
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 unknown
languages. This function is analogous to the role of phrasebooks in human
languages.

cooked mode

/n./ [Unix, by opposition from raw mode] The normal character-input mode,
with interrupts enabled and with erase, kill and other special-character
interpretations performed directly by the tty driver. Oppose raw mode, rare
mode. This term is techspeak under Unix but jargon elsewhere; other operating
systems often have similar mode distinctions, and the raw/rare/cooked way of
describing them has spread widely along with the C language and other Unix
exports. Most generally, 'cooked mode' may refer to any mode of a system that
does extensive preprocessing before presenting data to a program.

cookie

/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
only thing it's useful for is to relate a later transaction to this one (so you
get the same clothes back). Compare magic cookie; see also fortune cookie.

cookie bear

/n. obs./ Original term, pre-Sesame-Street, for what is now universally called
a cookie monster. A correspondent observes "In those days, hackers were
actually getting their yucks from...sit down now...Andy Williams. Yes, *that*
Andy Williams. Seems he had a rather hip (by the standards of the day) TV
variety show. One of the best parts of the show was the recurring 'cookie bear'
sketch. In these sketches, a guy in a bear suit tried all sorts of tricks to get
a cookie out of Williams. The sketches would always end with Williams shrieking
(and I don't mean figuratively), 'No cookies! Not now, not ever...NEVER!!!' And
the bear would fall down. Great stuff."

cookie file

/n./ A collection of fortune cookies in a format that facilitates retrieval

by a fortune program. There are several different cookie files in public
distribution, and site admins often assemble their own from various sources
including this lexicon.

cookie jar

/n./ An area of memory set aside for storing cookies. Most commonly heard in
the Atari ST community; many useful ST programs record their presence by storing
a distinctive magic number in the jar. Programs can inquire after the
presence or otherwise of other programs by searching the contents of the jar.

cookie monster

/n./ [from the children's TV program "Sesame Street"] 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 a batch mainframe), repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". The
required responses ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through "HAVE A COOKIE"
and upward. Folklorist Jan Brunvand (see FOAF) has described these programs
as urban legends (implying they probably never existed) but they existed, all
right, in several different versions. See also wabbit. Interestingly, the
term 'cookie monster' appears to be a retcon; the original term was cookie
bear.

copious free time

/n./ [Apple; orig. fr. the intro to Tom Lehrer's song "It Makes A Fellow Proud
To Be A Soldier"] 1. [used ironically to indicate the speaker's lack of the
quantity in question] A mythical schedule slot for accomplishing tasks held to
be unlikely or impossible. Sometimes used to indicate that the speaker is
interested in accomplishing the task, but believes that the opportunity will not
arise. "I'll implement the automatic layout stuff in my copious free time." 2.
[Archly] Time reserved for bogus or otherwise idiotic tasks, such as
implementation of chrome, or the stroking of suits. "I'll get back to him
on that feature in my copious free time."

copper

/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

/n./ A class of methods for preventing incompetent pirates from stealing

software and legitimate customers from using it. Considered silly.

copybroke

/kop'ee-brohk/ /adj./ 1. [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. 2. Copy-protected
software which is unusable because of some bit-rot or bug that has confused the
anti-piracy check. See also copy protection.

copyleft

/kop'ee-left/ /n./ [play on 'copyright'] 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
General Public Virus). 2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to
achieve similar aims.

copywronged

/kop'ee-rongd/ /adj./ [play on 'copyright'] Syn. for copybroke.

core

/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 idioms are quite current; 'in core', for 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. Some varieties of Commonwealth hackish
prefer store.

core cancer

/n./ A process that exhibits a slow but inexorable resource leak — like a
cancer, it kills by crowding out productive 'tissue'.

core dump

/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
registering extreme shock. "He dumped core. 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 (compare bits, sense 1). Hence, spewing all one
knows about a topic (syn. brain dump), 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). See core.

core leak

/n./ Syn. memory leak.

Core Wars

/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
devised by Victor Vyssotsky, Robert Morris Sr., 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

/korj/ /n./ [originally, the name of a cat] Yet another metasyntactic

variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the GOSMACS
documentation. See grault.

cosmic rays

/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 —
I just got a burst of garbage on my 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 passing through a memory chip can cause single-bit 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 random bit drops
in their early chips, and one 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 rays were causing the bit drops, they should see 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 emissions from thorium (and to a much
lesser degree 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
became obvious that one has to design memories to withstand these hits.

cough and die

/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." Compare
die, die horribly, scream and die.

cowboy
/n./ [Sun, from William Gibson's cyberpunk SF] Synonym for hacker. It is
reported that at Sun this word is often said with reverence.

CP/M

: /C-P-M/ /n./ [Control Program/Monitor; later retconned to 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 PC in 1981. Legend has it that
Kildall's 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
strongly resemble those of early DEC operating systems such as TOPS-10,
OS/8, RSTS, and RSX-11. See MS-DOS, operating system.

CPU Wars

/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).
This rather transparent allegory featured 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 company stationery from the head of IBM's Thomas
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.

crack root

/v./ To defeat the security system of a Unix machine and gain root privileges
thereby; see cracking.

cracker

/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 failure.

Use of both these neologisms reflects a strong revulsion against the theft and
vandalism perpetrated by cracking rings. While it is expected that any real
hacker will have done some playful cracking and knows many of the basic
techniques, anyone past larval stage is expected to have outgrown the desire
to do so except for immediate, benign, practical reasons (for example, if it's
necessary to get around some security in order to get some work done).

Thus, there is far less overlap between hackerdom and crackerdom than the
mundane reader misled by sensationalistic journalism might expect. Crackers
tend to gather in small, tight-knit, very secretive groups that have little
overlap with the huge, open poly-culture this lexicon describes; though crackers
often like to describe *themselves* as hackers, most true hackers consider them
a separate and lower form of life.

Ethical considerations aside, hackers figure that anyone who can't imagine a
more interesting way to play with their computers than breaking into someone
else's has to be pretty losing. Some other reasons crackers are looked down
on are discussed in the entries on cracking and phreaking. See also
samurai, dark-side hacker, and hacker ethic. For a portrait of the
typical teenage cracker, see warez d00dz.
cracking

/n./ The act of breaking into a computer system; what a cracker does.
Contrary to widespread myth, this does not usually involve some mysterious leap
of hackerly brilliance, but rather persistence and the dogged repetition of a
handful of fairly well-known tricks that exploit common weaknesses in the
security of target systems. Accordingly, most crackers are only mediocre
hackers.

crank

/vt./ [from automotive slang] 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."

C*ApTeX

/krap'tekh/ /n./ [University of York, England] Term of abuse used to describe

TeX and LaTeX when they don't work (when used by TeXhackers), or all the time
(by everyone else). The non-TeX-enthusiasts generally dislike it because it is
more verbose than other formatters (e.g. troff) and because (particularly if
the standard Computer Modern fonts are used) it generates vast output files.
See religious issues, TeX.

crash

1. /n./ A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system
(q.v., sense 1), esp. of magnetic disk drives (the term originally described
what happens when the air gap of a hard disk collapses). "Three lusers lost
their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash that involves the
read/write heads dropping onto the surface of the disks 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 system just crashed?"
"Something crashed the 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 long hacking run; see gronk out.

crash and burn

/vi.,n./ A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car-chase

scene in the movie "Bullitt" and many subsequent imitators (compare die
horribly). Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes
on VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. 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 that
machine crashed, since only the testers would be inconvenienced.

crawling horror

/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
but an active menace to health and sanity. "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

/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 Cray, a noted computer
architect and 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

/n./ 1. 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 on a
workstation or mini. 2. More specifically, a shortcoming of algorithms which
are well behaved when run on gentle floating point hardware (such as
IEEE-standard or DEC) but which break down badly when exposed to a Cray's unique
'rounding' rules.

crayola

/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.

crayola books

/n./ The rainbow series of National Computer Security Center (NCSC) computer
security standards (see Orange Book). Usage: humorous and/or disparaging.

crayon

/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
background tend not to be described as crayons. 2. 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 usage that
derives from an old Crayola crayon promotional gimmick: When you buy 64 crayons
you get a free sharpener.

creationism

/n./ The (false) belief that large, innovative software 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 shown repeatedly that good designs arise 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. Unfortunately, because these truths
don't fit the planning models beloved of management, they are generally
ignored.

creep

/v./ To advance, grow, or multiply inexorably. In hackish usage this verb has
overtones of menace and silliness, evoking the creeping horrors of low-budget
monster movies.

creeping elegance

/n./ Describes a tendency for parts of a design to become elegant past the
point of diminishing return, something which often happens at the expense of the
less interesting parts of the design, the schedule, and other things deemed
important in the Real World. See also creeping featurism, second-system
effect, tense.

creeping featurism

/kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ /n./ 1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more

chrome and features onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they
may have possessed when originally designed. See also feeping creaturism.
"You know, the main problem with 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 too". (See feature.) The result is usually 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.... When creeping featurism gets out of hand,
it's 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 redesigns; see
second-system effect. See also creeping elegance.

creeping featuritis

/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, as opposed to
the lurking general tendency in designers' minds. (After all, -ism means
'condition' or 'pursuit of', whereas -itis usually means 'inflammation of'.)

cretin

/kret'in/ 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 /kret'in/ over standard American
/kree'tn/; it is thought this may be due to the insidious phonetic influence of
Monty Python's Flying Circus.

cretinous

/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 losing,
brain-damaged.

crippleware

/n./ 1. Software that has some important functionality deliberately removed, so

as to entice potential users to pay for a working version. 2. [Cambridge]
Variety of guiltware that exhorts you to donate to some charity (compare
careware, nagware). 3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be
upgraded to a more expensive model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper).

An excellent example of crippleware (sense 3) is Intel's 486SX chip, which is a

standard 486DX chip with the co-processor dyked out (in some early versions it
was present but disabled). To upgrade, you buy a complete 486DX chip with
*working* co-processor (its identity thinly veiled by a different pinout) and
plug it into the board's expansion socket. It then disables the SX, which
becomes a fancy power sink. Don't you love Intel?

critical mass

/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. (This malady has
many causes: creeping featurism, ports to too many disparate environments,
poor initial design, etc.) When software achieves critical mass, it can never
be fixed; it can only be discarded and rewritten.

crlf

/ker'l*f/, sometimes /kru'l*f/ or /C-R-L-F/ /n./ (often capitalized as 'CRLF')

A carriage return (CR, ASCII 0001101) followed by a line feed (LF, ASCII
0001010). More loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the end of one line
of text to the beginning of the next line. See newline, terpri. Under
Unix influence this usage has become less common (Unix uses a bare line feed
as its 'CRLF').

crock

/n./ [from the American scatologism 'crock of s***'] 1. An awkward feature or

programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. For example, using small
integers to represent error codes without the program interpreting them to the
user (as in, for example, Unix 'make(1)', which returns code 139 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, a too-clever
programmer might write an assembler which mapped instruction mnemonics to
numeric opcodes algorithmically, a trick which depends far too intimately on the
particular bit patterns of the opcodes. (For another example of programming
with a dependence on actual opcode values, see The Story of Mel, a Real
Programmer in Appendix A.) Many crocks have a tightly woven, almost completely
unmodifiable structure. See kluge, brittle. The adjectives 'crockish' and
'crocky', and the nouns 'crockishness' and 'crockitude', are also used.

cross-post

[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 (which is very bad form). Gratuitous
cross-posting without a Followup-To 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

/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
crudware!"

cruft

/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 construction. 3. /vt./ [from 'hand cruft', 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; used esp. of redundant or
superseded code. 5. [University of Wisconsin] /n./ Cruft is to hackers as
gaggle is to geese; that is, at UW one properly says "a cruft of hackers".

cruft together

/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 together in
about 10 minutes." See hack together, hack up, kluge up, crufty.

cruftsmanship

/kruhfts'm*n-ship / /n./ [from cruft] The antithesis of craftsmanship.

crufty

/kruhf'tee/ /adj./ [origin unknown; poss. from 'crusty' or 'cruddy'] 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'
holds that was originally a mutation of '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 butter and catsup. 3. Generally unpleasant. 4.
(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)."

This term is one of the oldest in the jargon and no one is sure of its
etymology, but it is suggestive that there is a Cruft Hall at Harvard University
which is part of the old physics building; it's said to have been the physics
department's radar lab during WWII. To this day (early 1993) the windows appear
to be full of random techno-junk. MIT or Lincoln Labs people may well have
coined the term as a knock on the competition.

crumb

/n./ Two binary digits; a quad. Larger than a bit, smaller than a
nybble. Considered silly. Syn. tayste. General discussion of such terms is
under nybble.

crunch

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
1,000,000,000. "FORTRAN programs do mostly 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 something like a paper document would if
somebody crunched the paper into a 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 it from number-crunching.) See compress. 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 a
famous program on the BBC micro that 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

/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 (sense 3).

cryppie

/krip'ee/ /n./ A cryptographer. One who hacks or implements cryptographic

software or hardware.

CTSS

/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)
was a hack on CTSS, meant both as a joke and to express some basic differences
in philosophy about the way I/O services should be presented to user programs.

CTY

/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
less common, as most Unix hackers simply refer to the CTY as 'the console'.

cube

/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

/vi./ [parallel with 'tubing'] 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 form of self-torture (see sense 1 or 2).

cursor dipped in X

/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 moves, leaving
letters behind, when one is composing on-line). "Talk about a nastygram! He
must've had his cursor dipped in acid when he wrote that one!"

cuspy

/kuhs'pee/ /adj./ [WPI: from the DEC abbreviation CUSP, for 'Commonly Used
System Program', i.e., a utility program used by many people] 1. (of a program)
Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program that performs well and
interfaces well to users is cuspy. See rude. 3. [NYU] Said of an attractive
woman, especially one regarded as available. Implies a certain curvaceousness.
cut a tape

/vi./ To write a software or document distribution on magnetic tape for

shipment. Has nothing to do with physically cutting the medium! Early versions
of this lexicon claimed that one never analogously speaks of 'cutting a disk',
but this has since been reported as live usage. Related slang usages are
mainstream business's 'cut a check', the recording industry's 'cut a record',
and the military's 'cut an order'.

All of these usages reflect physical processes in obsolete recording and

duplication technologies. The first stage in manufacturing an old-style vinyl
record involved cutting grooves in a stamping die with a precision lathe. More
mundanely, the dominant technology for mass duplication of paper documents in
pre-photocopying days involved "cutting a stencil", punching away portions of
the wax overlay on a silk screen. More directly, paper tape with holes punched
in it was an important early storage medium.

cybercrud

/si:'ber-kruhd/ /n./ 1. [coined by Ted Nelson] Obfuscatory tech-talk. Verbiage

with a high MEGO factor. The computer equivalent of bureaucratese. 2.
Incomprehensible stuff embedded in email. First there were the "Received"
headers that show how mail flows through systems, then MIME (Multi-purpose
Internet Mail Extensions) headers and part boundaries, and now huge blocks of
hex for PEM (Privacy Enhanced Mail) or PGP (Pretty Good Privacy) digital
signatures and certificates of authenticity. This stuff all services a purpose
and good user interfaces should hide it, but all too often users are forced to
wade through it.

cyberpunk

/si:'ber-puhnk/ /n.,adj./ [orig. by SF writer Bruce Bethke and/or editor

Gardner Dozois] 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 Names" (see the Bibliography in Appendix C) to John 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 found both irritatingly na"ive
and tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by
the short-lived but innovative "Max Headroom" TV series. See cyberspace, ice,
jack in, go flatline.

Since 1990 or so, popular culture has included a movement or fashion trend that
calls itself 'cyberpunk', associated especially with the rave/techno subculture.
Hackers have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, self-described
cyberpunks too often seem to be shallow trendoids in black leather who have
substituted enthusiastic blathering about technology for actually learning and
*doing* it. Attitude is no substitute for competence. On the other hand, at
least cyberpunks are excited about the right things and properly respectful of
hacking talent in those who have it. The general consensus is to tolerate them
politely in hopes that they'll attract people who grow into being true hackers.

cyberspace

/si:'br-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. Serious efforts to construct virtual
reality interfaces modeled explicitly on Gibsonian cyberspace are under way,
using more conventional devices such as glove sensors and binocular TV headsets.
Few hackers are prepared to deny outright the possibility of a cyberspace
someday evolving out of the network (see network, the). 2. The Internet or
Matrix (sense #2) as a whole, considered as a crude cyberspace (sense 1).
Although this usage became widely popular in the mainstream press during 1994
when the Internet exploded into public awareness, it is strongly deprecated
among hackers because the Internet does not meet the high, SF-inspired standards
they have for true cyberspace technology. Thus, this use of the term usually
tags a wannabee or outsider. 3. 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 from
multiple sources suggest that there are 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 lines and angles, or moire patterns.

cycle

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 its
memory once on every clock cycle, and so 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 up among the users. The more cycles
the 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
notional unit of *human* thought power, 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 (sense 4), 120 reset; from the phrase 'cycle
power'. "Cycle the machine again, that serial port's still hung."

cycle crunch

/n./ A situation wherein the number of people trying to use a 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
scenario is an inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing.
Usually the only solution is to buy more computer. Happily, this has rapidly
become easier since the mid-1980s, so much so that the very term 'cycle crunch'
now has a faintly archaic flavor; most hackers now use workstations or personal
computers as opposed to traditional timesharing systems.

cycle drought

/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
only half the usual amount of memory. There will be a cycle drought until it's
fixed."

cycle of reincarnation

/n./ [coined in a paper by T. H. Myer and I.E. Sutherland "On the Design of
Display Processors", Comm. ACM, Vol. 11, no. 6, June 1968)] 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
evolves toward more computing power as it does 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 iterations of this cycle have been observed in 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 theological idea. See also blitter, bit bang.

cycle server

/n./ A powerful machine that exists primarily for running large compute-,
disk-, or memory-intensive jobs. Implies that interactive tasks such as editing
are done on other machines on the network, such as workstations.

cypherpunk

/n./ [from cyberpunk] Someone interested in the uses of encryption via

electronic ciphers for enhancing personal privacy and guarding against tyranny
by centralized, authoritarian power structures, especially government. There is
an active cypherpunks mailing list at [email protected] coordinating
work on public-key encryption freeware, privacy, and digital cash. See also
tentacle.

D. C. Power Lab

/n./ The former site of SAIL. Hackers thought this was very funny because
the obvious connection to electrical engineering was nonexistent — the lab was
named for a Donald C. Power. Compare Marginal Hacks.

daemon

/day'mn/ or /dee'mn/ /n./ [from the mythological meaning, later rationalized as

the acronym 'Disk And Execution MONitor'] A program that is not invoked
explicitly, but lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. The idea
is that the perpetrator of the condition need 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 invoke the spooling daemon, which would then
print the file. The advantage is that programs wanting (in this example) files
printed need neither compete for access to nor understand any idiosyncrasies of
the LPT. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide
what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system,
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 pronounced it /dee'mon/) and used it to refer to what ITS called a
dragon. Although the meaning and the pronunciation have drifted, we think
this glossary reflects current (1996) usage.

daemon book

/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, ISBN 0-201-06196-1) — the standard
reference book on the internals of BSD Unix. So called 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). Also known as the Devil Book.

dahmum
/dah'mum/ /n./ [Usenet] The material of which protracted flame wars,
especially those about operating systems, is composed. Homeomorphic to spam.
The term 'dahmum' is derived from the name of a militant OS/2 advocate, and
originated when an extensively crossposted OS/2-versus-Linux debate was fed
through Dissociated Press.

dangling pointer

/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 happens because it formerly pointed to something that has moved or
disappeared. Used as jargon in a generalization 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. Compare dead link.

dark-side hacker

/n./ A criminal or malicious hacker; a cracker. From George Lucas's Darth

Vader, "seduced by the dark side of the Force". The implication that hackers
form a sort of elite of technological Jedi Knights is intended. Oppose
samurai.

Datamation

/day`t*-may'sh*n/ /n./ A magazine that many hackers assume all suits read.
Used to question an unbelieved quote, as in "Did you read that in 'Datamation?'"
(But see below; this slur may be dated by the time you read this.) It used to
publish something hackishly funny every once in a while, like the original paper
on COME FROM in 1973, and Ed Post's "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" ten
years later, but for a long time after that it was much more exclusively
suit-oriented and boring. Following a change of editorship in 1994,
Datamation is trying for more of the technical content and irreverent humor that
marked its early days.

Datamation now has a WWW page at http://www.datamation.com worth visiting for

its selection of computer humor, including "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal"
and the 'Bastard Operator From Hell' stories by Simon Travaglia (see BOFH).

DAU

/dow/ [German FidoNet] /n./ German acronym for D"ummster Anzunehmender User
(stupidest imaginable user). From the engineering-slang GAU for Gr"osster
Anzunehmender Unfall, worst assumable accident, esp. of a LNG tank farm plant or
something with similarly disastrous consequences. In popular German, GAU is
used only to refer to worst-case nuclear acidents such as a core meltdown. See
cretin, fool, loser and weasel.

day mode

/n./ See phase (sense 1). Used of people only.

dd

/dee-dee/ /vt./ [Unix: from IBM JCL] Equivalent to cat or BLT.

Originally the name of a Unix copy command with special options suitable for
block-oriented devices; it was often used in heavy-handed system maintenance, as
in "Let's 'dd' the root partition onto a tape, then use 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 an
elaborate DD 'Dataset Definition' specification for I/O devices); though the
command filled a need, the interface design was clearly a prank. 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). The term has been displaced by BLT or simple English 'copy'.

DDT

/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,
having been widely displaced by 'debugger' or names of individual programs like
'adb', 'sdb', 'dbx', or 'gdb'. 2. [ITS] Under MIT's fabled ITS operating
system, DDT (running under the alias HACTRN, a six-letterism for 'Hack
Translator') was also used as the shell or top level command language used to
execute other programs. 3. Any one of several 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 that illuminates the
origin of the term:

Historical footnote: DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1 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. Since media
other than tape are now frequently used, the more descriptive name "Dynamic
Debugging Technique" has been adopted, retaining the DDT abbreviation.
Confusion between DDT-10 and another well known pesticide,
dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (C14-H9-Cl5) should be minimal since each
attacks a different, and apparently mutually exclusive, class of bugs.

(The 'tape' referred to was, incidentally, not magnetic but paper.) Sadly, this
quotation was removed from later editions of the handbook after the suits took
over and DEC became much more 'businesslike'.

The history above is known to many old-time hackers. But there's more: Peter
Samson, compiler of the original TMRC lexicon, reports that he named 'DDT'
after a similar tool on the TX-0 computer, the direct ancestor of the PDP-1
built at MIT's Lincoln Lab in 1957. The debugger on that ground-breaking
machine (the first transistorized computer) rejoiced in the name FLIT
(FLexowriter Interrogation Tape).

de-rezz

/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 person
who seems to have suddenly 'fuzzed out' 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./ The Macintosh resource decompiler. On a Macintosh, many program
structures (including the code itself) are managed in small segments of the
program file known as 'resources'; 'Rez' and 'DeRez' are a pair of utilities for
compiling and decompiling resource files. Thus, decompiling a resource is
'derezzing'. Usage: very common.

dead

/adj./ 1. Non-functional; down; crashed. Especially used of hardware. 2.

At XEROX PARC, software that is working but not undergoing continued development
and support. 3. Useless; inaccessible. Antonym: 'live'. Compare dead code.

dead code
/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
presence of dead code may reveal either logical 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. (Sometimes it simply means that an
*extremely* defensive programmer has inserted can't happen tests which really
can't happen — yet.) Syn. grunge. See also dead, and The Story of Mel, a
Real Programmer.

dead link

/n./ [WWW] A World-Wide-Web URL that no longer points to the information it was
written to reach. Usually this happens because the document has been moved or
deleted. Lots of dead links make a WWW page frustrating and useless and are the
#1 sign of poor page maintainance. Compare dangling pointer.

DEADBEEF

/ded-beef/ /n./ The hexadecimal word-fill pattern for freshly allocated memory
(decimal -21524111) under a number of IBM environments, including the RS/6000.
Some modern debugging tools deliberately fill freed memory with this value as a
way of converting heisenbugs into Bohr bugs. As in "Your program is
DEADBEEF" (meaning gone, aborted, flushed from memory); if you start from an odd
half-word boundary, of course, you have BEEFDEAD. See also the anecdote under
fool.

deadlock

/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 waiting
for output from the server before sending 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 deadlock', though the term 'starvation' is more
properly used for situations where a program can never run simply because it
never gets high enough priority. Another common flavor is 'constipation', in
which each process is trying to send stuff to the other but all buffers are full
because nobody is reading anything.) 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 to side without making any progress because they
always move the same way at the same time.

deadly embrace

/n./ Same as deadlock, though usually used only when exactly two processes
are involved. This is the more popular term in Europe, while deadlock
predominates in the United States.

death code

/n./ A routine whose job is to set everything in the computer — registers,

memory, flags, everything — to zero, including that portion of memory where it
is running; its last act is to stomp on its own "store zero" instruction. Death
code isn't very useful, but writing it is an interesting hacking challenge on
architectures where the instruction set makes it possible, such as the PDP-8 (it
has also been done on the DG Nova).
Perhaps the ultimate death code is on the TI 990 series, where all registers are
actually in RAM, and the instruction "store immediate 0" has the opcode "0". The
PC will immediately wrap around core as many times as it can until a user hits
HALT. Any empty memory location is death code. Worse, the manufacturer
recommended use of this instruction in startup code (which would be in ROM and
therefore survive).

Death Square

/n./ The corporate logo of Novell, the people who acquired USL after AT T
let go of it (Novell eventually sold the Unix group to SCO). Coined by analogy
with Death Star, because many people believed Novell was bungling the lead in
Unix systems exactly as AT T did for many years.

Death Star

/n./ [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,
who tend to regard the AT T versions as 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 magazine, "Focus", uses 'death star'
to describe an 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

: /dek/ /n./ Commonly used abbreviation for Digital Equipment Corporation,

now deprecated by DEC itself in favor of "Digital". Before the killer micro
revolution of the late 1980s, hackerdom was closely symbiotic with DEC's
pioneering timesharing machines. The first of the group of cultures described
by this lexicon nucleated around the PDP-1 (see TMRC). Subsequently, the
PDP-6, PDP-10, PDP-20, PDP-11 and VAX were all foci of large and important
hackerdoms, and DEC machines long dominated the ARPANET and Internet machine
population. DEC was the technological leader of the minicomputer era (roughly
1967 to 1987), but its failure to embrace microcomputers and Unix early cost it
heavily in profits and prestige after silicon got cheap. Nevertheless, the
microprocessor design tradition owes a heavy debt to the PDP-11 instruction set,
and every one of the major general-purpose microcomputer OSs so far (CP/M,
MS-DOS, Unix, OS/2, Windows NT) was either genetically descended from a DEC OS,
or incubated on DEC hardware, or both. Accordingly, DEC is still regarded with
a certain wry affection even among many hackers too young to have grown up on
DEC machines. The contrast with IBM is instructive.

[1996 update: DEC has gradually been reclaiming some of its old reputation among
techies in the last five years. The success of the Alpha, an
innovatively-designed and very high-performance killer micro, has helped a
lot. So has DEC's newfound receptiveness to Unix and open systems in general.
— ESR]

dec

/dek/ /v./ Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand for decrement, i.e.
'decrease by one'. Especially used by assembly programmers, as many assembly
languages have a 'dec' mnemonic. Antonym: inc.
DEC Wars

/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-times-longer complete rewrite called "Unix WARS"; the two are often confused.

decay

/n.,vi/ [from nuclear physics] An automatic conversion which is applied to most

array-valued expressions in C; they 'decay into' pointer-valued expressions
pointing to the array's first element. This term is borderline techspeak, but
is not used in the official standard for the language.

DEChead

/dek'hed/ /n./ 1. A DEC field servoid. Not flattering. 2. [from

'deadhead'] A Grateful Dead fan working at DEC.

deckle

/dek'l/ /n./ [from dec- and nybble; the original spelling seems to have been
'decle'] Two nickles; 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. See nybble for other such terms.

DED

/D-E-D/ /n./ Dark-Emitting Diode (that is, a burned-out LED). Compare SED,
LER, write-only memory. In the early 1970s both Signetics and Texas
instruments released DED spec sheets as AFJs (suggested uses included "as a
power-off indicator").

deep hack mode

/n./ See hack mode.

deep magic

/n./ [poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] An awesomely arcane technique

central to a program or system, esp. one neither generally published nor
available to hackers at large (compare black art); one that could only have
been composed by a true wizard. Compiler 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 "Deep magic begins here...". Compare voodoo
programming.

deep space

/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 gotten
a prompt ten seconds ago. The program's 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 coherently to normal communication. Compare page
out.
defenestration

/n./ [from the traditional Czechoslovakian method of assassinating prime

ministers, via SF fandom] 1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible
punster. "Oh, ghod, that was *awful*!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" 2. The act
of exiting a window system in order to get 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 improve matters. "I don't have any disk space
left." "Well, why don't you defenestrate that 100 megs worth of old core dumps?"
4. Under a GUI, the act of dragging something out of a window (onto the screen).
"Next, defenestrate the MugWump icon." 5. [proposed] The requirement to support a
command-line interface. "It has to run on a VT100." "Curses! I've been
defenestrated!"

defined as

/adj./ In the role of, usually in an organization-chart sense. "Pete is

currently defined as bug prioritizer." Compare logical.

dehose

/dee-hohz/ /vt./ To clear a hosed condition.

delint

/dee-lint/ /v. obs./ To modify code to remove problems detected when linting.
Confusingly, this process is also referred to as 'linting' code. This term is
no longer in general use because ANSI C compilers typically issue compile-time
warnings almost as detailed as lint warnings.

delta

/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." (He
doubled the speed of his program, but 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 not as small as epsilon. The jargon usage of
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 is
often used, once epsilon has been 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 constructions include 'within delta of —',
'within epsilon of —': that is, 'close to' and 'even closer to'.

demented

/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
error messages, implying that it is on the brink of imminent collapse. Compare
wonky, bozotic.

demigod
/n./ A hacker with years of experience, a world-wide 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
person must recognizably identify with the hacker community and have helped
shape it. Major demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie (co-inventors
of Unix and C), Richard M. Stallman (inventor of EMACS), Linus Torvalds
(inventor of Linux), and most recently James Gosling (inventor of Java). In
their hearts of hearts, most hackers dream of someday becoming demigods
themselves, and 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

/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 demoing. "I've gotta give a demo of the drool-proof interface; how
does it work again?" 3. /n./ Esp. as 'demo version', can refer either to an
early, barely-functional version of a program which can be used for
demonstration purposes as long as the operator uses *exactly* the right commands
and skirts its numerous bugs, deficiencies, and unimplemented portions, or to a
special version of a program (frequently with some features crippled) which is
distributed at little or no cost to the user for enticement purposes.

demo mode

/n./ 1. [Sun] 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 by
themselves running through a portion of the game, also known as 'attract mode'.
Some serious apps have a demo mode 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

/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 usually programs running on an operating system. 2. [outside MIT] Often
used equivalently to daemon — especially in the Unix world, where the
latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic.

Demons in sense 1 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 demons depends on the particular piece of data) 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. Meanwhile, the main program
could continue with whatever its primary task was.

demon dialer

/n./ A program which repeatedly calls the same telephone number. Demon dialing
may be benign (as when a number of communications programs contend for
legitimate access to a BBS line) or malign (that is, used as a prank or
denial-of-service attack). This term dates from the blue box days of the
1970s and early 1980s and is now semi-obsolescent among phreakers; see war
dialer for its contemporary progeny.
depeditate

/dee-ped'*-tayt/ /n./ [by (faulty) analogy with 'decapitate'] 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 result in
chopped-off letter descenders. Such letters are said to have been depeditated.

deprecated

/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. This term
appears with distressing frequency in standards documents when the committees
writing the documents realize that large amounts of extant (and presumably
happily working) code depend on the feature(s) that have passed out of favor.
See also dusty deck.

derf

/derf/ /v.,n./ [PLATO] The act of exploiting a terminal which someone else has
absentmindedly left logged on, to use that person's account, especially to post
articles intended to make an ass of the victim you're impersonating.

deserves to lose

/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 use
mess-dos deserves to lose!" (ITS fans used to say the same thing of
Unix; many still do.) See also screw, chomp, bagbiter.

desk check

/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 some
maintain stoutly that it ought to be. Compare eyeball search, vdiff,
vgrep.

despew

/d*-spyoo'/ /v./ [Usenet] To automatically generate a large amount of garbage

to the net, esp. from an automated posting program gone wild. See ARMM.

Devil Book

/n./ See daemon book, the term preferred by its authors.

dickless workstation

/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
disadvantages of time-sharing with all the disadvantages of distributed personal
computers; typically, they cannot even boot themselves without help (in the
form of some kind of breath-of-life packet) from the server.
dictionary flame

/n./ [Usenet] An attempt to sidetrack a debate away from issues by insisting on

meanings for key terms that presuppose a desired conclusion or smuggle in an
implicit premise. A common tactic of people who prefer argument over definitions
to disputes about reality. Compare spelling flame.

diddle

1. /vt./ To work with or modify in a not particularly serious manner. "I

diddled a copy of ADVENT so it didn't double-space all the time." "Let's
diddle this piece of code and see if the problem goes away." See tweak and
twiddle. 2. /n./ The action or result of diddling. See also tweak,
twiddle, frob.

die

/v./ Syn. crash. Unlike crash, which is used primarily of hardware, this
verb is used of both hardware and software. See also go flatline, casters-up
mode.

die horribly

/v./ The software equivalent of crash and burn, and the preferred emphatic
form of die. "The converter choked on an FF in its input and died horribly".

diff

/dif/ /n./ 1. A change listing, especially giving differences between (and

additions to) source code or documents (the term is often used in the plural
'diffs'). "Send me your diffs for the Jargon File!" Compare vdiff. 2.
Specifically, such a listing produced by the 'diff(1)' command, esp. when used
as specification input to the 'patch(1)' utility (which can actually perform the
modifications; see patch). This is a common method of distributing patches
and source updates in the Unix/C world. 3. /v./ To compare (whether or not by
use of automated tools on machine-readable files); see also vdiff, mod.

digit

/n./ An employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. See also VAX, VMS,

PDP-10, TOPS-10, DEChead, double DECkers, field circus.

dike

/vt./ To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a computer or

a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is "When in doubt, dike it out".
(The implication is that it is usually more effective to attack software
problems by reducing complexity than by increasing it.) The word 'dikes' is
widely used among mechanics and engineers to mean 'diagonal cutters', esp. the
heavy-duty metal-cutting version, but may also refer to a kind of wire-cutters
used by electronics techs. To 'dike something out' means to use such cutters to
remove something. Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as "to attack with
dikes". Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended to
informational objects such as sections of code.

Dilbert

/n./ Name and title character of a comic strip nationally syndicated in the
U.S. and enormously popular among hackers. Dilbert is an archetypical
engineer-nerd who works at an anonymous high-technology company; the strips
present a lacerating satire of insane working conditions and idiotic
management practices all too readily recognized by hackers. Adams, who spent
nine years in cube 4S700R at Pacific Bell (not DEC as often reported), often
remarks that he has never been able to come up with a fictional management
blunder that his correspondents didn't quickly either report to have actually
happened or top with a similar but even more bizarre incident. In 1996 Adams
distilled his insights into the collective psychology of businesses into an even
funnier book, "The Dilbert Principle" (HarperCollins, ISBN 0-887-30787-6). See
also rat dance.

ding

/n.,vi./ 1. Synonym for feep. Usage: rare among hackers, but commoner in the
Real World. 2. 'dinged': What happens when someone in authority gives you a
minor bitching about something, esp. something trivial. "I was dinged for
having a messy desk."

dink

/dink/ /adj./ Said of a machine that has the bitty box nature; a machine too
small to be worth bothering with — sometimes the system you're currently
forced to work on. First heard from an MIT hacker working on a CP/M system with
64K, in reference to any 6502 system, then from fans of 32-bit architectures
about 16-bit machines. "GNUMACS will never work on that dink machine."
Probably derived from mainstream 'dinky', which isn't sufficiently pejorative.
See macdink.

dinosaur

/n./ 1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power. Used
especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer
microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from the 1988 Unix EXPO, Bill
Joy compared the liquid-cooled mainframe in the massive IBM display with a
grazing dinosaur "with a truck outside pumping its bodily fluids through it".
IBM was not amused. Compare big iron; see also mainframe. 2. [IBM] A very
conservative user; a zipperhead.

dinosaur pen

/n./ A traditional mainframe computer room complete with raised flooring,

special power, its own ultra-heavy-duty air conditioning, and a side order of
Halon fire extinguishers. See boa.

dinosaurs mating

/n./ Said to occur when yet another big iron merger or buyout occurs;
reflects a perception by hackers that these signal another stage in the long,
slow dying of the mainframe industry. In its glory days of the 1960s, it was
'IBM and the Seven Dwarves': Burroughs, Control Data, General Electric,
Honeywell, NCR, RCA, and Univac. RCA and GE sold out early, and it was 'IBM and
the Bunch' (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data, and Honeywell) for a while.
Honeywell was bought out by Bull; Burroughs merged with Univac to form Unisys
(in 1984 — this was when the phrase 'dinosaurs mating' was coined); and in
1991 AT T absorbed NCR. More such earth-shaking unions of doomed giants
seem inevitable.

dirtball

/n./ [XEROX PARC] A small, perhaps struggling outsider; not in the major or
even the minor leagues. For example, "Xerox is not a dirtball company".

[Outsiders often observe in the PARC culture an institutional arrogance which

usage of this term exemplifies. The brilliance and scope of PARC's
contributions to computer science have been such that this superior attitude is
not much resented. — ESR]

dirty power

/n./ Electrical mains voltage that is unfriendly to the delicate innards of

computers. Spikes, drop-outs, average voltage significantly higher or lower
than nominal, or just plain noise can all cause problems of varying subtlety and
severity (these are collectively known as power hits).

disclaimer

/n./ [Usenet] Statement ritually appended to many Usenet postings (sometimes

automatically, by the posting software) reiterating the fact (which should be
obvious, but is easily forgotten) that the article reflects its author's
opinions and not necessarily those of the organization running the machine
through which the article entered the network.

Discordianism

/dis-kor'di-*n-ism/ /n./ The veneration of Eris, a.k.a. Discordia; widely

popular among hackers. Discordianism was popularized by Robert Shea and Robert
Anton Wilson's novel "Illuminatus!" as a sort of self-subverting Dada-Zen for
Westerners — it should on no account be taken seriously but is far more serious
than most jokes. Consider, for example, the Fifth Commandment of the Pentabarf,
from "Principia Discordia": "A Discordian is Prohibited of Believing What he
Reads." Discordianism is usually connected with an elaborate conspiracy
theory/joke involving millennia-long warfare between the anarcho-surrealist
partisans of Eris and a malevolent, authoritarian secret society called the
Illuminati. See Religion in Appendix B, Church of the SubGenius, and ha ha
only serious.

disk farm

/n./ (also laundromat) A large room or rooms filled with disk drives (esp.
washing machines).

display hack

/n./ A program with the same approximate purpose as a kaleidoscope: to make

pretty pictures. Famous display hacks include munching squares, smoking
clover, the BSD Unix 'rain(6)' program, 'worms(6)' on miscellaneous Unixes, and
the X 'kaleid(1)' program. Display hacks can also be implemented without
programming by creating text files containing numerous escape sequences for
interpretation by a video terminal; one notable example displayed, on any VT100,
a Christmas tree with twinkling lights and a toy train circling its base. The
hack value of a display hack is proportional to the esthetic value of the
images times the cleverness of the algorithm divided by the size of the code.
Syn. psychedelicware.

Dissociated Press

/n./ [play on 'Associated Press'; perhaps inspired by a reference in the 1950

Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Up, Doc?"] An algorithm for transforming any text
into potentially humorous garbage even more efficiently than by passing it
through a marketroid. The algorithm starts by printing any N consecutive
words (or letters) in the text. Then at every step it searches for any random
occurrence in the original text of the last N words (or letters) already printed
and then prints the next word or letter. EMACS has a handy command for this.
Here is a short example of word-based Dissociated Press applied to an earlier
version of this Jargon File:

wart: /n./ A small, crocky feature that sticks out of an array (C has no
checks for this). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the phrase is
bent so as to be not worth paying attention to the medium in question.

Here is a short example of letter-based Dissociated Press applied to the same

source:

window sysIWYG: /n./ A bit was named aften /bee't*/ prefer to use the other
guy's re, especially in every cast a chuckle on neithout getting into useful
informash speech makes removing a featuring a move or usage actual
abstractionsidered /interj./ Indeed spectace logic or problem!

A hackish idle pastime is to apply letter-based Dissociated Press to a random

body of text and vgrep the output in hopes of finding an interesting new word.
(In the preceding example, 'window sysIWYG' and 'informash' show some promise.)
Iterated applications of Dissociated Press usually yield better results.
Similar techniques called 'travesty generators' have been employed with
considerable satirical effect to the utterances of Usenet flamers; see pseudo.

distribution

/n./ 1. A software source tree packaged for distribution; but see kit. 2. A
vague term encompassing mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups (but not BBS
fora); any topic-oriented message channel with multiple recipients. 3. An
information-space domain (usually loosely correlated with geography) to which
propagation of a Usenet message is restricted; a much-underutilized feature.

disusered

/adj./ [Usenet] Said of a person whose account on a computer has been removed,
esp. for cause rather than through normal attrition. "He got disusered when
they found out he'd been cracking through the school's Internet access." The
verbal form 'disuser' is live but less common. Both usages probably derive from
the DISUSER account status flag on VMS; setting it disables the account.
Compare star out.

do protocol

/vi./ [from network protocol programming] To perform an interaction with

somebody or something that follows a clearly defined procedure. For example,
"Let's do protocol with the check" at a restaurant means to ask for the check,
calculate the tip and everybody's share, collect money from everybody, generate
change as necessary, and pay the bill. See protocol.

doc

/dok/ /n./ Common spoken and written shorthand for 'documentation'. Often used
in the plural 'docs' and in the construction 'doc file' (i.e., documentation
available on-line).

documentation

: /n./ The multiple kilograms of macerated, pounded, steamed, bleached, and

pressed trees that accompany most modern software or hardware products (see also
tree-killer). Hackers seldom read paper documentation and (too) often resist
writing it; they prefer theirs to be terse and on-line. A common comment on
this predilection is "You can't grep dead trees". See drool-proof paper,
verbiage, treeware.

dodgy

/adj./ Syn. with flaky. Preferred outside the U.S.

dogcow

/dog'kow/ /n./ See Moof. The dogcow is a semi-legendary creature that lurks
in the depths of the Macintosh Technical Notes Hypercard stack V3.1. The full
story of the dogcow is told in technical note #31 (the particular dogcow
illustrated is properly named '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. Clue: rot13 is involved. A dogcow also appears
if you choose 'Page Setup...' with a LaserWriter selected and click on the
'Options' button.

dogpile

/v./ [Usenet: prob. fr. mainstream "puppy pile"] When many people post
unfriendly responses in short order to a single posting, they are sometimes said
to "dogpile" or "dogpile on" the person to whom they're responding. For
example, when a religious missionary posts a simplistic appeal to alt.atheism,
he can expect to be dogpiled.

dogwash

/dog'wosh/ [From a quip in the 'urgency' field of a very optional software

change request, ca. 1982. It was something like "Urgency: Wash your dog
first".] 1. /n./ A project of minimal priority, undertaken as an escape from
more serious work. 2. /v./ To engage in such a project. Many games and much
freeware get written this way.

domainist

/doh-mayn'ist/ /adj./ 1. [USENET, by pointed analogy with "sexist", "racist",

etc.] Someone who judges people by the domain of their email addresses; esp.
someone who dismisses anyone who posts from a public internet provider. "What do
you expect from an article posted from aol.com?" 2. Said of an Internet
address (as opposed to a bang path) because the part to the right of the '@'
specifies a nested series of 'domains'; for example, [email protected]
specifies the machine called snark in the subdomain called thyrsus within the
top-level domain called com. See also big-endian, sense 2.

The meaning of this term has drifted. At one time sense 2 was primary. In
elder days it was also used of a site, mailer, or routing program which knew how
to handle domainist addresses; or of a person (esp. a site admin) who preferred
domain addressing, supported a domainist mailer, or proselytized for domainist
addressing and disdained bang paths. These senses are now (1996) obsolete, as
effectively all sites have converted.

Don't do that, then!

/imp./ [from an old doctor's office joke about a patient with a trivial
complaint] Stock response to a user complaint. "When I type control-S, the
whole system comes to a halt for thirty seconds." "Don't do that, then!" (or
"So don't do that!"). Compare RTFM.
dongle

/dong'gl/ /n./ 1. A security or copy protection device for commercial

microcomputer programs consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in a
D-25 connector shell, which must be connected to an I/O port of the computer
while the program is run. Programs that use a dongle query the port at startup
and at programmed intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not respond
with the dongle's programmed validation code. Thus, users can make as many
copies of the program as they want but must pay for each dongle. The idea was
clever, but it was initially a failure, as users disliked tying up a serial port
this way. Almost all dongles on the market today (1993) will pass data through
the port and monitor for magic codes (and combinations of status lines) with
minimal if any interference with devices further down the line — this
innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for multiple pieces
of software. The devices are still not widely used, as the industry has moved
away from copy-protection schemes in general. 2. By extension, any physical
electronic key or transferable ID required for a program to function. Common
variations on this theme have used parallel or even joystick ports.
See dongle-disk.

[Note: in early 1992, advertising copy from Rainbow Technologies (a manufacturer

of dongles) included a claim that the word derived from "Don Gall", allegedly
the inventor of the device. The company's receptionist will cheerfully tell you
that the story is a myth invented for the ad copy. Nevertheless, I expect it to
haunt my life as a lexicographer for at least the next ten years. :-( — ESR]

dongle-disk

/don'gl disk/ /n./ A special floppy disk that is required in order to perform
some task. Some contain special coding that allows an application to identify
it uniquely, others *are* special code that does something that
normally-resident programs don't or can't. (For example, AT T's "Unix PC"
would only come up in root mode with a special boot disk.) Also called a 'key
disk'. See dongle.

donuts

/n. obs./ A collective noun for any set of memory bits. This usage is extremely
archaic and may no longer be live jargon; it dates from the days of
ferrite-core memories in which each bit was implemented by a doughnut-shaped
magnetic flip-flop.

doorstop

/n./ Used to describe equipment that is non-functional and halfway expected to

remain so, especially obsolete equipment kept around for political reasons or
ostensibly as a backup. "When we get another Wyse-50 in here, that ADM 3 will
turn into a doorstop." Compare boat anchor.

dot file

[Unix] /n./ A file that is not visible by default to normal directory-browsing

tools (on Unix, files named with a leading dot are, by convention, not normally
presented in directory listings). Many programs define one or more dot files in
which startup or configuration information may be optionally recorded; a user
can customize the program's behavior by creating the appropriate file in the
current or home directory. (Therefore, dot files tend to creep — with every
nontrivial application program defining at least one, a user's home directory
can be filled with scores of dot files, of course without the user's really
being aware of it.) See also profile (sense 1), rc file.
double bucky

/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 typical MIT comment
was that the Stanford 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 keys, and this was eventually done; but a 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 pedals; typing on such a keyboard
would be very 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
0-671-21036-X). These lyrics were written on May 27, 1978, in celebration of the
Stanford keyboard:

Double Bucky

Double bucky, you're the one! You make my keyboard lots of fun.
Double bucky, an additional bit or two: (Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and meta, side by side, Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
Double bucky! Half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!
Oh, I sure wish that I Had a couple of Bits more!
Perhaps a Set of pedals to Make the number of Bits four:
Double double bucky! Double bucky, left and right
OR'd together, outta sight!
Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of Double bucky,
I'm happy I heard of Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!

— The Great Quux (with apologies to Jeffrey Moss)

[This, by the way, is an excellent example of computer filk — ESR] See also
meta bit, cokebottle, and quadruple bucky.

double DECkers

/n./ Used to describe married couples in which both partners work for Digital
Equipment Corporation.

doubled sig

[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 often,
however, it reveals the author's lack of experience in electronic communication.
See B1FF, pseudo.

down

1. /adj./ Not operating. "The up escalator is down" is considered a humorous

thing to say (unless of course you were expecting to use it), 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 computers, this term has passed into
the mainstream; the extension to other kinds of machine is still confined to
techies (e.g. boiler mechanics may speak of a boiler being down). 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 "System going
down in 5 minutes". 3. 'take 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./ sense. See crash; oppose up.

download

/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 ground-to-space communications has its own usage rule for
this term. Space-to-earth transmission is always 'down' and the reverse 'up'
regardless of the relative size of the computers involved. So far the in-space
machines have invariably been smaller; thus the upload/download distinction has
been reversed from its usual sense.

DP

/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

/d*-pib'/ /vt./ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] 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 one last
person to sit in. DPB means 'DePosit Byte', and was the name of a PDP-10
instruction that inserts some bits into the middle of some other bits. Hackish
usage has been kept alive by the Common LISP function of the same name.

DPer

/dee-pee-er/ /n./ Data Processor. Hackers are absolutely amazed that suits
use this term self-referentially. *Computers* process data, not people! See
DP.

dragon

/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
logged in, accumulates load-average statistics, 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 dragon'. Usage: rare outside MIT
— under Unix 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

/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
'complexity of compiler design' and a knight 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. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman;
Addison-Wesley, 1977; 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 gauntlets!) at a terminal showing a video-game representation of the
Red Dragon's head while the rest of the beast extends back in normal space. See
also book titles.

drain

/v./ [IBM] 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

/n./ A condition endemic to some now-obsolete computers and peripherals

(including ASR-33 teletypes and PRIME minicomputers) that results in all
characters having their high (0x80) bit forced on. This of course makes
transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention the
problems these machines have talking with true 8-bit devices.

This term was originally used specifically of PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME)

minicomputers. Folklore has it that PRIME adopted the reversed-8-bit convention
in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine; PRIME old-timers, on the
other hand, claim they inherited the disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's
compatibility requirements and struggled heroically to cure it. Whoever was
responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the most cretinous design
tradeoffs ever made. See meta bit.

DRECNET

/drek'net/ /n./ [from Yiddish/German 'dreck', meaning filth] 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 or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in the
design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also connector
conspiracy.

driver

/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 tape unit. 3. In the TeX world and the computerized typesetting world in
general, a program that translates some device-independent or other common
format to something a real device can actually understand.

droid

/n./ [from 'android', SF terminology for a humanoid robot of essentially

biological (as opposed to mechanical/electronic) construction] A person (esp. a
low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee) exhibiting most of the
following characteristics: (a) naive trust in the wisdom of the parent
organization or 'the system'; (b) a blind-faith propensity to believe obvious
nonsense emitted by authority figures (or computers!); (c) a rule-governed
mentality, one unwilling or unable to look beyond the 'letter of the law' in
exceptional situations; (d) a paralyzing fear of official reprimand or worse if
Procedures are not followed No Matter What; and (e) no interest in doing
anything above or beyond the call of a very narrowly-interpreted duty, or in
particular in fixing that which is broken; an "It's not my job, man" attitude.

Typical droid positions include 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; problems arise when the software has not been properly debugged. The
term 'droid mentality' is also used to describe the mindset behind this
behavior. Compare suit, marketroid; see -oid.

drool-proof paper

/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 paper'.
For example, this is an actual quote from Apple's LaserWriter manual: "Do not
expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame."

drop on the floor

/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 netnews relay
sites that lose messages. See also black hole, bit bucket.

drop-ins

/n./ [prob. by analogy with drop-outs] 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.
Compare drop-outs, sense 2.

drop-outs

/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 (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a
bad connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character
interrupts; see screaming tty). 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

/adj./ (also 'on drugs') 1. Conspicuously stupid, heading toward

brain-damaged. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint. 2. Of
hardware, very slow relative to normal performance.

drum

adj, /n./ Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic media
that were once state-of-the-art storage devices. Under BSD Unix the disk
partition used for swapping is still called '/dev/drum'; this has led to
considerable humor and not a few straight-faced but utterly bogus 'explanations'
getting foisted on newbies. See also "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer"
in Appendix A.

drunk mouse syndrome

/n./ (also 'mouse on drugs') 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 usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse 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. When the steel ball on the mouse had picked 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 and more frequent. Finally,
the mouse was declared 'alcoholic' and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a
CFC ultrasonic bath.

Duff's device

/n./ The most dramatic use yet seen of fall through in C, invented by Tom
Duff when he was at Lucasfilm. Trying to bum all the instructions he could out
of an inner loop that copied data serially onto an output port, he decided to
unroll it. He then realized that the unrolled version could be implemented by
*interlacing* the structures of a switch and a loop:

register n = (count + 7) / 8; /* count 0 assumed */

switch (count % 8) case 0: do *to = *from++;

case 7: *to = *from++; case 6: *to = *from++;
case 5: *to = *from++; case 4: *to = *from++;
case 3: *to = *from++; case 2: *to = *from++;
case 1: *to = *from++; while (--n 0);

Shocking though it appears to all who encounter it for the first time, the
device is actually perfectly valid, legal C. C's default fall through in case
statements has long been its most controversial single feature; Duff observed
that "This code forms some sort of argument in that debate, but I'm not sure
whether it's for or against."

[For maximal obscurity, the outermost pair of braces above could be actually be
removed — GLS]

dumb terminal

/n./ A terminal that is one step above a glass tty, having a minimally
addressable cursor but no on-screen editing or other features normally supported
by a smart terminal. Once upon a time, when glass ttys were common and
addressable cursors were something special, what is now called a dumb terminal
could pass for a smart terminal.

dumbass attack

/duhm'as *-tak'/ /n./ [Purdue] 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

/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 making
it smart. This creates friction. See user-friendly.

dump

/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
runes describing the byte-by-byte state of 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 such tedium uncommon, and the term 'dump' now has a faintly archaic flavor.
2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing installations.

dumpster diving

/dump'-ster di:'-ving/ /n./ 1. The practice of sifting refuse from an office or

technical installation to extract confidential data, especially
security-compromising information (`dumpster' is an Americanism for what is
elsewhere called a 'skip'). Back in AT T's monopoly days, before paper
shredders became common office equipment, phone phreaks (see phreaking) used
to organize regular dumpster runs against phone company plants and offices.
Discarded and damaged copies of AT T internal manuals taught them much. The
technique is still rumored to be a favorite of crackers operating against
careless targets. 2. The practice of raiding the dumpsters behind buildings
where producers and/or consumers of high-tech equipment are located, with the
expectation (usually justified) of finding discarded but still-valuable
equipment to be nursed back to health in some hacker's den. Experienced
dumpster-divers not infrequently accumulate basements full of moldering (but
still potentially useful) cruft.

dup killer

/d[y]oop kill'r/ /n./ [FidoNet] Software that is supposed to detect and delete
duplicates of a message that may have reached the FidoNet system via different
routes.

dup loop

/d[y]oop loop/ (also 'dupe loop') /n./ [FidoNet] An infinite stream of

duplicated, near-identical messages on a FidoNet echo, the only difference
being unique or mangled identification information applied by a faulty or
incorrectly configured system or network gateway, thus rendering dup killers
ineffective. If such a duplicate message 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

/n./ Old software (especially applications) which one is obliged to remain

compatible with, or to maintain (DP types call this 'legacy code', a term
hackers consider smarmy and excessively reverent). The term implies that the
software in question is a holdover from card-punch days. Used esp. when
referring to old scientific and number-crunching software, much of which was
written in FORTRAN and very poorly documented but is believed to be too
expensive to replace. See fossil; compare crawling horror.

DWIM

/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 of the more common errors. See hairy. 3. 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 idiosyncratic to his style, and would often make hash of anyone
else's typos if they were stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus
claimed that the acronym stood for 'Damn Warren's Infernal Machine!'.

In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the command

interpreter used at Xerox PARC. 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 sessions.) It happened that there weren't any 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 or so
files were lost.

The disgruntled victim later 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 also occasionally described as the single 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 Thing); see Right Thing.

dynner

/din'r/ /n./ 32 bits, by analogy with nybble and byte. Usage: rare and
extremely silly. See also playte, tayste, crumb. General discussion of
such terms is under nybble.

earthquake

/n./ [IBM] The ultimate real-world shock test for computer hardware. Hackish
sources at IBM deny the rumor that the Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by
the company to test quality-assurance procedures at its California plants.

Easter egg

/n./ [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in the U.S. and many
parts of Europe] 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 response to some undocumented set of commands 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 more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM,
including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of
music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire development team.

Easter egging

/n./ [IBM] The act of replacing unrelated components 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. See also
the jokes under field circus. Compare shotgun debugging.

eat flaming death

/imp./ A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous CPU Wars

comic; supposedly derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi
propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something
of the sort (however, it is also 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
expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, EBCDIC users!"

EBCDIC

: /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see`dik/, or /eb'k*-dik/ /n./ [abbreviation, Extended

Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] An alleged character set used on IBM
dinosaurs. It exists in at least six mutually incompatible versions, all
featuring such delights as non-contiguous letter sequences 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 punched card code in
the early 1960s and 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 to convert between them is still internally 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

[FidoNet] /n./ A topic group on FidoNet's echomail system. Compare

newsgroup.

eighty-column mind

/n./ [IBM] 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 old joke)
the founder of IBM, will be buried 'face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being
the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 and 1622
card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called "The Last
Bug", the climactic lines of which are as follows:

He died at 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 and loathing, card walloper.

El Camino Bignum

/el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ /n./ The road mundanely called El Camino Real,
running along San Francisco peninsula. It originally extended all the way down
to Mexico City; many portions of the old road are still intact. Navigation on
the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which
defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south in
many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University and so is
familiar to hackers.

The Spanish word 'real' (which has two syllables: /ray-ahl'/) means 'royal'; El
Camino Real is 'the royal road'. In the FORTRAN language, a 'real' quantity is
a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a 'double precision'
quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen
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
Double Precision' — but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of
miles long, he renamed it 'El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck. (See
bignum.) In recent years, the synonym 'El Camino Virtual' has been reported as
an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.

[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was in fact he
— ESR]

elder days

/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 Iron
Age; see also elvish and Great Worm, the.

elegant

/adj./ [from mathematical usage] Combining simplicity, power, and a certain

ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than 'clever', 'winning', or even
cuspy.

The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de Saint-Exup'ery, probably

best known for his classic children's book "The Little Prince", was also an
aircraft designer. He gave us perhaps the best definition of engineering
elegance when he said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when
there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away."

elephantine

/adj./ Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous hogs (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
friendly, but (as in the old joke about being 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 mention of the offending program.
Usage: semi-humorous. Compare 'has the elephant nature' and the somewhat more
pejorative monstrosity. See also second-system effect and baroque.

elevator controller

/n./ An 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 example of a really
stupid, memory-limited 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 sides of several holy wars.

elite

/adj./ Clueful. Plugged-in. One of the cognoscenti. Also used as a general

positive adjective. This term is not actually hacker slang in the strict sense;
it is used primarily by crackers and warez d00dz. Cracker usage is probably
related to a 19200cps modem called the 'Courier Elite' that was widely popular
on pirate boards before the V.32bis standard. A true hacker would be more
likely to use 'wizardly'. Oppose lamer.
ELIZA effect

/*-li:'z* *-fekt'/ /n./ [AI community] 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
just that people associate it with addition. 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 by Joseph Weizenbaum, which
simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing many of the patient's
statements as questions and posing them to the 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 with ELIZA. All this was due to people's
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 Intelligence
system. Compare ad-hockery; see also AI-complete.

elvish

/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
'elvish' languages, this system (which is both visually and phonetically
elegant) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be intrigued by artificial
languages in general). It is traditional for graphics printers, plotters,
window systems, and the like to support a Feanorian typeface as one of their
demo items. See 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

/ee'maks/ /n./ [from Editing MACroS] The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a
programmable text editor with an entire LISP system inside it. It was
originally written by Richard Stallman in TECO under ITS at the MIT AI lab;
AI Memo 554 described it as "an advanced, self-documenting, customizable,
extensible real-time display editor". It has since been reimplemented any
number of times, by various hackers, and versions exist that run under most
major operating systems. Perhaps the most widely used version, also written by
Stallman and now called "GNU EMACS" or GNUMACS, runs principally under Unix.
It includes facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and receive
mail; many hackers spend up to 80% of their tube time inside it. Other
variants include GOSMACS, CCA EMACS, UniPress EMACS, Montgomery EMACS, jove,
epsilon, and MicroEMACS.

Some EMACS versions running under window managers iconify as an overflowing

kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the editor does 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 spoof
expansions include 'Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping', 'Eventually
'malloc()'s All Computer Storage', and 'EMACS Makes A Computer Slow' (see
recursive acronym). See also vi.

email

/ee'mayl/ (also written 'e-mail' and 'E-mail') 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.
Oddly enough, the word 'emailed' is actually listed in the OED; it means
"embossed (with a raised pattern) or perh. arranged in a net or open work". A
use from 1480 is given. The word is probably derived from French ''emaill'e'
(enameled) and related to Old French 'emmaille"ure' (network). A French
correspondent tells us that in modern French, 'email' is a hard enamel obtained
by heating special paints in a furnace; an 'emailleur' (no final e) is a
craftsman who makes email (he generally paints some objects (like, say, jewelry)
and cooks them in a furnace).

There are numerous spelling variants of this word. In Internet traffic up to

1995, 'email' predominates, 'e-mail' runs a not-too-distant second, and 'E-mail'
and 'Email' are a distant third and fourth.

emoticon

/ee-moh'ti-kon/ /n./ An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in

email or news. Although originally intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some
other explicit humor indication) are virtually required under certain
circumstances in high-volume text-only communication forums such as Usenet; the
lack of verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what were intended to be
humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise non-100%-serious comments to be badly
misinterpreted (not always even by newbies), resulting in arguments and flame
wars.

Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are in common use.
These include:

:-) 'smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness, occasionally sarcasm)

:-( 'frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset)

;-) 'half-smiley' (ha ha only serious); also known as 'semi-smiley'

or 'winkey face'.

:-/ 'wry face'

(These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head sideways, to the
left.)

The first two listed are 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 specifically for the happy-face emoticon.

It appears 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 something that would soon pollute all the 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 over the line.

empire

/n./ Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written by

Peter Langston many years ago. Five or six multi-player variants of varying
degrees of sophistication exist, and one single-player version implemented for
both Unix and VMS; the latter is even available as MS-DOS freeware. All are
notoriously addictive.

engine
/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
that does a lot of noisy crunching, such as 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 completely eclipsed by
the modern connotation of 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

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
favorite programming language is at least as readable as English. Usage: 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, brain-damaged SQL with delusions of grandeur. The name permits
marketroids to say "Yes, and you can program our computers in English!" to
ignorant suits without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.

enhancement

/n./ Common 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 effort by declaring the bug itself to be a feature.

ENQ

/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 SYNs representing notional synchronization 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

/E-O-F/ /n./ [abbreviation, 'End Of File'] 1. [techspeak] The out-of-band

value returned by C's sequential character-input functions (and their
equivalents in other environments) when end of file has been reached. This
value is -1 under C libraries postdating V6 Unix, but was originally 0. 2.
[Unix] The keyboard character (usually control-D, the ASCII EOT (End Of
Transmission) character) that is mapped by the terminal driver into an
end-of-file condition. 3. 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 joke, but I
hit EOF pretty fast; all the library had was a JCL manual." See also EOL.

EOL

/E-O-L/ /n./ [End Of Line] 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

/E-O-U/ /n./ The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control character (End Of User)
that would make an ASR-33 Teletype explode on receipt. This construction
parodies the numerous obscure delimiter and control characters left in ASCII
from the days when it was associated more with wire-service 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 as
ridiculous as it might seem to someone sitting in front of a tube or
flatscreen today.

epoch

/n./ [Unix: prob. from astronomical timekeeping] The time and date
corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and timestamp values. Under
most Unix versions the epoch is 00:00:00 GMT, January 1, 1970; under VMS, it's
00:00:00 of November 17, 1858 (base date of the U.S. Naval Observatory's
ephemerides); on a Macintosh, it's the midnight beginning January 1 1904.
System time is measured in seconds or ticks past the epoch. Weird 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 clock
of Unix is good only until January 18, 2038, assuming at least some software
continues to consider it signed and that word lengths don't increase by then.
See also wall time.

epsilon

[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 indistinguishable
for all practical purposes, even 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 epsilon of working."

epsilon squared

/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 terminal to
go with it is epsilon, and the cost of the ten-dollar cable to connect them is
epsilon squared. Compare lost in the underflow, lost in the noise.

era, the

/n./ Syn. epoch. Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous,
but 'era' more often connotes a span of time rather than a point in time,
whereas the reverse is true for epoch. The epoch usage is recommended.

Eric Conspiracy

/n./ A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a

sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1987; this was
doubtless influenced by the numerous 'Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre.
There do indeed seem to be considerably 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 indent style) and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your
editor has heard from about fifteen others by email, and the organization line
'Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one
site. See the Eric Conspiracy Web Page at http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ecsl.html
for full details.

Eris

/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
reinvented as a more benign personification of 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

/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.

error 33

[XEROX PARC] /n./ 1. Predicating one research effort upon the success of
another. 2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the critical path
of some other project (be it a research effort or not).

evil

/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,
'evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or
design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This usage is more an
esthetic and engineering judgment than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We
thought about adding a Blue Glue interface but decided it was too evil to deal
with." "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/. Compare
evil and rude.

evil and rude

/adj./ Both evil and rude, but with the additional connotation that the
rudeness was due to malice rather than incompetence. Thus, for example:
Microsoft's Windows NT is evil because it's a competent implementation of a bad
design; it's rude because it's gratuitously incompatible with Unix in places
where compatibility would have been as easy and effective to do; but it's evil
and rude because the incompatibilities are apparently there not to fix design
bugs in Unix but rather to lock hapless customers and developers into the
Microsoft way. Hackish evil and rude is close to the mainstream sense of
'evil'.

exa-

/ek's*/ /pref./ [SI] See quantifiers.

examining the entrails

/n./ The process of grovelling through a core dump or hex image in an

attempt to discover the bug that brought a program or system down. The
reference is to divination from the entrails of a sacrified animal. Compare
runes, incantation, black art, desk check.

EXCH

/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
PDP-10 instruction that exchanged the contents of a register and a memory
location. Many newer hackers are probably thinking instead of the PostScript
exchange operator (which is usually written in lowercase).

excl

/eks'kl/ /n./ Abbreviation for 'exclamation point'. See bang, shriek,

ASCII.

EXE

/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 though Unix executables don't have any required suffix.

exec

/eg-zek'/ or /eks'ek/ 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 UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems. 3. At
IBM and VM/CMS shops, 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.

exercise, left as an

/adj./ [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*
occasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of
either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the capabilities of their
audiences.

Exon

/eks'on/ /excl./ A generic obscenity that quickly entered wide use on the
Internet and Usenet after Black Thursday. From the last name of Senator James
Exon (Democrat-Nevada), primary author of the CDA.

external memory

/n./ A memo pad, palmtop computer, or written notes. "Hold on while I write
that to external memory". The analogy is with store or DRAM versus nonvolatile
disk storage on computers.

eye candy
 /i:' kand`ee/ /n./ [from mainstream slang "ear candy"] A display of some sort
that's presented to lusers to keep them distracted while the program performs
necessary background tasks. "Give 'em some eye candy while the back-end
slurps that BLOB into core."

eyeball search

/n.,v./ 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; compare
vdiff, desk check.

face time

/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

/n./ See coefficient of X.

fall over

/vi./ [IBM] Yet another synonym for crash or lose. 'Fall over hard'
equates to crash and burn.

fall through

/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
*really* old, dating from the 1940s and 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 by jumping there from the switch header,
passing a point where one would normally expect to find a 'break'. A trivial
example:

switch (color) case GREEN: do_green(); break; case PINK:

do_pink(); /* FALL THROUGH */ case RED: do_red(); break;
default: do_blue(); break;

The variant spelling '/* FALL THRU */' is also common.

The effect of the above code is to 'do_green()' when color is 'GREEN',

'do_red()' when color is 'RED', 'do_blue()' on any other color 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) in which it is
natural; it is generally considered good practice to include a comment
highlighting the fall-through where one would normally expect a break. See also
Duff's device.

fan

/n./ Without qualification, indicates a fan of science fiction, especially one

who goes to cons and tends to hang out with other fans. Many hackers are
fans, so this term has been imported from fannish slang; however, unlike much
fannish slang it is recognized by most non-fannish hackers. Among SF fans the
plural is correctly 'fen', but this usage is not automatic to hackers. "Laura
reads the stuff occasionally but isn't really a fan."

fandango on core

/n./ [Unix/C hackers, from the Mexican dance] 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 to have
'done a fandango on core'. On 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, smash the stack, memory leak, memory smash, overrun
screw, core.

FAQ

/F-A-Q/ or /fak/ /n./ [Usenet] 1. A Frequently Asked Question. 2. A compendium

of accumulated lore, posted periodically to high-volume newsgroups in an attempt
to forestall such questions. Some people prefer the term 'FAQ list' or 'FAQL'
/fa'kl/, reserving 'FAQ' for sense 1.

This lexicon itself serves as a good example of a collection of one kind of

lore, although it is far too big for a regular FAQ posting. Examples: "What is
the proper type of NULL?" and "What's that funny name for the '#' character?"
are both Frequently Asked Questions. Several FAQs refer readers to this file.

FAQ list

/F-A-Q list/ or /fak list/ /n./ [Usenet] Syn FAQ, sense 2.

FAQL

/fa'kl/ /n./ Syn. FAQ list.

faradize

/far'*-di:z/ /v./ [US Geological Survey] To start any hyper-addictive process

or trend, or to continue adding current to such a trend. Telling one user about
a new octo-tetris game you compiled would be a faradizing act — in two weeks
you might find your entire department playing the faradic game.

farkled

/far'kld/ /adj./ [DeVry Institute of Technology, Atlanta] Syn. hosed. Poss.

owes something to Yiddish 'farblondjet' and/or the 'Farkle Family' skits on
"Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In", a popular comedy show of the late 1960s.

farming

/n./ [Adelaide University, Australia] 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
hope the hard drive hasn't gone farming again."

fascist
/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
'fascistic' seems to have been preferred at MIT, 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 is that this may be desirable
in order to simplify the implementation or provide tighter error checking.
Compare bondage-and-discipline language, although that term is global rather
than local.

fat electrons

/n./ Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the causation of computer

glitches. Your typical electric utility draws its line current out of the big
generators with a pair of coil taps located near the top of the dynamo. When
the normal tap brushes get dirty, they take them off line to clean them up, and
use special auxiliary taps on the *bottom* of the coil. Now, this is a problem,
because when they do that they get not ordinary or 'thin' electrons, but the
fat'n'sloppy electrons that are heavier and so settle to the bottom of the
generator. These flow down ordinary wires just fine, but when they have to turn
a sharp corner (as in an integrated-circuit via), they're apt to get stuck. This
is what causes computer glitches. [Fascinating. Obviously, fat electrons must
gain mass by bogon absorption — ESR] Compare bogon, magic smoke.

faulty

/adj./ Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as bletcherous, losing,

q.v., but the connotation is much milder.

fd leak

/F-D 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

/n./ [from Hunter S. Thompson] 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 machine except
the Rios (a.k.a. the RS/6000). "Ack! They want PCs to be able to talk to the
AI machine. Fear and loathing time!"

feature

/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 misfeature).
3. A surprising property or behavior; 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 classic example. 4. A property or behavior
that 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
gongs). 5. A property or behavior that was 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 responded in a way that was unexpected
but not 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.
"That's not a bug, that's a feature!" is a 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 between two hackers on an
airliner:

A: "This 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 the spacing between
rows here."

B: "Yes. But 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 throughout they'd lose

several rows and a chunk out 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.

There's a related joke that is sometimes referred to as the "one-question geek
test". You say to someone "I saw a Volkswagen Beetle today with a vanity
license plate that read FEATURE". If he/she laughs, he/she is a geek (see
computer geek, sense #2).

feature creature

/n./ [poss. fr. slang 'creature feature' for a horror movie] 1. One who loves
to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence,
concision, or taste. 2. Alternately, a mythical being that induces otherwise
rational programmers to perpetrate such crocks. See also feeping creaturism,
creeping featurism.

feature key

/n./ The Macintosh key with the cloverleaf graphic on its keytop; sometimes
referred to as 'flower', 'pretzel', 'clover', 'propeller', 'beanie' (an apparent
reference to the major feature of a propeller beanie), splat, or the 'command
key'. The Mac's equivalent of an alt key. The proliferation of terms for this
creature may illustrate one subtle peril of iconic interfaces.

Many people have been mystified by the cloverleaf-like symbol that appears on
the feature key. Its oldest name is 'cross of St. Hannes', but it occurs in
pre-Christian Viking art as a decorative motif. Throughout Scandinavia today
the road agencies use it to mark sites of historical interest. Apple picked up
the symbol from an early Mac developer who happened to be Swedish. Apple
documentation gives the translation "interesting feature"!

There is some dispute as to the proper (Swedish) name of this symbol. It

technically stands for the word 'sev"ardhet' (interesting feature); many of
these are old churches. Some Swedes report as an idiom for it the word 'kyrka',
cognate to English 'church' and Scots-dialect 'kirk' but pronounced /shir'k*/ in
modern Swedish. Others say this is nonsense. Another idiom reported for the
sign is 'runsten' /roon'stn/, derived from the fact that many of the interesting
features are Viking rune-stones.
feature shock

/n./ [from Alvin Toffler's book title "Future Shock"] A user's (or
programmer's!) confusion when confronted with a package that has too many
features and poor introductory material.

featurectomy

/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
would be more elegant without the feature, or there is already an equivalent and
better way to achieve the same end. (Doing so is not quite the same thing as
removing a misfeature.) Reluctant featurectomies are performed to satisfy
some external constraint such as code size or execution speed.

feep

/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)
do not feep; they have mechanical bells 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 closest written approximation yet.) The
term '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
communicator's beep lasting for five seconds). The 'feeper' on a VT-52 has been
compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also ding.

feeper

/fee'pr/ /n./ The device in a terminal or workstation (usually a loudspeaker of

some kind) that makes the feep sound.

feeping creature

/n./ [from feeping creaturism] 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

/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 sounds so neat
that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image
of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises.

feetch feetch

/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 "Boy,
that's great! What a great hack!" 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 done".

fence

/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 (ASCII
0000000) character that terminates strings in C is a fence. Hex FF is also
(though slightly less frequently) used this way. See zigamorph. 2. An extra
data value inserted in an array or other data structure in order to allow some
normal test on the array's contents also to function as a termination test. For
example, a highly optimized routine for finding a value in an array might
artificially place a copy of the value to be searched for after the last slot of
the array, thus allowing the main search loop to search for the value without
having to check at each pass whether the end of the array had been reached. 3.
[among users of optimizing compilers] Any technique, usually exploiting
knowledge about the compiler, that blocks certain optimizations. Used when
explicit mechanisms are not available or are overkill. Typically a hack: "I
call a dummy procedure there to force a flush of the optimizer's
register-coloring info" can be expressed by the shorter "That's a fence
procedure".

fencepost error

/n./ 1. A problem with the discrete equivalent of a boundary condition, often

exhibited in programs by iterative loops. From the following problem: "If you
build a fence 100 feet long with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you
need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10.) For example,
suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want to process items m
through n; how many items are there? The obvious answer is n - m, but that is
off by one; the right answer is n - m + 1. A program that used the 'obvious'
formula would have a fencepost error in it. See also zeroth and off-by-one
error, and note that not all off-by-one errors are fencepost errors. The game
of Musical Chairs involves a catastrophic off-by-one error where N people try to
sit in N - 1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from
counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa, or by
neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both ends of a row. 2.
[rare] An error induced by unexpected regularities in input values, which can
(for instance) completely thwart a theoretically efficient binary tree or hash
table implementation. (The error here involves the difference between expected
and worst case behaviors of an algorithm.)

fepped out

/fept owt/ /adj./ The Symbolics 3600 LISP Machine has a Front-End Processor
called a 'FEP' (compare sense 2 of box). When the main processor gets
wedged, the FEP takes control of the keyboard and screen. Such a machine is
said to have 'fepped out' or 'dropped into the fep'.

FidoNet

/n./ A worldwide hobbyist network of personal computers which exchanges mail,

discussion groups, and files. Founded in 1984 and originally consisting only of
IBM PCs and compatibles, FidoNet now includes such diverse machines as Apple
][s, Ataris, Amigas, and Unix systems. FidoNet has grown rapidly and in early
1996 has approximately 38000 nodes.

field circus

/n./ [a derogatory pun on 'field service'] The field service organization of

any hardware manufacturer, but especially DEC. There is an entire genre of
jokes about DEC field circus engineers:

Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

[See Easter egging for additional insight on these jokes.]

There is also the 'Field Circus Cheer' (from the plan file for DEC on MIT-AI):

Maynard! Maynard! Don't mess with us! We're mean and we're tough! If you
get us confused We'll screw up your stuff.

(DEC's service HQ is located in Maynard, Massachusetts.)

field servoid

[play on 'android'] /fee'ld ser'voyd/ /n./ Representative of a field service

organization (see field circus). This has many of the implications of
droid.

Fight-o-net

/n./ [FidoNet] Deliberate distortion of FidoNet, often applied after a flurry

of flamage in a particular echo, especially the SYSOP echo or Fidonews (see
'Snooze).

File Attach

[FidoNet] 1. /n./ A file sent along with a mail message from one BBS to
another. 2. /vt./ Sending someone a file by using the File Attach option in a
BBS mailer.

File Request

[FidoNet] 1. /n./ The FidoNet equivalent of FTP, in which one BBS system
automatically dials another and snarfs one or more files. Often abbreviated
'FReq'; files are often announced as being "available for FReq" in the same way
that files are announced as being "available for/by anonymous FTP" on the
Internet. 2. /vt./ The act of getting a copy of a file by using the File
Request option of the BBS mailer.

file signature

/n./ A magic number, sense 3.

filk

/filk/ /n.,v./ [from SF fandom, where a typo for 'folk' was adopted as a new
word] A popular or folk song with lyrics revised or completely new lyrics,
intended for humorous effect when read, and/or to be sung late at night at SF
conventions. There is a flourishing subgenre of these called 'computer filks',
written by hackers and often containing rather sophisticated technical humor.
See double bucky for an example. Compare grilf, hing and newsfroup.

film at 11
 [MIT: in parody of TV newscasters] 1. Used in conversation to announce ordinary
events, with a sarcastic implication that these events are earth-shattering.
"ITS crashes; film at 11." "Bug found in scheduler; film at 11." 2. Also
widely used outside MIT to indicate that additional information will be
available at some future time, *without* the implication of anything
particularly ordinary about the referenced event. For example, "The mail file
server died this morning; we found garbage all over the root directory. Film at
11." would indicate that a major failure had occurred but that the people
working on it have no additional information about it as yet; use of the phrase
in this way suggests gently that the problem is liable to be fixed more quickly
if the people doing the fixing can spend time doing the fixing rather than
responding to questions, the answers to which will appear on the normal "11:00
news", if people will just be patient.

filter

/n./ [orig. Unix, now also in MS-DOS] A program that processes an input
data stream into an output data stream in some well-defined way, and does no I/O
to anywhere else except possibly on error conditions; one designed to be used as
a stage in a 'pipeline' (see plumbing). Compare sponge.

Finagle's Law

/n./ The generalized or 'folk' version of Murphy's Law, fully named

"Finagle's Law of Dynamic Negatives" and usually rendered "Anything that can go
wrong, will". One variant favored among hackers is "The perversity of the
Universe tends towards a maximum" (but see also Hanlon's Razor). The label
'Finagle's Law' was popularized by SF author Larry Niven in several stories
depicting a frontier culture of asteroid miners; this 'Belter' culture professed
a religion and/or running joke involving the worship of the dread god Finagle
and his mad prophet Murphy. Some technical and scientific cultures (e.g.,
paleontologists) know it under the name 'Sod's Law'; this usage may be more
common in Great Britain.

fine

/adj./ [WPI] Good, but not good enough to be cuspy. The word 'fine' is used
elsewhere, of course, but without the implicit comparison to the higher level
implied by cuspy.

finger

[WAITS, via BSD Unix] 1. /n./ A program that displays information about a
particular user or all users logged on the system, or a remote system.
Typically shows full name, last login time, idle time, terminal line, and
terminal location (where applicable). May also display a plan file left by
the user (see also Hacking X for Y). 2. /vt./ To apply finger to a username.
3. /vt./ By extension, to check a human's current state by any means. "Foodp?"
"T!" "OK, finger Lisa and see if she's idle." 4. Any picture (composed of
ASCII characters) depicting 'the finger'. Originally a humorous component of
one's plan file to deter the curious fingerer (sense 2), it has entered the
arsenal of some flamers.

finger trouble

/n./ Mistyping, typos, or generalized keyboard incompetence (this is

surprisingly common among hackers, given the amount of time they spend at
keyboards). "I keep putting colons at the end of statements instead of
semicolons", "Finger trouble again, eh?".
finger-pointing syndrome

/n./ All-too-frequent result of bugs, esp. in new or experimental

configurations. The hardware vendor points a finger at the software. The
software vendor points a finger at the hardware. All the poor users get is the
finger.

finn

/v./ [IRC] To pull rank on somebody based on the amount of time one has spent
on IRC. The term derives from the fact that IRC was originally written in
Finland in 1987. There may be some influence from the 'Finn' character in
William Gibson's seminal cyberpunk novel "Count Zero", who at one point says to
another (much younger) character "I have a pair of shoes older than you are, so
shut up!"

firebottle

/n./ A large, primitive, power-hungry active electrical device, similar in

function to a FET but constructed out of glass, metal, and vacuum.
Characterized by high cost, low density, low reliability, high-temperature
operation, and high power dissipation. Sometimes mistakenly called a 'tube' in
the U.S. or a 'valve' in England; another hackish term is glassfet.

firefighting

/n./ 1. What sysadmins have to do to correct sudden operational problems. An

opposite of hacking. "Been hacking your new newsreader?" "No, a power glitch
hosed the network and I spent the whole afternoon fighting fires." 2. The act
of throwing lots of manpower and late nights at a project, esp. to get it out
before deadline. See also gang bang, Mongolian Hordes technique; however,
the term 'firefighting' connotes that the effort is going into chasing bugs
rather than adding features.

firehose syndrome

/n./ In mainstream folklore it is observed that trying to drink from a firehose

can be a good way to rip your lips off. On computer networks, the absence or
failure of flow control mechanisms can lead to situations in which the sending
system sprays a massive flood of packets at an unfortunate receiving system,
more than it can handle. Compare overrun, buffer overflow.

firewall code

/n./ 1. The code you put in a system (say, a telephone switch) to make sure
that the users can't do any damage. Since users always want to be able to do
everything but never want to suffer for any mistakes, the construction of a
firewall is a question not only of defensive coding but also of interface
presentation, so that users don't even get curious about those corners of a
system where they can burn themselves. 2. Any sanity check inserted to catch a
can't happen error. Wise programmers often change code to fix a bug twice:
once to fix the bug, and once to insert a firewall which would have arrested the
bug before it did quite as much damage.

firewall machine

/n./ A dedicated gateway machine with special security precautions on it, used
to service outside network connections and dial-in lines. The idea is to
protect a cluster of more loosely administered machines hidden behind it from
crackers. The typical firewall is an inexpensive micro-based Unix box kept
clean of critical data, with a bunch of modems and public network ports on it
but just one carefully watched connection back to the rest of the cluster. The
special precautions may include threat monitoring, callback, and even a complete
iron box keyable to particular incoming IDs or activity patterns. Syn.
flytrap, Venus flytrap.

[When first coined in the mid-1980s this term was pure jargon. Now (1996) it is
borderline techspeak, and may have to be dropped from this lexicon before very
long — ESR]

fireworks mode

/n./ The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is performing a

crash and burn operation.

firmy

/fer'mee/ /n./ Syn. stiffy (a 3.5-inch floppy disk).

fish

/n./ [Adelaide University, Australia] 1. Another metasyntactic variable. See

foo. Derived originally from the Monty Python skit in the middle of "The
Meaning of Life" entitled "Find the Fish". 2. A pun for 'microfiche'. A
microfiche file cabinet may be referred to as a 'fish tank'.

FISH queue

/n./ [acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)] 'First In, Still
Here'. A joking way of pointing out that processing of a particular sequence of
events or requests has stopped dead. Also 'FISH mode' and 'FISHnet'; the latter
may be applied to any network that is running really slowly or exhibiting
extreme flakiness.

FITNR

// /adj./ [Thinking Machines, Inc.] Fixed In The Often Next Release. A

written-only notation attached to bug reports. wishful thinking.

fix

/n.,v./ What one does when a problem has been reported too many times to be
ignored.

FIXME

/imp./ A standard tag often put in C comments near a piece of code that needs
work. The point of doing so is that a 'grep' or a similar pattern-matching tool
can find all such places quickly.

/* FIXME: note this is common in GNU code. */

Compare XXX.

flag

/n./ A variable or quantity that can take on one of two values; a bit,
particularly one that is used to indicate one of two outcomes or is used to
control which of two things is to be done. "This flag controls whether to clear
the screen before printing the message." "The program status word contains
several flag bits." Used of humans analogously to bit. See also hidden
flag, mode bit.

flag day

/n./ A software change that is neither forward- nor backward-compatible, and

which is costly to make and costly to reverse. "Can we install that without
causing a flag day for all users?" This term has nothing to do with the use of
the word flag to mean a variable that has two values. It came into use when a
massive change was made to the Multics timesharing system to convert from the
old ASCII code to the new one; this was scheduled for Flag Day (a U.S. holiday),
June 14, 1966. See also backward combatability.

flaky

/adj./ (var sp. 'flakey') Subject to frequent lossage. This use is of course
related to the common slang use of the word to describe a person as eccentric,
crazy, or just unreliable. A system that is flaky is working, sort of — enough
that you are tempted to try to use it — but fails frequently enough that the
odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth hackish prefers
dodgy or wonky.

flamage

/flay'm*j/ /n./ Flaming verbiage, esp. high-noise, low-signal postings to

Usenet or other electronic fora. Often in the phrase 'the usual flamage'.
'Flaming' is the act itself; 'flamage' the content; a 'flame' is a single
flaming message. See flame, also dahmum.

flame

1. /vi./ To post an email message intended to insult and provoke. 2. /vi./ To

speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or
with a patently ridiculous attitude. 3. /vt./ Either of senses 1 or 2, directed
with hostility at a particular person or people. 4. /n./ An instance of
flaming. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell
the participants "Now you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to
get them to cool down (so to speak).

The term may have been independently invented at several different places. It
has been reported from MIT, Carleton College and RPI (among many other places)
from as far back as 1969.

It is possible that the hackish sense of 'flame' is much older than that. The
poet Chaucer was also what passed for a wizard hacker in his time; he wrote a
treatise on the astrolabe, the most advanced computing device of the day. In
Chaucer's "Troilus and Cressida", Cressida laments her inability to grasp the
proof of a particular mathematical theorem; her uncle Pandarus then observes
that it's called "the fleminge of wrecches." This phrase seems to have been
intended in context as "that which puts the wretches to flight" but was probably
just as ambiguous in Middle English as "the flaming of wretches" would be today.
One suspects that Chaucer would feel right at home on Usenet.

flame bait

/n./ A posting intended to trigger a flame war, or one that invites flames in
reply. See also troll.
flame on

vi.,/interj./ 1. To begin to flame. The punning reference to Marvel Comics's

Human Torch is no longer widely recognized. 2. To continue to flame. See
rave, burble.

flame war

/n./ (var. 'flamewar') An acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a

public electronic forum such as Usenet.

flamer

/n./ One who habitually flames. Said esp. of obnoxious Usenet

personalities.

flap

/vt./ 1. To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...). Old-time

hackers at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and microtapes were
1, 2,... and attempting to flap device 0 would instead start a motor banging
inside a cabinet near the disk. 2. By extension, to unload any magnetic tape.
See also macrotape. Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the
usage has remained. (The term could well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge
tape drive, a spectacularly misengineered contraption which makes a loud
flapping sound, almost like an old reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many
tape-eating failure modes.)

flarp

/flarp/ /n./ [Rutgers University] Yet another metasyntactic variable (see

foo). Among those who use it, it is associated with a legend that any program
not containing the word 'flarp' somewhere will not work. The legend is
discreetly silent on the reliability of programs which *do* contain the magic
word.

flat

/adj./ 1. Lacking any complex internal structure. "That bitty box has only a
flat filesystem, not a hierarchical one." The verb form is flatten. 2. Said
of a memory architecture (like that of the VAX or 680x0) that is one big linear
address space (typically with each possible value of a processor register
corresponding to a unique core address), as opposed to a 'segmented'
architecture (like that of the 80x86) in which addresses are composed from a
base-register/offset pair (segmented designs are generally considered
cretinous).

Note that sense 1 (at least with respect to filesystems) is usually used
pejoratively, while sense 2 is a Good Thing.

flat-ASCII

/adj./ Said of a text file that contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and uses
only ASCII-standard control characters (that is, has no embedded codes specific
to a particular text formatter markup language, or output device, and no
meta-characters). Syn. plain-ASCII. Compare flat-file.

flat-file
/adj./ A flattened representation of some database or tree or network
structure as a single file from which the structure could implicitly be rebuilt,
esp. one in flat-ASCII form. See also sharchive.

flatten

/vt./ To remove structural information, esp. to filter something with an

implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves; also tends to imply
mapping to flat-ASCII. "This code flattens an expression with parentheses
into an equivalent canonical form."

flavor

/n./ 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." "These
lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones." See vanilla.
2. The attribute that causes something to be flavorful. Usually used in the
phrase "yields additional flavor". "This convention yields additional flavor by
allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down." See vanilla.
This usage was certainly reinforced by the terminology of quantum
chromodynamics, in which quarks (the constituents of, e.g., protons) come in six
flavors (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue,
green) — however, hackish use of 'flavor' at MIT predated QCD. 3. The term for
'class' (in the object-oriented sense) in the LISP Machine Flavors system.
Though the Flavors design has been superseded (notably by the Common LISP CLOS
facility), the term 'flavor' is still used as a general synonym for 'class' by
some LISP hackers.

flavorful

/adj./ Full of flavor (sense 2); esthetically pleasing. See random and
losing for antonyms. See also the entries for taste and elegant.

flippy

/flip'ee/ /n./ A single-sided floppy disk altered for double-sided use by

addition of a second write-notch, so called because it must be flipped over for
the second side to be accessible. No longer common.

flood

/v./ [IRC] To dump large amounts of text onto an IRC channel. This is
especially rude when the text is uninteresting and the other users are trying to
carry on a serious conversation.

flowchart

: /n./ [techspeak] An archaic form of visual control-flow specification

employing arrows and 'speech balloons' of various shapes. Hackers never use
flowcharts, consider them extremely silly, and associate them with COBOL
programmers, card wallopers, and other lower forms of life. This attitude
follows from the observations that flowcharts (at least from a hacker's point of
view) are no easier to read than code, are less precise, and tend to fall out of
sync with the code (so that they either obfuscate it rather than explaining it,
or require extra maintenance effort that doesn't improve the code). See also
pdl, sense 3.

flower key

/n./ [Mac users] See feature key.

flush

/v./ 1. To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation.

"All that nonsense has been flushed." 2. [Unix/C] To force buffered I/O to disk,
as with an 'fflush(3)' call. This is *not* an abort or deletion as in sense 1,
but a demand for early completion! 3. To leave at the end of a day's work (as
opposed to leaving for a meal). "I'm going to flush now." "Time to flush." 4.
To exclude someone from an activity, or to ignore a person.

'Flush' was standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation; one spoke
of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been flushed.
It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted
characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing the characters
away before they could be printed. The Unix/C usage, on the other hand, was
propagated by the 'fflush(3)' call in C's standard I/O library (though it is
reported to have been in use among BLISS programmers at DEC and on Honeywell and
IBM machines as far back as 1965). Unix/C hackers find the ITS usage confusing,
and vice versa.

flypage

/fli:'payj/ /n./ (alt. 'fly page') A banner, sense 1.

Flyspeck 3

/n./ Standard name for any font that is so tiny as to be unreadable (by analogy
with names like 'Helvetica 10' for 10-point Helvetica). Legal boilerplate is
usually printed in Flyspeck 3.

flytrap

/n./ See firewall machine.

FM

/F-M/ /n./ 1. *Not* 'Frequency Modulation' but rather an abbreviation for

'F**king Manual', the back-formation from RTFM. Used to refer to the manual
itself in the RTFM. "Have you seen the Networking FM lately?" 2. Abbreviation
for "F**king Magic", used in the sense of black magic.

fnord

/n./ [from the "Illuminatus Trilogy"] 1. A word used in email and news postings
to tag utterances as surrealist mind-play or humor, esp. in connection with
Discordianism and elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that David Koresh
is sharing an apartment in Argentina with Hitler. (Fnord.)" "Where can I fnord
get the Principia Discordia from?" 2. A metasyntactic variable, commonly used
by hackers with ties to Discordianism or the Church of the SubGenius.

FOAF

// /n./ [Usenet] Acronym for 'Friend Of A Friend'. The source of an unverified,

possibly untrue story. This term was not originated by hackers (it is used in
Jan Brunvand's books on urban folklore), but is much better recognized on Usenet
and elsewhere than in mainstream English.

FOD
/fod/ /v./ [Abbreviation for 'Finger of Death', originally a spell-name from
fantasy gaming] To terminate with extreme prejudice and with no regard for other
people. From MUDs where the wizard command 'FOD player ' results in
the immediate and total death of player , usually as punishment for
obnoxious behavior. This usage migrated to other circumstances, such as "I'm
going to fod the process that is burning all the cycles." Compare gun.

In aviation, FOD means Foreign Object Damage, e.g., what happens when a jet
engine sucks up a rock on the runway or a bird in flight. Finger of Death is a
distressingly apt description of what this generally does to the engine.

fold case

/v./ See smash case. This term tends to be used more by people who don't
mind that their tools smash case. It also connotes that case is ignored but
case distinctions in data processed by the tool in question aren't destroyed.

followup

/n./ On Usenet, a posting generated in response to another posting (as

opposed to a reply, which goes by email rather than being broadcast).
Followups include the ID of the parent message in their headers; smart
news-readers can use this information to present Usenet news in 'conversation'
sequence rather than order-of-arrival. See thread.

fontology

/n./ [XEROX PARC] The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and use
of new fonts (e.g., for window systems and typesetting software). It has been
said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny.

[Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that "Ontogeny

recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the Macintosh, for example,
System 7 has to go through contortions to compensate for an earlier design error
that created a whole different set of abstractions for fonts parallel to 'files'
and 'folders' — ESR]

foo

/foo/ 1. /interj./ Term of disgust. 2. Used very generally as a sample name

for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp. scratch files). 3. First
on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See
also bar, baz, qux, quux, corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred,
plugh, xyzzy, thud.

The etymology of hackish 'foo' is obscure. When used in connection with 'bar'
it is generally traced to the WWII-era Army slang acronym FUBAR (`F****d Up
Beyond All Repair'), later bowdlerized to foobar. (See also FUBAR.)

However, the use of the word 'foo' itself has more complicated antecedents,
including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. The old "Smokey Stover"
comic strips by Bill Holman often included the word 'FOO', in particular on
license plates of cars; allegedly, 'FOO' and 'BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's
"Pogo" strips. In the 1938 cartoon "The Daffy Doc", a very early version of
Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!"; oddly, this seems to refer
to some approving or positive affirmative use of foo. It has been suggested
that this might be related to the Chinese word 'fu' (sometimes transliterated
'foo'), which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper tone (the
lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are properly
called "fu dogs").
Paul Dickson's excellent book "Words" (Dell, 1982, ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traces
"Foo" to an unspecified British naval magazine in 1946, quoting as follows: "Mr.
Foo is a mysterious Second World War product, gifted with bitter omniscience and
sarcasm."

Other sources confirm that 'FOO' was a semi-legendary subject of WWII

British-army graffiti more-or-less equivalent to the American Kilroy. Where
British troops went, the graffito "FOO was here" or something similar showed up.
Several slang dictionaries aver that FOO probably came from Forward Observation
Officer. In this connection, the later American military slang 'foo fighters'
is interesting; at least as far back as the 1950s, radar operators used it for
the kind of mysterious or spurious trace that would later be called a UFO (the
older term resurfaced in popular American usage in 1995 via the name of one of
the better grunge-rock bands).

Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker usage
actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of a comic book first
issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles and Robert Crumb. Though
Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later became one of the most important and
influential artists in underground comics, this venture was hardly a success;
indeed, the brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The
title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However, very few
copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of Crumb's 'oeuvre' have
established that this title was a reference to the earlier Smokey Stover comics.

An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC Language",
compiled at TMRC, there was an entry that went something like this:

FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME HUM."
Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.

For more about the legendary foo counters, see TMRC. Almost the entire staff
of what later became the MIT AI Lab was involved with TMRC, and probably picked
the word up there.

Very probably, hackish 'foo' had no single origin and derives through all these
channels from Yiddish 'feh' and/or English 'fooey'.

foobar

/n./ Another common metasyntactic variable; see foo. Hackers do *not*

generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense.

fool

/n./ As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons

from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded by
evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in its other senses, i.e., to
describe a person with a native incapacity to reason correctly, or a clown.
Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of reasoning all too
effectively in executing their errors. See also cretin, loser, fool file,
the.

The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the character string
"F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as a floating point number it
caused a crash, and as an integer or a character string it was very recognizable
in a dump. Sadly, one day a very senior professor at Nottingham University
wrote a program that called him a fool. He proceeded to demonstrate the
correctness of this assertion by lobbying the university (not quite
successfully) to forbid the use of Algol on its computers. See also DEADBEEF.

fool file, the

/n./ [Usenet] A notional repository of all the most dramatically and abysmally
stupid utterances ever. An entire subgenre of sig blocks consists of the
header "From the fool file:" followed by some quote the poster wishes to
represent as an immortal gem of dimwittery; for this usage to be really
effective, the quote has to be so obviously wrong as to be laughable. More than
one Usenetter has achieved an unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this way.

Foonly

/n./ 1. The PDP-10 successor that was to have been built by the Super Foonly
project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory along with a new
operating system. The intention was to leapfrog from the old DEC timesharing
system SAIL was then running to a new generation, bypassing TENEX which at that
time was the ARPANET standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the
new operating system was cut in 1974. Most of the design team went to DEC and
contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10. 2. The name of the
company formed by Dave Poole, one of the principal Super Foonly designers, and
one of hackerdom's more colorful personalities. Many people remember the parrot
which sat on Poole's shoulder and was a regular companion. 3. Any of the
machines built by Poole's company. The first was the F-1 (a.k.a. Super
Foonly), which was the computational engine used to create the graphics in the
movie "TRON". The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever
made. The effort drained Foonly of its financial resources, and the company
turned towards building smaller, slower, and much less expensive machines.
Unfortunately, these ran not the popular TOPS-20 but a TENEX variant called
Foonex; this seriously limited their market. Also, the machines shipped were
actually wire-wrapped engineering prototypes requiring individual attention from
more than usually competent site personnel, and thus had significant reliability
problems. Poole's legendary temper and unwillingness to suffer fools gladly did
not help matters. By the time of the Jupiter project cancellation in 1983,
Foonly's proposal to build another F-1 was eclipsed by the Mars, and the
company never quite recovered. See the Mars entry for the continuation and
moral of this story.

footprint

/n./ 1. The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware. 2. [IBM] The
audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in plural, 'footprints').
See also toeprint. 3. "RAM footprint": The minimum amount of RAM which an OS
or other program takes; this figure gives one one an idea of how much will be
left for other applications. How actively this RAM is used is another matter
entirely. Recent tendencies to featuritis and software bloat can expand the RAM
footprint of an OS to the point of making it nearly unusable in practice.
[This problem is, thankfully, limited to operating systems so stupid that they don't
do virtual memory — ESR]

for free

/adj./ Said of a capability of a programming language or hardware that is

available by its design without needing cleverness to implement: "In APL, we get
the matrix operations for free." "And owing to the way revisions are stored in
this system, you get revision trees for free." The term usually refers to a
serendipitous feature of doing things a certain way (compare big win), but it
may refer to an intentional but secondary feature.

for the rest of us

/adj./ [from the Mac slogan "The computer for the rest of us"] 1. Used to
describe a spiffy product whose affordability shames other comparable
products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe spiffy but very
overpriced products. 2. Describes a program with a limited interface,
deliberately limited capabilities, non-orthogonality, inability to compose
primitives, or any other limitation designed to not 'confuse' a naive user.
This places an upper bound on how far that user can go before the program begins
to get in the way of the task instead of helping accomplish it. Used in
reference to Macintosh software which doesn't provide obvious capabilities
because it is thought that the poor lusers might not be able to handle them.
Becomes 'the rest of *them*' when used in third-party reference; thus, "Yes, it
is an attractive program, but it's designed for The Rest Of Them" means a
program that superficially looks neat but has no depth beyond the surface flash.
See also WIMP environment, Macintrash, point-and-drool interface,
user-friendly.

for values of

[MIT] A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the canonical

random numbers as placeholders for variables. "The max function takes 42
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 'non-random'
numbers are occasionally used in this fashion. A related joke is that pi equals
3 — for small values of pi and large values of 3.

Historical note: at MIT this usage has traditionally been traced to the
programming language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an Algol-58-like language
that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users at MIT in
the mid-60s. It inherited from Algol-58 a control structure FOR VALUES OF X =
3, 7, 99 DO ... that would repeat the indicated instructions for each value in
the list (unlike the usual FOR that only works for arithmetic sequences of
values). MAD is long extinct, but similar for-constructs still flourish (e.g.,
in Unix's shell languages).

fora

/pl.n./ Plural of forum.

foreground

/vt./ [Unix] To bring a task to the top of one's stack for immediate
processing, and hackers often use it in this sense for non-computer tasks. "If
your presentation is due next week, I guess I'd better foreground writing up the
design document."

Technically, on a time-sharing system, a task executing in foreground is one

able to accept input from and return output to the user; oppose background.
Nowadays this term is primarily associated with Unix, but it appears first to
have been used in this sense on OS/360. Normally, there is only one foreground
task per terminal (or terminal window); having multiple processes simultaneously
reading the keyboard is a good way to lose.

fork bomb

/n./ [Unix] A particular species of wabbit that can be written in one line of
C (`main() for(;;)fork();') or shell (`$0 $0 ') on any Unix system,
or occasionally created by an egregious coding bug. A fork bomb process
'explodes' by recursively spawning copies of itself (using the Unix system call
'fork(2)'). Eventually it eats all the process table entries and effectively
wedges the system. Fortunately, fork bombs are relatively easy to spot and kill,
so creating one deliberately seldom accomplishes more than to bring the just
wrath of the gods down upon the perpetrator. See also logic bomb.

forked
/adj./ [Unix; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive] Terminally slow, or
dead. Originated when one system was slowed to a snail's pace by an inadvertent
fork bomb.

Fortrash

/for'trash/ /n./ Hackerism for the FORTRAN (FORmula TRANslator) language,

referring to its primitive design, gross and irregular syntax, limited control
constructs, and slippery, exception-filled semantics.

fortune cookie

/n./ [WAITS, via Unix] A random quote, item of trivia, joke, or maxim printed
to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at logout time. Items from
this lexicon have often been used as fortune cookies. See cookie file.

forum

/n./ [Usenet, GEnie, CI$; pl. 'fora' or 'forums'] Any discussion group
accessible through a dial-in BBS, a mailing list, or a newsgroup (see
network, the). A forum functions much like a bulletin board; users submit
postings for all to read and discussion ensues. Contrast real-time chat via
talk mode or point-to-point personal email.

fossil

/n./ 1. In software, a misfeature that becomes understandable only in

historical context, as a remnant of times past retained so as not to break
compatibility. Example: the retention of octal as default base for string
escapes in C, in spite of the better match of hexadecimal to ASCII and modern
byte-addressable architectures. See dusty deck. 2. More restrictively, a
feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE)
bits in the V7 and BSD Unix tty driver, designed for use with monocase
terminals. (In a perversion of the usual backward-compatibility goal, this
functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later USG Unix
releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits.) 3. The FOSSIL (Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard
Interface Level) driver specification for serial-port access to replace the
brain-dead routines in the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MS-DOS BBS
software in preference to the 'supported' ROM routines, which do not support
interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600; the use of a
semistandard FOSSIL library is preferable to the bare metal serial port
programming otherwise required. Since the FOSSIL specification allows
additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers that use the hook but do not
provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in 'video
fossil'.

four-color glossies

/n./ 1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly contains technical

specs but which is in fact as superficial as possible without being totally
content-free. "Forget the four-color glossies, give me the tech ref manuals."
Often applied as an indication of superficiality even when the material is
printed on ordinary paper in black and white. Four-color-glossy manuals are
*never* useful for solving a problem. 2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual
pages that don't contain enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't
produce the expected or desired output.

fragile

/adj./ Syn brittle.

fred

/n./ 1. The personal name most frequently used as a metasyntactic variable

(see foo). Allegedly popular because it's easy for a non-touch-typist to type
on a standard QWERTY keyboard. Unlike J. Random Hacker or 'J. Random Loser',
this name has no positive or negative loading (but see Mbogo, Dr. Fred). See
also barney. 2. An acronym for 'Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device'; other
F-verbs may be substituted for 'flipping'.

frednet

/fred'net/ /n./ Used to refer to some random and uncommon protocol

encountered on a network. "We're implementing bridging in our router to solve
the frednet problem."

freeware

/n./ Free software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users'

groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, Usenet, or other
electronic media. At one time, 'freeware' was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman,
the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn't
enforced after his mysterious disappearance and presumed death in 1984. See
shareware, FRS.

freeze

/v./ To lock an evolving software distribution or document against changes so

it can be released with some hope of stability. Carries the strong implication
that the item in question will 'unfreeze' at some future date. "OK, fix that
bug and we'll freeze for release."

There are more specific constructions on this term. A 'feature freeze', for
example, locks out modifications intended to introduce new features but still
allows bugfixes and completion of existing features; a 'code freeze' connotes no
more changes at all. At Sun Microsystems and elsewhere, one may also hear
references to 'code slush' — that is, an almost-but-not-quite frozen state.

fried

/adj./ 1. Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out. Especially used of

hardware brought down by a 'power glitch' (see glitch), drop-outs, a short,
or some other electrical event. (Sometimes this literally happens to electronic
circuits! In particular, resistors can burn out and transformers can melt down,
emitting noxious smoke — see friode, SED and LER. However, this term is
also used metaphorically.) Compare frotzed. 2. Of people, exhausted. Said
particularly of those who continue to work in such a state. Often used as an
explanation or excuse. "Yeah, I know that fix destroyed the file system, but I
was fried when I put it in." Esp. common in conjunction with 'brain': "My brain
is fried today, I'm very short on sleep."

frink

/frink/ /v./ The unknown ur-verb, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on the
Usenet newsgroup alt.fan.lemurs, where it is said that the lemurs know what
'frink' means, but they aren't telling. Compare gorets.

friode
/fri:'ohd/ /n./ [TMRC] A reversible (that is, fused or blown) diode. Compare
fried; see also SED, LER.

fritterware

/n./ An excess of capability that serves no productive end. The canonical

example is font-diddling software on the Mac (see macdink); the term describes
anything that eats huge amounts of time for quite marginal gains in function but
seduces people into using it anyway. See also window shopping.

frob

/frob/ 1. /n./ [MIT] The TMRC definition was "FROB = a protruding arm or
trunnion"; by metaphoric extension, a 'frob' is any random small thing; an
object that you can comfortably hold in one hand; something you can frob (sense
2). See frobnitz. 2. /vt./ Abbreviated form of frobnicate. 3. [from the
MUD world] A command on some MUDs that changes a player's experience level
(this can be used to make wizards); also, to request wizard privileges on the
'professional courtesy' grounds that one is a wizard elsewhere. The command is
actually 'frobnicate' but is universally abbreviated to the shorter form.

frobnicate

/frob'ni-kayt/ /vt./ [Poss. derived from frobnitz, and usually abbreviated to

frob, but 'frobnicate' is recognized as the official full form.] To manipulate
or adjust, to tweak. One frequently frobs bits or other 2-state devices. Thus:
"Please frob the light switch" (that is, flip it), but also "Stop frobbing that
clasp; you'll break it". One also sees the construction 'to frob a frob'. See
tweak and twiddle.

Usage: frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a continuum.
'Frob' connotes aimless manipulation; 'twiddle' connotes gross manipulation,
often a coarse search for a proper setting; 'tweak' connotes fine-tuning. If
someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting
it, he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the
screen, he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a
knob is fun, he's frobbing it. The variant 'frobnosticate' has been recently
reported.

frobnitz

/frob'nits/, /pl./ 'frobnitzem' /frob'nit-zm/ or 'frobni' /frob'ni:/ /n./ [TMRC]

An unspecified physical object, a widget. Also refers to electronic black
boxes. This rare form is usually abbreviated to 'frotz', or more commonly to
frob. Also used are 'frobnule' (/frob'n[y]ool/) and 'frobule' (/frob'yool/).
Starting perhaps in 1979, 'frobozz' /fr*-boz'/ (plural: 'frobbotzim'
/fr*-bot'zm/) has also become very popular, largely through its exposure as a
name via Zork. These variants can also be applied to nonphysical objects,
such as data structures.

Pete Samson, compiler of the original TMRC lexicon, adds, "Under the TMRC
[railroad] layout were many storage boxes, managed (in 1958) by David R. Sawyer.
Several had fanciful designations written on them, such as 'Frobnitz Coil Oil'.
Perhaps DRS intended Frobnitz to be a proper name, but the name was quickly
taken for the thing". This was almost certainly the origin of the term.

frog

alt. 'phrog' 1. /interj./ Term of disgust (we seem to have a lot of them). 2.
Used as a name for just about anything. See foo. 3. /n./ Of things, a crock.
4. /n./ Of people, somewhere in between a turkey and a toad. 5. 'froggy':
/adj./ Similar to bagbiting, but milder. "This froggy program is taking
forever to run!"

frogging

[University of Waterloo] /v./ 1. Partial corruption of a text file or input

stream by some bug or consistent glitch, as opposed to random events like line
noise or media failures. Might occur, for example, if one bit of each incoming
character on a tty were stuck, so that some characters were correct and others
were not. See terminak for a historical example and compare dread high-bit
disease. 2. By extension, accidental display of text in a mode where the
output device emits special symbols or mnemonics rather than conventional ASCII.
This often happens, for example, when using a terminal or comm program on a
device like an IBM PC with a special 'high-half' character set and with the
bit-parity assumption wrong. A hacker sufficiently familiar with ASCII bit
patterns might be able to read the display anyway.

front end

/n./ 1. An intermediary computer that does set-up and filtering for another
(usually more powerful but less friendly) machine (a 'back end'). 2. What
you're talking to when you have a conversation with someone who is making
replies without paying attention. "Look at the dancing elephants!" "Uh-huh."
"Do you know what I just said?" "Sorry, you were talking to the front end."
See also fepped out. 3. Software that provides an interface to another
program 'behind' it, which may not be as user-friendly. Probably from analogy
with hardware front-ends (see sense 1) that interfaced with mainframes.

frotz

/frots/ 1. /n./ See frobnitz. 2. 'mumble frotz': An interjection of mildest

disgust.

frotzed

/frotst/ /adj./ down because of hardware problems. Compare fried. A

machine that is merely frotzed may be fixable without replacing parts, but a
fried machine is more seriously damaged.

frowney

/n./ (alt. 'frowney face') See emoticon.

FRS

// /n./ Abbreviation for "Freely Redistributable Software" which entered

general use on the Internet in 1995 after years of low-level confusion over what
exactly to call software written to be passed around and shared (contending
terms including freeware, shareware, and 'sourceware' were never universally
felt to be satisfactory for various subtle reasons). The first formal conference
on freely redistributable software was held in Cambridge, Massachussetts, in
February 1996 (sponsored by the Free Software Foundation). The conference
organizers used the FRS abbreviation heavily in its calls for papers and other
literature during 1995; this was probably critical in helping establish the
term.

fry

1. /vi./ To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. More

generally, to become non-working. Usage: never said of software, only of
hardware and humans. See fried, magic smoke. 2. /vt./ To cause to fail; to
roach, toast, or hose a piece of hardware. Never used of software or
humans, but compare fried.

FSF

/F-S-F/ /abbrev./ Common abbreviation (both spoken and written) for the name of
the Free Software Foundation, a nonprofit educational association formed to
support the GNU project.

FTP

/F-T-P/, *not* /fit'ip/ 1. [techspeak] /n./ The File Transfer Protocol for
transmitting files between systems on the Internet. 2. /vt./ To beam a file
using the File Transfer Protocol. 3. Sometimes used as a generic even for file
transfers not using FTP. "Lemme get a copy of "Wuthering Heights" ftp'd from
uunet."

FUBAR

/n./ The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A good example of how jargon
can occasionally be snuck past the suits; see foobar, and foo for a fuller
etymology.

**** me harder

/excl./ Sometimes uttered in response to egregious misbehavior, esp. in

software, and esp. of misbehaviors which seem unfairly persistent (as though
designed in by the imp of the perverse). Often theatrically elaborated:
"Aiighhh! **** me with a piledriver and 16 feet of curare-tipped wrought-iron
fence *and no lubricants*!" The phrase is sometimes heard abbreviated 'FMH' in
polite company.

[This entry is an extreme example of the hackish habit of coining elaborate and
evocative terms for lossage. Here we see a quite self-conscious parody of
mainstream expletives that has become a running gag in part of the hacker
culture; it illustrates the hackish tendency to turn any situation, even one of
extreme frustration, into an intellectual game (the point being, in this case,
to creatively produce a long-winded description of the most anatomically absurd
mental image possible — the short forms implicitly allude to all the ridiculous
long forms ever spoken). Scatological language is actually relatively uncommon
among hackers, and there was some controversy over whether this entry ought to
be included at all. As it reflects a live usage recognizably peculiar to the
hacker culture, we feel it is in the hackish spirit of truthfulness and
opposition to all forms of censorship to record it here. — ESR GLS]

FUD

/fuhd/ /n./ Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company:
"FUD is the fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the
minds of potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The
idea, of course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with
competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished
by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but
Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software. See
IBM.

FUD wars
/fuhd worz/ /n./ [from FUD] Political posturing engaged in by hardware and
software vendors ostensibly committed to standardization but actually willing to
fragment the market to protect their own shares. The Unix International vs. OSF
conflict is but one outstanding example.

fudge

1. /vt./ To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable way,

particularly with respect to the writing of a program. "I didn't feel like
going through that pain and suffering, so I fudged it — I'll fix it later." 2.
/n./ The resulting code.

fudge factor

/n./ A value or parameter that is varied in an ad hoc way to produce the

desired result. The terms 'tolerance' and slop are also used, though these
usually indicate a one-sided leeway, such as a buffer that is made larger than
necessary because one isn't sure exactly how large it needs to be, and it is
better to waste a little space than to lose completely for not having enough. A
fudge factor, on the other hand, can often be tweaked in more than one
direction. A good example is the 'fuzz' typically allowed in floating-point
calculations: two numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ
by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation may never
terminate, while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate.
Fudge factors are frequently adjusted incorrectly by programmers who don't fully
understand their import. See also coefficient of X.

fuel up

/vi./ To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to hacking. "Food-p?"

"Yeah, let's fuel up." "Time for a great-wall!" See also oriental food.

Full Monty, the

/n./ See monty, sense 2.

fum

/n./ [XEROX PARC] At PARC, often the third of the standard metasyntactic
variables (after foo and bar). Competes with baz, which is more common
outside PARC.

funky

/adj./ Said of something that functions, but in a slightly strange, klugey way.
It does the job and would be difficult to change, so its obvious non-optimality
is left alone. Often used to describe interfaces. The more bugs something has
that nobody has bothered to fix because workarounds are easier, the funkier it
is. TECO and UUCP are funky. The Intel i860's exception handling is
extraordinarily funky. Most standards acquire funkiness as they age. "The new
mailer is installed, but is still somewhat funky; if it bounces your mail for no
reason, try resubmitting it." "This UART is pretty funky. The data ready line
is active-high in interrupt mode and active-low in DMA mode."

funny money

/n./ 1. Notional 'dollar' units of computing time and/or storage handed to

students at the beginning of a computer course; also called 'play money' or
'purple money' (in implicit opposition to real or 'green' money). In New
Zealand and Germany the odd usage 'paper money' has been recorded; in Germany,
the particularly amusing synonym 'transfer ruble' commemmorates the funny money
used for trade between COMECON countries back when the Soviet Bloc still
existed. When your funny money ran out, your account froze and you needed to go
to a professor to get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing
cycles has made this less common. The amounts allocated were almost invariably
too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by with minimum work.
In extreme cases, the practice led to small-scale black markets in bootlegged
computer accounts. 2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any
kind used as a resource-allocation hack within a system. Antonym: 'real money'.

furrfu

// /excl./ [Usenet] Written-only equivalent of "Sheesh!"; it is, in fact,

"sheesh" modified by rot13. Evolved in mid-1992 as a response to notably silly
postings repeating urban myths on the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban, after
some posters complained that "Sheesh!" as a response to newbies was being
overused. See also FOAF.

fuzzball

/n./ [TCP/IP hackers] A DEC LSI-11 running a particular suite of homebrewed

software written by Dave Mills and assorted co-conspirators, used in the early
1980s for Internet protocol testbedding and experimentation. These were used as
NSFnet backbone sites in its early 56KB-line days; a few were still active on
the Internet as late as mid-1993, doing odd jobs such as network time service.

G -

/pref.,suff./ [SI] See quantifiers.

g-file

/n./ [Commodore BBS culture] Any file that is written with the intention of
being read by a human rather than a machine, such as the Jargon File,
documentation, humor files, hacker lore, and technical materials.

This term survives from the nearly forgotten Commodore 64 underground and BBS
community. In the early 80s, C-Net had emerged as the most popular C64 BBS
software for systems which encouraged messaging (as opposed to file transfer).
There were three main options for files: Program files (p-files), which served
the same function as 'doors' in today's systems, UD files (the user
upload/download section), and g-files. Anything that was meant to be read was
included in g-files.

gabriel

/gay'bree-*l/ /n./ [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and volleyball fanatic]
An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's
shoelaces or combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer
to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, 'pulling a Gabriel', 'Gabriel mode'.

gag

/vi./ Equivalent to choke, but connotes more disgust. "Hey, this is FORTRAN
code. No wonder the C compiler gagged." See also barf.
gang bang

/n./ The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to

wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have
been memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned
in Steven Levy's "Hackers"), most are perpetrated by large companies trying to
meet deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely
lacking in orthogonality. When market-driven managers make a list of all the
features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, the
probability of maintaining a coherent (or even functional) design goes
infinitesimal. See also firefighting, Mongolian Hordes technique, Conway's
Law.

garbage collect

/vi./ (also 'garbage collection', n.) See GC.

garply

/gar'plee/ /n./ [Stanford] Another metasyntactic variable (see foo); once

popular among SAIL hackers.

gas

[as in 'gas chamber'] 1. /interj./ A term of disgust and hatred, implying that
gas should be dispensed in generous quantities, thereby exterminating the source
of irritation. "Some loser just reloaded the system for no reason! Gas!" 2.
/interj./ A suggestion that someone or something ought to be flushed out of
mercy. "The system's getting wedged every few minutes. Gas!" 3. /vt./ To
flush (sense 1). "You should gas that old crufty software." 4. [IBM] /n./
Dead space in nonsequentially organized files that was occupied by data that has
since been deleted; the compression operation that removes it is called
'degassing' (by analogy, perhaps, with the use of the same term in vacuum
technology). 5. [IBM] /n./ Empty space on a disk that has been clandestinely
allocated against future need.

gaseous

/adj./ Deserving of being gassed. Disseminated by Geoff Goodfellow while at

SRI; became particularly popular after the Moscone-Milk killings in San
Francisco, when it was learned that the defendant Dan White (a politician who
had supported Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under Proposition 7 if
convicted of first-degree murder (he was eventually convicted of manslaughter).

gawble

/gaw'bl/ /n./ See chawmp.

GC

/G-C/ [from LISP terminology; 'Garbage Collect'] 1. /vt./ To clean up and throw
away useless things. "I think I'll GC the top of my desk today." When said of
files, this is equivalent to GFR. 2. /vt./ To recycle, reclaim, or put to
another use. 3. /n./ An instantiation of the garbage collector process.

'Garbage collection' is computer-science techspeak for a particular class of

strategies for dynamically but transparently reallocating computer memory (i.e.,
without requiring explicit allocation and deallocation by higher-level
software). One such strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in
memory and determining what is no longer accessible; useless data items are then
discarded so that the memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another
purpose. Implementations of the LISP language usually use garbage collection.

In jargon, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the abbrev GC is more
frequently used because it is shorter. Note that there is an ambiguity in usage
that has to be resolved by context: "I'm going to garbage-collect my desk"
usually means to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to throw away or
recycle the desk itself.

GCOS

: /jee'kohs/ /n./ A quick-and-dirty clone of System/360 DOS that emerged

from GE around 1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive
Operating System). Later kluged to support primitive timesharing and
transaction processing. After the buyout of GE's computer division by Honeywell,
the name was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS). Other OS
groups at Honeywell began referring to it as 'God's Chosen Operating System',
allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's uninformed and snotty attitude about
the superiority of their product. All this might be of zero interest, except
for two facts: (1) The GCOS people won the political war, and this led in the
orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell Multics, and (2) GECOS/GCOS left one
permanent mark on Unix. Some early Unix systems at Bell Labs used GCOS machines
for print spooling and various other services; the field added to '/etc/passwd'
to carry GCOS ID information was called the 'GECOS field' and survives today as
the 'pw_gecos' member used for the user's full name and other human-ID
information. GCOS later played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal
also-ran in the mainframe market, and was itself ditched for Unix in the late
1980s when Honeywell retired its aging big iron designs.

GECOS

: /jee'kohs/ /n./ See GCOS.

gedanken

/g*-dahn'kn/ /adj./ Ungrounded; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried;

untested.

'Gedanken' is a German word for 'thought'. A thought experiment is one you

carry out in your head. In physics, the term 'gedanken experiment' is used to
refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider
because it can be reasoned about theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment
of relativity theory involves thinking about a man in an elevator accelerating
through space.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but must be
used with care. It's too easy to idealize away some important aspect of the
real world in constructing the 'apparatus'.

Among hackers, accordingly, the word has a pejorative connotation. It is

typically used of a project, especially one in artificial intelligence research,
that is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever
being implemented to any great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by
people who aren't very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are just
in a hurry. A 'gedanken thesis' is usually marked by an obvious lack of
intuition about what is programmable and what is not, and about what does and
does not constitute a clear specification of an algorithm. See also
AI-complete, DWIM.

geef

/v./ [ostensibly from 'gefingerpoken'] /vt./ Syn. mung. See also

blinkenlights.
geek code

/n./ (also "Code of the Geeks"). A set of codes commonly used in sig blocks
to broadcast the interests, skills, and aspirations of the poster. Features a G
at the left margin followed by numerous letter codes, often suffixed with
plusses or minuses. Because many net users are involved in computer science,
the most common prefix is 'GCS'. To see a copy of the current code, browse
http://krypton.mankato.msus.edu/~hayden/geek.html. Here is a sample geek code
(that or Robert Hayden, the code's inventor) from that page:

----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK---- Version: 3.1 GED/J d-- s:++ : a-

C++(++++)$ ULUO++ P+ +++ L++ !E--- W+(--) N+++ o+ K+++ w+(--) O-
M+$ ++ V-- PS++(+++) $ PE++(+) $ Y++ PGP++ t- 5+++ X++ R+++ $ tv+
b+ DI+++ D+++ G+++++ $ e++$ ++++ h r-- y+** ----END GEEK CODE
BLOCK----
The geek code originated in 1993; it was inspired (according to the inventor) by
previous "bear", "smurf" and "twink" style-and-sexual-preference codes from
lesbian and gay newsgroups. It has in turn spawned imitators; there is now
even a "Saturn geek code" for owners of the Saturn car. See also computer
geek.

geek out

/vi./ To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in a non-hackish context, for

example at parties held near computer equipment. Especially used when you need
to do or say something highly technical and don't have time to explain: "Pardon
me while I geek out for a moment." See computer geek; see also propeller
head.

gen

/jen/ /n.,v./ Short for generate, used frequently in both spoken and written
contexts.

gender mender

/n./ A cable connector shell with either two male or two female connectors on
it, used to correct the mismatches that result when some loser didn't
understand the RS232C specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE.
Used esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM PC's bogus
D-9 format. Also called 'gender bender', 'gender blender', 'sex changer', and
even 'homosexual adapter;' however, there appears to be some confusion as to
whether a 'male homosexual adapter' has pins on both sides (is doubly male) or
sockets on both sides (connects two males).

General Public Virus

/n./ Pejorative name for some versions of the GNU project copyleft or
General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or apps
incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same
counter-commercial terms as GNU stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft
'infects' software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other
software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation's official
position as of January 1991 is that copyright law limits the scope of the GPL to
"programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code", and that the
'infection' is not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is
transmitted (as in, for example, use of the Bison parser skeleton).
Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the copyleft language is
'boobytrapped' has caused many developers to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL.
Recent (July 1991) changes in the language of the version 2.00 license may
eliminate this problem.

generate

/vt./ To produce something according to an algorithm or program or set of

rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect of the execution of an
algorithm or program. The opposite of parse. This term retains its
mechanistic connotations (though often humorously) when used of human behavior.
"The guy is rational most of the time, but mention nuclear energy around him and
he'll generate infinite flamage."

Genius From Mars Technique

/n./ [TMRC] A visionary quality which enables one to ignore the standard
approach and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. An attack on a
problem from an offbeat angle that no one has ever thought of before, but that
in retrospect makes total sense. Compare grok, zen.

gensym

/jen'sim/ [from MacLISP for 'generated symbol'] 1. /v./ To invent a new name
for something temporary, in such a way that the name is almost certainly not in
conflict with one already in use. 2. /n./ The resulting name. The canonical
form of a gensym is 'Gnnnn' where nnnn represents a number; any LISP hacker
would recognize G0093 (for example) as a gensym. 3. A freshly generated data
structure with a gensymmed name. Gensymmed names are useful for storing or
uniquely identifying crufties (see cruft).

Get a life!

/imp./ Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the person to whom it is directed

has succumbed to terminal geekdom (see computer geek). Often heard on
Usenet, esp. as a way of suggesting that the target is taking some obscure
issue of theology too seriously. This exhortation was popularized by William
Shatner on a "Saturday Night Live" episode in a speech that ended "Get a
*life*!", but some respondents believe it to have been in use before then. It
was certainly in wide use among hackers for at least five years before achieving
mainstream currency in early 1992.

Get a real computer!

/imp./ Typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting
work done on a system that (a) is single-tasking, (b) has no hard disk, or (c)
has an address space smaller than 16 megabytes. This is as of early 1996; note
that the threshold for 'real computer' rises with time. See bitty box and
toy.

GFR

/G-F-R/ /vt./ [ITS: from 'Grim File Reaper', an ITS and LISP Machine utility]
To remove a file or files according to some program-automated or semi-automatic
manual procedure, especially one designed to reclaim mass storage space or
reduce name-space clutter (the original GFR actually moved files to tape).
Often generalized to pieces of data below file level. "I used to have his phone
number, but I guess I GFRed it." See also prowler, reaper. Compare GC,
which discards only provably worthless stuff.

GIFs at 11
 [Fidonet] Fidonet alternative to film at 11, especially in echoes (Fidonet
topic areas) where uuencoded GIFs are permitted. Other formats, especially JPEG
and MPEG, may be referenced instead.

gig

/jig/ or /gig/ /n./ [SI] See quantifiers.

giga-

/ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/ /pref./ [SI] See quantifiers.

GIGO

/gi:'goh/ [acronym] 1. 'Garbage In, Garbage Out' — usually said in response

to lusers who complain that a program didn't "do the right thing" when given
imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to
describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or
imprecise data. 2. 'Garbage In, Gospel Out': this more recent expansion is a
sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in
'computerized' data.

gilley

/n./ [Usenet] The unit of analogical bogosity. According to its originator, the
standard for one gilley was "the act of bogotoficiously comparing the shutting
down of 1000 machines for a day with the killing of one person". The
milligilley has been found to suffice for most normal conversational exchanges.

gillion

/gil'y*n/ or /jil'y*n/ /n./ [formed from giga- by analogy with mega/million

and tera/trillion] 10^9. Same as an American billion or a British 'milliard'.
How one pronounces this depends on whether one speaks giga- with a hard or
soft 'g'.

GIPS

/gips/ or /jips/ /n./ [analogy with MIPS] Giga-Instructions per Second (also
possibly 'Gillions of Instructions per Second'; see gillion). In 1991, this
is used of only a handful of highly parallel machines, but this is expected to
change. Compare KIPS.

glark

/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
contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but 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 verb to 'glark' because glork was
already an established jargon term. Compare grok, zen.

glass

/n./ [IBM] Synonym for silicon.

glass tty

/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: like
a printing terminal, it can't do fancy 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; compare
dumb terminal, smart terminal. See "TV Typewriters" (Appendix A) for an
interesting true story about a glass tty.

glassfet

/glas'fet/ /n./ [by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for

'Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor'] Syn. firebottle, a
humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.

glitch

/glich/ [from German 'glitschig' 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 is
specifically called a 'power glitch' (also power hit), 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. /vi./ To commit a glitch.
See gritch. 3. /vt./ [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 these uses of 'glitch' derive from the specific technical meaning
the term has in the electronic hardware world, where it is now techspeak. A
glitch can occur when 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. If another circuit inspects the output at just the wrong time,
reading the random value, the results can be very wrong and very hard to debug
(a glitch is one of many causes of electronic heisenbugs).

glob

/glob/, *not* /glohb/ /v.,n./ [Unix] 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
that many hackers use some of them in written 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 single character (generally read this way only at
the beginning or in the middle of 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 his name was [KC]arl" (expresses ambiguity). "I don't
read talk.politics.*" (any of the talk.politics subgroups on Usenet). Other
examples are given under the entry for X. Note that glob patterns are
similar, but not identical, to those used in regexps.

Historical note: The jargon usage derives from 'glob', the name of a subprogram
that expanded wildcards in archaic pre-Bourne versions of the Unix shell.

glork

/glork/ 1. /interj./ Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with outrage, as

when one attempts to save the results of two hours of editing and finds that the
system has just crashed. 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See foo.
3. /vt./ Similar to glitch, but usually used reflexively. "My program just
glorked itself." See also glark.

glue

/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

/nar'lee/ /adj./ Both obscure and hairy (sense 1). "Yow! — the tuned
assembler implementation of BitBlt is really gnarly!" From a similar but less
specific usage in surfer slang.

GNU

/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 [email protected] . GNU EMACS and the GNU C compiler,
two tools designed for this project, have become 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 software hoarding!" Though
this remains 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
software for free redistribution under the Free Software Foundation's
imprimatur. See EMACS, copyleft, General Public Virus, Linux. 2. Noted
Unix hacker John Gilmore [email protected] , founder of Usenet's anarchic
alt.* hierarchy.

GNUMACS

/gnoo'maks/ /n./ [contraction of 'GNU EMACS'] Often-heard abbreviated name for

the GNU project's flagship tool, EMACS. Used esp. in contrast with
GOSMACS.

go flatline

/v./ [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death]
(also adjectival 'flatlined'). 1. To die, terminate, or fail, esp.
irreversibly. In hacker parlance, this is used of machines only, human death
being considered somewhat too serious a matter to employ jargon-jokes about. 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, to fail by losing vertical scan,
so all one sees is a bright horizontal line bisecting the screen.

go root
/vi./ [Unix] 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

/n./ [UK] Syn. chrome. Mainstream in some parts of UK.

gobble

/vt./ 1. To consume, usu. used with 'up'. "The output spy gobbles characters
out of a tty output buffer." 2. To obtain, usu. used with 'down'. "I guess
I'll gobble down a copy of the documentation tomorrow." See also snarf.

Godwin's Law

/prov./ [Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a

comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in
many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned
the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's
Law thus practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length
in those groups.

Godzillagram

/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 is an
IP datagram whose destination IP address is [255.255.255.255]. Fortunately, few
gateways are foolish enough to attempt to implement this case! 2. A network
packet of maximum size. An IP Godzillagram has 65,536 octets. Compare super
source quench.

golden

/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

/n. obs./ The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal
based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The 'golf ball' was a little spherical
frob bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on
four parallels of latitude; one could change the font by swapping in a different
golf ball. The print element spun and jerked alarmingly in action and when in
motion was sometimes described as an 'infuriated 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 stayed, firmly rooted, for the next 20, until character displays
gave way to programmable bit-mapped devices with the flexibility to support
other character sets.

gonk

/gonk/ /vi.,n./ 1. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any

reasonable recognition. In German the term is (mythically) 'gonken'; in Spanish
the verb becomes 'gonkar'. "You're gonking me. That story you just told me is a
bunch of gonk." In German, 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

/gon'kyoo-lay-tr/ /n./ [from the old "Hogan's Heroes" TV series] 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

/gon'zoh/ /adj./ [from Hunter S. Thompson] 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
without the implication of obscurity or complexity.

Good Thing

/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 relaying netnews." 2. Something that can't 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 Thing", specifically connotes that the
thing has drastically reduced a programmer's work load. Oppose Bad Thing.

gopher

/n./ A type of Internet service first floated around 1991 and now (1994) being
obsolesced by the World Wide Web. Gopher presents a menuing interface to a tree
or graph of links; the links can be to documents, runnable programs, or other
gopher menus arbitrarily far across the net.

Some claim that the gopher software, which was originally developed at the
University of Minnesota, was named after the Minnesota Gophers (a sports team).
Others claim the word derives from American slang 'gofer' (from "go for",
dialectical "go fer"), one whose job is to run and fetch things. Finally,
observe that gophers (aka woodchucks) dig long tunnels, and the idea of
tunneling through the net to find information was a defining metaphor for the
developers. Probably all three things were true, but with the first two coming
first and the gopher-tunnel metaphor serendipitously adding flavor and impetus
to the project as it developed out of its concept stage.

gopher hole

/n./ 1. Any access to a gopher. 2. [Amateur Packet Radio] The terrestrial

analog of a wormhole (sense 2), from which this term was coined. A gopher
hole links two amateur packet relays through some non-ham radio medium.

gorets

/gor'ets/ /n./ The unknown ur-noun, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on
the Usenet newsgroup alt.gorets, which seems to be a running contest to redefine
the word by implication in the funniest and most peculiar way, with the
understanding that no definition is ever final. [A correspondent from the
Former Soviet Union informs me that 'gorets' is Russian for 'mountain dweller'
— ESR] Compare frink.

gorilla arm
/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
designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After
more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and
oversized — the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen and
feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to
human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand for "How is
this going to fly in *real* use?".

gorp

/gorp/ /n./ [CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old Raisins and
Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like foo and bar.

GOSMACS

/goz'maks/ /n./ [contraction of 'Gosling EMACS'] 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
author, James Gosling, went on to invent NeWS and the programming language
Java; the latter earned him demigod status.

Gosperism

/gos'p*r-izm/ /n./ A hack, invention, or saying due to 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

/n./ A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or

environment, that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it both enticingly
easy to invoke and completely unexpected and/or unreasonable in its outcome.
For example, a classic gotcha in C is the fact that 'if (a=b) code;' is
syntactically valid and sometimes even 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

/G-P-L/ /n./ Abbreviation for 'General Public License' in widespread use; see
copyleft, General Public Virus.

GPV

/G-P-V/ /n./ Abbrev. for General Public Virus in widespread use.

grault

/grawlt/ /n./ Yet another metasyntactic variable, invented by Mike Gallaher

and propagated by the GOSMACS documentation. See corge.

gray goo

/n./ A hypothetical substance composed of sagans 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 Earth being eventually converted to robot 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

/n./ The flag day in 1985 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. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup
names. "The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great
Renaming, it was net.sources."

Great Runes

/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 transmittal devices, the Teletype 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 Of The Day was therefore, which one to
choose. A study was 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 when the letters are mangled or partly 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."

In this way (or so, at least, hacker 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. Thus, that one bad call stuck us with Great Runes for
thirty years.

Great Worm, the

/n./ The 1988 Internet worm perpetrated by RTM. This is a play on Tolkien
(compare elvish, elder days). In the fantasy history of his Middle Earth
books, there were dragons powerful enough to lay waste to entire regions; two of
these (Scatha and Glaurung) were known as "the Great Worms". This usage
expresses the connotation that the RTM hack was a sort of devastating watershed
event in hackish history; certainly it did more to make non-hackers nervous
about the Internet than anything before or since.

great-wall

/vi.,n./ [from SF fandom] 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 value of N,
which is the number of people in the group, can be inferred from context (see
N). See oriental food, ravs, stir-fried random.

Green Book

/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, and the White Book
(sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on
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", which
defines an international standard Unix 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 Purple Book. 4. The IEEE 1003.1 POSIX Operating
Systems Interface standard has been dubbed "The Ugly Green Book". 5. Any of the
1992 standards issued by the CCITT's tenth plenary assembly. These include,
among other things, the X.400 email standard and the Group 1 through 4 fax
standards. See also book titles.

green bytes

/n./ (also 'green words') 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) at which these two approaches were being 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 the packing method for the
image." Compare out-of-band, zigamorph, fence (sense 1).

green card

/n./ [after the "IBM System/360 Reference Data" card] A 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 go get my green card so I
can check the 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 scene that took
place in a programmers' terminal 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 olive and rapidly left the room, never to return.

green lightning

/n./ [IBM] 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 the
user know that 'something is happening'. 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 marketing. "Motorola calls the CISC cruft
in the 88000 architecture 'compatibility logic', but I call it green lightning".
See also feature (sense 6).

green machine

/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
olive-drab 'uniform' paint used for military equipment.

Green's Theorem

/prov./ [TMRC] For any story, in any group of people there will be at least one
person who has not heard the story. A refinement of the theorem states that
there will be *exactly* one person (if there were more than one, it wouldn't be
as bad to re-tell the story). [The name of this theorem is a play on a
fundamental theorem in calculus. — ESR]

grep

/grep/ /vi./ [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)'] To rapidly scan a file or
set of files looking for a particular string or pattern (when browsing through a
large set of files, one may speak of 'grepping around'). By extension, to look
for something by pattern. "Grep the bulletin board for the system backup
schedule, would you?" See also vgrep.

grilf

// /n./ Girlfriend. Like newsfroup and filk, a typo reincarnated as a new

word. Seems to have originated sometime in 1992 on Usenet. [A friend tells
me there was a Lloyd Biggle SF novel "Watchers Of The Dark", in which alien
species after species goes insane and begins to chant "Grilf! Grilf!". A human
detective eventually determines that the word means "Liar!" I hope this has
nothing to do with the popularity of the Usenet term. — ESR]

grind

/vt./ 1. [MIT and Berkeley] To prettify hardcopy of code, especially LISP code,
by reindenting lines, printing keywords and comments in distinct fonts (if
available), etc. This usage was associated with the MacLISP community and is
now rare; prettyprint was and is the generic term for such operations. 2.
[Unix] To generate the formatted version of a document from the nroff,
troff, TeX, or Scribe source. 3. To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but
not necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task.
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. 'grind
grind' /excl./ Roughly, "Isn't the machine slow today!"

grind crank

/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 the
appropriate gesture and noise. See 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 'The Rice Institute Computer' (TRIC) and
later 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
arrangement that repeatedly pushed the single-step 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.

gripenet

/n./ [IBM] A wry (and thoroughly unofficial) name for IBM's internal VNET
system, deriving from its common use by IBMers to voice pointed criticism of IBM
management that would be taboo in more formal channels.
gritch

/grich/ [MIT] 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).

Interestingly, this word seems to have a separate history from glitch, with
which it is often confused. Back in the early 1960s, when 'glitch' was strictly
a hardware-tech's term of art, the Burton House dorm at M.I.T. maintained a
"Gritch Book", a blank volume, into which the residents hand-wrote complaints,
suggestions, and witticisms. Previous years' volumes of this tradition were
maintained, dating back to antiquity. The word "gritch" was described as a
portmanteau of "gripe" and "bitch". Thus, sense 3 above is at least
historically incorrect.

grok

/grok/, var. /grohk/ /vt./ [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'] The emphatic form is 'grok in fullness'. 1. To
understand, usually in a global sense. Connotes intimate and exhaustive
knowledge. Contrast zen, which is similar supernal understanding experienced
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

/gronk/ /vt./ [popularized by Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." but the word
apparently predates that] 1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart
it. More severe than 'to frob' (sense 2). 2. [TMRC] To cut, sever, smash, or
similarly disable. 3. The sound made by many 3.5-inch diskette drives. In
particular, the microfloppies on a Commodore Amiga go "grink, gronk".

gronk out

/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

/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!" Compare broken, which means about the same as gronk used of
hardware, but connotes depression or mental/emotional problems in people.

grovel

/vi./ 1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used

transitively with 'over' or 'through'. "The file scavenger has been groveling
through the /usr directories for 10 minutes now." Compare grind and crunch.
Emphatic form: 'grovel obscenely'. 2. To 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
/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

/guhb'*sh/ /n./ [a portmanteau of 'garbage' and 'rubbish'; may have originated

with SF author Philip K. Dick] Garbage; c**p; nonsense. "What is all this
gubbish?" The opposite portmanteau 'rubbage' is also reported; in fact, it was
British slang during the 19th century and appears in Dickens.

guiltware

/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 of
money. 2. A piece of shareware that works.

gumby

/guhm'bee/ /n./ [from a class of Monty Python characters, poss. with some
influence from the 1960s claymation character] An act of minor but conspicuous
stupidity, often in 'gumby maneuver' or 'pull a gumby'. 2. [NRL] /n./ A
bureaucrat, or other technical incompetent who impedes the progress of real
work. 3. /adj./ Relating to things typically associated with people in sense 2.
(e.g. "Ran would be writing code, but Richard gave him gumby work that's due
on Friday", or, "Dammit! Travel screwed up my plane tickets. I have to go out
on gumby patrol.")

gun

/vt./ [ITS: from the ':GUN' command] 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." Usage: now rare. Compare can, blammo.

gunch

/guhnch/ /vt./ [TMRC] To push, prod, or poke at a device that has almost (but
not quite) produced the desired result. Implies a threat to mung.

gurfle

/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

/n./ [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
bits.

guru meditation

/n./ Amiga equivalent of 'panic' in Unix (sometimes just called a 'guru' or

'guru event'). When the system crashes, a cryptic message of the form "GURU
MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY" may appear, indicating what the problem was. An
Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Sometimes a guru event
must be followed by a Vulcan nerve pinch.

This term is (no surprise) an in-joke from the earliest days of the Amiga.
There used to be a device called a 'Joyboard' which was basically a plastic
board built onto a joystick-like device; it was sold with a skiing game
cartridge for the Atari game machine. It is said that whenever the prototype OS
crashed, the system programmer responsible would calm down by concentrating on a
solution while sitting cross-legged on a Joyboard trying to keep the board in
balance. This position resembled that of a meditating guru. Sadly, the joke
was removed in AmigaOS 2.04 (actually in 2.00, a buggy post-2.0 release on the
A3000 only).

gweep

/gweep/ [WPI] 1. /v./ To hack, usually at night. At WPI, from 1975 onwards,
one who gweeped could often be found at the College Computing Center punching
cards or crashing the PDP-10 or, later, the DEC-20. A correspondent who was
there at the time opines that the term was originally onomatopoetic, describing
the keyclick sound of the Datapoint terminals long connected to the PDP-10. The
term has survived the demise of those technologies, however, and was still alive
in late 1991. "I'm going to go gweep for a while. See you in the morning." "I
gweep from 8 PM till 3 AM during the week." 2. /n./ One who habitually gweeps
in sense 1; a hacker. "He's a hard-core gweep, mumbles code in his sleep."

h -

[from SF fandom] 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-infix marking of 'Ghod' and other words spread 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 benchmark names
(Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc.); this is probably patterning on the original
Whetstone (the name of a laboratory) but influenced by the
fannish/counterculture h infix.

ha ha only serious

[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 jokes that
are both intended and perceived 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 hacker culture is often perceived as 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 master. See also hacker humor,
and AI koans.

hack

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't hack this heat!" 4. /vt./ To work on 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 to "`foo' is my major interest
(or project)". "I hack solid-state physics." See Hacking X for Y. 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. /n./ Short for hacker. 8. See
nethack. 9. [MIT] /v./ To explore the basements, roof ledges, and steam
tunnels of a large, institutional building, to the dismay of Physical Plant
workers and (since this is usually performed at educational institutions) the
Campus Police. This activity has been found to be eerily similar to playing
adventure games such as Dungeons and Dragons and Zork. See also vadding.

Constructions on this term abound. They include 'happy hacking' (a farewell),

'how's hacking?' (a friendly greeting among hackers) and 'hack, hack' (a fairly
content-free but friendly comment, often used as a temporary farewell). For
more on this totipotent term see "The Meaning of 'Hack'". See also neat
hack, real hack.

hack attack

/n./ [poss. by analogy with 'Big Mac Attack' from ads for the McDonald's
fast-food chain; the variant 'big hack attack' is reported] Nearly synonymous
with hacking run, though the latter more strongly implies an all-nighter.

hack mode

/n./ 1. What one is in when hacking, of course. 2. More specifically, a

Zen-like state of total focus on The Problem that may be achieved when one is
hacking (this is why every good hacker is part mystic). Ability to enter such
concentration at will correlates strongly with wizardliness; it is one of the
most important skills learned during larval stage. Sometimes amplified as
'deep hack mode'.

Being yanked out of hack mode (see priority interrupt) may be experienced as a
physical shock, and the sensation of being in hack mode is more than a little
habituating. The intensity of this experience is probably by itself sufficient
explanation for the existence of hackers, and explains why many resist being
promoted out of positions where they can code. See also cyberspace (sense 2).

Some aspects of hackish etiquette will appear quite odd to an observer unaware
of the high value placed on hack mode. For example, if someone appears at your
door, it is perfectly okay to hold up a hand (without turning one's eyes away
from the screen) to avoid being interrupted. One may read, type, and interact
with the computer for quite some time before further acknowledging the other's
presence (of course, he or she is reciprocally free to leave without a word).
The understanding is that you might be in hack mode with a lot of delicate
state (sense 2) in your head, and you dare not swap that context out until
you have reached a good point to pause. See also juggling eggs.

hack on

/vt./ To hack; implies that the subject is some pre-existing hunk of code
that one is evolving, as opposed to something one might hack up.

hack together

/vt./ To throw something together so it will work. Unlike 'kluge together' or

cruft together, this does not necessarily have negative connotations.

hack up
/vt./ To hack, but generally implies that the result is a hack in sense 1 (a
quick hack). Contrast this with hack on. To 'hack up on' implies a
quick-and-dirty modification to an existing system. Contrast hacked up;
compare kluge up, monkey up, cruft together.

hack value

/n./ Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a
seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack.
For example, MacLISP had features for reading and printing Roman numerals, which
were installed purely for hack value. See display hack for one method of
computing hack value, but this cannot really be explained, only experienced. As
Louis Armstrong once said when asked to explain jazz: "Man, if you gotta ask
you'll never know." (Feminists please note Fats Waller's explanation of rhythm:
"Lady, if you got to ask, you ain't got it.")

hacked off

/adj./ [analogous to 'pissed off'] Said of system administrators who have

become annoyed, upset, or touchy owing to suspicions that their sites have been
or are going to be victimized by crackers, or used for inappropriate,
technically illegal, or even overtly criminal activities. For example, having
unreadable files in your home directory called 'worm', 'lockpick', or 'goroot'
would probably be an effective (as well as impressively obvious and stupid) way
to get your sysadmin hacked off at you.

It has been pointed out that there is precedent for this usage in U.S. Navy
slang, in which officers under discipline are sometimes said to be "in hack" and
one may speak of "hacking off the C.O.".

hacked up

/adj./ Sufficiently patched, kluged, and tweaked that the surgical scars are
beginning to crowd out normal tissue (compare critical mass). Not all
programs that are hacked become 'hacked up'; if modifications are done with some
eye to coherence and continued maintainability, the software may emerge better
for the experience. Contrast hack up.

hacker

/n./ [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] 1. A person who
enjoys exploring the details of programmable systems and how to stretch their
capabilities, as opposed to most users, who prefer to learn only the minimum
necessary. 2. One who programs enthusiastically (even obsessively) or who
enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person
capable of appreciating hack value. 4. A person who is good at programming
quickly. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work
using it or on it; as in 'a Unix hacker'. (Definitions 1 through 5 are
correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. An expert or enthusiast of
any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. One who enjoys the
intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming or circumventing limitations.
8. [deprecated] A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive information
by poking around. Hence 'password hacker', 'network hacker'. The correct term
for this sense is cracker.

The term 'hacker' also tends to connote membership in the global community
defined by the net (see network, the and Internet address). It also implies
that the person described is seen to subscribe to some version of the hacker
ethic (see hacker ethic).

It is better to be described as a hacker by others than to describe oneself that

way. Hackers consider themselves something of an elite (a meritocracy based on
ability), though one to which new members are gladly welcome. There is thus a
certain ego satisfaction to be had in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if
you claim to be one and are not, you'll quickly be labeled bogus). See also
wannabee.

hacker ethic

/n./ 1. The belief that information-sharing is a powerful positive good, and

that it is an ethical duty of hackers to share their expertise by writing free
software and facilitating access to information and to computing resources
wherever possible. 2. The belief that system-cracking for fun and exploration
is ethically OK as long as the cracker commits no theft, vandalism, or breach of
confidentiality.

Both of these normative ethical principles are widely, but by no means

universally, accepted among hackers. Most hackers subscribe to the hacker ethic
in sense 1, and many act on it by writing and giving away free software. A few
go further and assert that *all* information should be free and *any*
proprietary control of it is bad; this is the philosophy behind the GNU
project.

Sense 2 is more controversial: some people consider the act of cracking itself
to be unethical, like breaking and entering. But the belief that 'ethical'
cracking excludes destruction at least moderates the behavior of people who see
themselves as 'benign' crackers (see also samurai). On this view, it may be
one of the highest forms of hackerly courtesy to (a) break into a system, and
then (b) explain to the sysop, preferably by email from a superuser account,
exactly how it was done and how the hole can be plugged — acting as an unpaid
(and unsolicited) tiger team.

The most reliable manifestation of either version of the hacker ethic is that
almost all hackers are actively willing to share technical tricks, software, and
(where possible) computing resources with other hackers. Huge cooperative
networks such as Usenet, FidoNet and Internet (see Internet address) can
function without central control because of this trait; they both rely on and
reinforce a sense of community that may be hackerdom's most valuable intangible
asset.

hacker humor

: A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor found among hackers,

having the following marked characteristics:

1. Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor having to do

with confusion of metalevels (see meta). One way to make a hacker laugh: hold
a red index card in front of him/her with "GREEN" written on it, or vice-versa
(note, however, that this is funny only the first time).

2. Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs, such as

specifications (see write-only memory), standards documents, language
descriptions (see INTERCAL), and even entire scientific theories (see quantum
bogodynamics, computron).

3. Jokes that involve screwily precise reasoning from bizarre, ludicrous, or

just grossly counter-intuitive premises.

4. Fascination with puns and wordplay.

5. A fondness for apparently mindless humor with subversive currents of

intelligence in it — for example, old Warner Brothers and Rocky
Bullwinkle cartoons, the Marx brothers, the early B-52s, and Monty Python's
Flying Circus. Humor that combines this trait with elements of high camp and
slapstick is especially favored.
6. References to the symbol-object antinomies and associated ideas in Zen
Buddhism and (less often) Taoism. See has the X nature, Discordianism,
zen, ha ha only serious, AI koans.

See also filk, retrocomputing, and A Portrait of J. Random Hacker in

Appendix B. If you have an itchy feeling that all 6 of these traits are really
aspects of one thing that is incredibly difficult to talk about exactly, you are
(a) correct and (b) responding like a hacker. These traits are also
recognizable (though in a less marked form) throughout science-fiction fandom.

hacking run

/n./ [analogy with 'bombing run' or 'speed run'] A hack session extended long
outside normal working times, especially one longer than 12 hours. May cause
you to 'change phase the hard way' (see phase).

Hacking X for Y

/n./ [ITS] Ritual phrasing of part of the information which ITS made publicly
available about each user. This information (the INQUIR record) was a sort of
form in which the user could fill out various fields. On display, two of these
fields were always combined into a project description of the form "Hacking X
for Y" (e.g., '"Hacking perceptrons for Minsky"'). This form of description
became traditional and has since been carried over to other systems with more
general facilities for self-advertisement (such as Unix plan files).

Hackintosh

/n./ 1. An Apple Lisa that has been hacked into emulating a Macintosh (also
called a 'Mac XL'). 2. A Macintosh assembled from parts theoretically belonging
to different models in the line.

hackish

/hak'ish/ /adj./ (also hackishness n.) 1. Said of something that is or

involves a hack. 2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See
also true-hacker.

hackishness

/n./ The quality of being or involving a hack. This term is considered mildly
silly. Syn. hackitude.

hackitude

/n./ Syn. hackishness; this word is considered sillier.

hair

/n./ [back-formation from hairy] The complications that make something hairy.
"Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of hair." Often seen in
the phrase 'infinite hair', which connotes extreme complexity. Also in
'hairiferous' (tending to promote hair growth): "GNUMACS elisp encourages lusers
to write complex editing modes." "Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right." (or
just: "Hair squared!")

hairball
/n./ [Fidonet] A large batch of messages that a store-and-forward network is
failing to forward when it should. Often used in the phrase "Fido coughed up a
hairball today", meaning that the stuck messages have just come unstuck,
producing a flood of mail where there had previously been drought.

hairy

/adj./ 1. Annoyingly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy." 2.

Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy." 3. Of people, high-powered,
authoritative, rare, expert, and/or incomprehensible. Hard to explain except in
context: "He knows this hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about."
See also hirsute.

A well-known result in topology called the Brouwer Fixed-Point Theorem states

that any continuous transformation of a surface into itself has at least one
fixed point. Mathematically literate hackers tend to associate the term 'hairy'
with the informal version of this theorem; "You can't comb a hairy ball smooth."

The adjective 'long-haired' is well-attested to have been in slang use among

scientists and engineers during the early 1950s; it was equivalent to modern
'hairy' senses 1 and 2, and was very likely ancestral to the hackish use. In
fact the noun 'long-hair' was at the time used to describe a person satisfying
sense 3. Both senses probably passed out of use when long hair was adopted as a
signature trait by the 1960s counterculture, leaving hackish 'hairy' as a sort
of stunted mutant relic.

HAKMEM

/hak'mem/ /n./ MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972). A legendary collection of neat
mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and
elsewhere. (The title of the memo really is "HAKMEM", which is a 6-letterism
for 'hacks memo'.) Some of them are very useful techniques, powerful theorems,
or interesting unsolved problems, but most fall into the category of
mathematical and computer trivia. Here is a sampling of the entries (with
authors), slightly paraphrased:

Item 41 (Gene Salamin): There are exactly 23,000 prime numbers less than 2^(18).

Item 46 (Rich Schroeppel): The most *probable* suit distribution in bridge hands
is 4-4-3-2, as compared to 4-3-3-3, which is the most *evenly* distributed.
This is because the world likes to have unequal numbers: a thermodynamic effect
saying things will not be in the state of lowest energy, but in the state of
lowest disordered energy.

Item 81 (Rich Schroeppel): Count the magic squares of order 5 (that is, all the
5-by-5 arrangements of the numbers from 1 to 25 such that all rows, columns, and
diagonals add up to the same number). There are about 320 million, not counting
those that differ only by rotation and reflection.

Item 154 (Bill Gosper): The myth that any given programming language is machine
independent is easily exploded by computing the sum of powers of 2. If the
result loops with period = 1 with sign +, you are on a sign-magnitude machine.
If the result loops with period = 1 at -1, you are on a twos-complement machine.
If the result loops with period greater than 1, including the beginning, you
are on a ones-complement machine. If the result loops with period greater than
1, not including the beginning, your machine isn't binary — the pattern should
tell you the base. If you run out of memory, you are on a string or bignum
system. If arithmetic overflow is a fatal error, some fascist pig with a
read-only mind is trying to enforce machine independence. But the very ability
to trap overflow is machine dependent. By this strategy, consider the universe,
or, more precisely, algebra: Let X = the sum of many powers of 2 = ...111111
(base 2). Now add X to itself: X + X = ...111110. Thus, 2X = X - 1, so X = -1.
Therefore algebra is run on a machine (the universe) that is two's-complement.
Item 174 (Bill Gosper and Stuart Nelson): 21963283741 is the only number such
that if you represent it on the PDP-10 as both an integer and a floating-point
number, the bit patterns of the two representations are identical.

Item 176 (Gosper): The "banana phenomenon" was encountered when processing a
character string by taking the last 3 letters typed out, searching for a random
occurrence of that sequence in the text, taking the letter following that
occurrence, typing it out, and iterating. This ensures that every 4-letter
string output occurs in the original. The program typed BANANANANANANANA....
We note an ambiguity in the phrase, "the Nth occurrence of." In one sense,
there are five 00's in 0000000000; in another, there are nine. The editing
program TECO finds five. Thus it finds only the first ANA in BANANA, and is
thus obligated to type N next. By Murphy's Law, there is but one NAN, thus
forcing A, and thus a loop. An option to find overlapped instances would be
useful, although it would require backing up N - 1 characters before seeking the
next N-character string.

Note: This last item refers to a Dissociated Press implementation. See also
banana problem.

HAKMEM also contains some rather more complicated mathematical and technical
items, but these examples show some of its fun flavor.

An HTML transcription of the document is available at

ftp://ftp.netcom.com/pub/hb/hbaker/hakmem/hakmem.html.

hakspek

/hak'speek/ /n./ A shorthand method of spelling found on many British academic

bulletin boards and talker systems. Syllables and whole words in a sentence
are replaced by single ASCII characters the names of which are phonetically
similar or equivalent, while multiple letters are usually dropped. Hence, 'for'
becomes '4'; 'two', 'too', and 'to' become '2'; 'ck' becomes 'k'. "Before I see
you tomorrow" becomes "b4 i c u 2moro". First appeared in London about 1986,
and was probably caused by the slowness of available talker systems, which
operated on archaic machines with outdated operating systems and no standard
methods of communication. Has become rarer since. See also talk mode.

hammer

/vt./ Commonwealth hackish syn. for bang on.

hamster

/n./ 1. [Fairchild] A particularly slick little piece of code that does one
thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a hamster happily
spinning its exercise wheel. 2. A tailless mouse; that is, one with an infrared
link to a receiver on the machine, as opposed to the conventional cable. 3. [UK]
Any item of hardware made by Amstrad, a company famous for its cheap plastic
PC-almost-compatibles.

hand cruft

/vt./ [pun on 'hand craft'] See cruft, sense 3.

hand-hacking

/n./ 1. The practice of translating hot spots from an HLL into hand-tuned
assembler, as opposed to trying to coerce the compiler into generating better
code. Both the term and the practice are becoming uncommon. See tune, bum,
by hand; syn. with /v./ cruft. 2. More generally, manual construction or
patching of data sets that would normally be generated by a translation utility
and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or
modified by humans.

hand-roll

/v./ [from obs. mainstream slang 'hand-rolled' in opposition to 'ready-made',

referring to cigarettes] To perform a normally automated software installation
or configuration process by hand; implies that the normal process failed due
to bugs in the configurator or was defeated by something exceptional in the
local environment. "The worst thing about being a gateway between four
different nets is having to hand-roll a new sendmail configuration every time
any of them upgrades."

handle

/n./ 1. [from CB slang] An electronic pseudonym; a 'nom de guerre' intended to

conceal the user's true identity. Network and BBS handles function as the same
sort of simultaneous concealment and display one finds on Citizen's Band radio,
from which the term was adopted. Use of grandiose handles is characteristic of
warez d00dz, crackers, weenies, spods, and other lower forms of network
life; true hackers travel on their own reputations rather than invented
legendry. Compare nick. 2. [Mac] A pointer to a pointer to
dynamically-allocated memory; the extra level of indirection allows on-the-fly
memory compaction (to cut down on fragmentation) or aging out of unused
resources, with minimal impact on the (possibly multiple) parts of the larger
program containing references to the allocated memory. Compare snap (to snap
a handle would defeat its purpose); see also aliasing bug, dangling pointer.

handshaking

/n./ Hardware or software activity designed to start or keep two machines or

programs in synchronization as they do protocol. Often applied to human
activity; thus, a hacker might watch two people in conversation nodding their
heads to indicate that they have heard each others' points and say "Oh, they're
handshaking!". See also protocol.

handwave

[poss. from gestures characteristic of stage magicians] 1. /v./ To gloss over a

complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid)
point with blatantly faulty logic. 2. /n./ The act of handwaving. "Boy, what a
handwave!"

If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It is

self-evident that...", it is a good bet he is about to handwave (alternatively,
use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a paraphrase of someone
else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). The theory behind this term is
that if you wave your hands at the right moment, the listener may be
sufficiently distracted to not notice that what you have said is bogus.
Failing that, if a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the objection
with a wave of your hand.

The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands up, palms
forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at the elbows and/or
shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the handwave); alternatively, holding
the forearms in one position while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them
flutter. In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark; if a speaker
makes an outrageously unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands
in this way, as an accusation, far more eloquent than words could express, that
his logic is faulty.
hang

/v./ 1. To wait for an event that will never occur. "The system is hanging
because it can't read from the crashed drive". See wedged, hung. 2. To
wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something happens. "The
program displays a menu and then hangs until you type a character." Compare
block. 3. To attach a peripheral device, esp. in the construction 'hang off':
"We're going to hang another tape drive off the file server." Implies a device
attached with cables, rather than something that is strictly inside the
machine's chassis.

Hanlon's Razor

/prov./ A corollary of Finagle's Law, similar to Occam's Razor, that reads

"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity."
The derivation of the Hanlon eponym is not definitely known, but a very similar
remark ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply result from
stupidity.") appears in "Logic of Empire", a 1941 story by Robert A. Heinlein,
who calls it the 'devil theory' of sociology. Heinlein's popularity in the
hacker culture makes plausible the supposition that 'Hanlon' is derived from
'Heinlein' by phonetic corruption. A similar epigram has been attributed to
William James, but Heinlein more probably got the idea from Alfred Korzybski and
other practitioners of General Semantics. Quoted here because it seems to be a
particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in sig blocks, fortune
cookie files and the login banners of BBS systems and commercial networks.
This probably reflects the hacker's daily experience of environments created by
well-intentioned but short-sighted people. Compare Sturgeon's Law.

happily

/adv./ Of software, used to emphasize that a program is unaware of some

important fact about its environment, either because it has been fooled into
believing a lie, or because it doesn't care. The sense of 'happy' here is not
that of elation, but rather that of blissful ignorance. "The program continues
to run, happily unaware that its output is going to /dev/null." Also used to
suggest that a program or device would really rather be doing something
destructive, and is being given an opportunity to do so. "If you enter an O
here instead of a zero, the program will happily erase all your data."

haque

/hak/ /n./ [Usenet] Variant spelling of hack, used only for the noun form and
connoting an elegant hack. that is a hack in sense 2.

hard boot

/n./ See boot.

hardcoded

/adj./ 1. Said of data inserted directly into a program, where it cannot be

easily modified, as opposed to data in some profile, resource (see de-rezz
sense 2), or environment variable that a user or hacker can easily modify. 2.
In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a '#define' macro (see
magic number).

hardwarily

/hard-weir'*-lee/ /adv./ In a way pertaining to hardware. "The system is

hardwarily unreliable." The adjective 'hardwary' is *not* traditionally used,
though it has recently been reported from the U.K. See softwarily.

hardwired

/adj./ 1. In software, syn. for hardcoded. 2. By extension, anything that is

not modifiable, especially in the sense of customizable to one's particular
needs or tastes.

has the X nature

[seems to derive from Zen Buddhist koans of the form "Does an X have the
Buddha-nature?"] /adj./ Common hacker construction for 'is an X', used for
humorous emphasis. "Anyone who can't even use a program with on-screen help
embedded in it truly has the loser nature!" See also the X that can be Y is
not the true X.

hash bucket

/n./ A notional receptacle, a set of which might be used to apportion data

items for sorting or lookup purposes. When you look up a name in the phone book
(for example), you typically hash it by extracting its first letter; the hash
buckets are the alphabetically ordered letter sections. This term is used as
techspeak with respect to code that uses actual hash functions; in jargon, it is
used for human associative memory as well. Thus,

two things 'in the same hash bucket' are more difficult to discriminate, and
may be confused. "If you hash English words only by length, you get too many
common grammar words in the first couple of hash buckets." Compare hash
collision.

hash collision

/n./ [from the techspeak] (var. 'hash clash') When used of people, signifies a
confusion in associative memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (see
thinko). True story: One of us [ESR] was once on the phone with a friend
about to move out to Berkeley. When asked what he expected Berkeley to be like,
the friend replied: "Well, I have this mental picture of naked women throwing
Molotov cocktails, but I think that's just a collision in my hash tables."
Compare hash bucket.

hat

/n./ Common (spoken) name for the circumflex (`^', ASCII 1011110) character.
See ASCII for other synonyms.

HCF

/H-C-F/ /n./ Mnemonic for 'Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented
and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly
included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back
as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which an HCF opcode
became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to toggle a subset
of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations this could
actually cause lines to burn up.

heads down

[Sun] /adj./ Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything
outside the focus area is missed. See also hack mode and larval stage,
although this mode is hardly confined to fledgling hackers.

heartbeat

/n./ 1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end of

every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is still connected.
2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware, such as a bus
clock or a periodic interrupt. 3. The 'natural' oscillation frequency of a
computer's clock crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's clock
rate. 4. A signal emitted at regular intervals by software to demonstrate that
it is still alive. Sometimes hardware is designed to reboot the machine if it
stops hearing a heartbeat. See also breath-of-life packet.

heatseeker

/n./ [IBM] A customer who can be relied upon to buy, without fail, the latest
version of an existing product (not quite the same as a member of the lunatic
fringe). A 1993 example of a heatseeker is someone who, owning a 286 PC and
Windows 3.0, goes out and buys Windows 3.1 (which offers no worthwhile benefits
unless you have a 386). If all customers were heatseekers, vast amounts of
money could be made by just fixing the bugs in each release (n) and selling it
to them as release (n+1).

heavy metal

/n./ [Cambridge] Syn. big iron.

heavy wizardry

/n./ Code or designs that trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or

experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application
interface. Distinguished from deep magic, which trades more on arcane
*theoretical* knowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is
interfacing to X (sense 2) without a toolkit. Esp. found in source-code
comments of the form "Heavy wizardry begins here". Compare voodoo
programming.

heavyweight

/adj./ High-overhead; baroque; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp.

used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of
implementation in which maximum generality and/or ease of implementation has
been pushed at the expense of mundane considerations such as speed, memory
utilization, and startup time. EMACS is a heavyweight editor; X is an
*extremely* heavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one
hacker's heavyweight is another's elephantine and a third's monstrosity.
Oppose 'lightweight'. Usage: now borders on techspeak, especially in the
compound 'heavyweight process'.

heisenbug

/hi:'zen-buhg/ /n./ [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum

physics] A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe
or isolate it. (This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a
debugger sometimes alters a program's operating environment significantly enough
that buggy code, such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized
memory, behaves quite differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug; see also mandelbug,
schroedinbug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from uninitialized auto
variables, fandango on core phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of
the malloc arena) or errors that smash the stack.

Helen Keller mode

/n./ 1. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and blind,
i.e., accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite
loop or some other excursion into deep space. (Unfair to the real Helen
Keller, whose success at learning speech was triumphant.) See also go
flatline, catatonic. 2. On IBM PCs under DOS, refers to a specific failure
mode in which a screen saver has kicked in over an ill-behaved application
which bypasses the very interrupts the screen saver watches for activity. Your
choices are to try to get from the program's current state through a successful
save-and-exit without being able to see what you're doing, or to re-boot the
machine. This isn't (strictly speaking) a crash.

hello, sailor!

/interj./ Occasional West Coast equivalent of hello, world; seems to have

originated at SAIL, later associated with the game Zork (which also included
"hello, aviator" and "hello, implementor"). Originally from the traditional
hooker's greeting to a swabbie fresh off the boat, of course.

hello, wall!

/excl./ See wall.

hello, world

/interj./ 1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/Unix universe. 2. Any
of the minimal programs that emit this message. Traditionally, the first
program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one that just
prints "hello, world" to standard output (and indeed it is the first example
program in K R). Environments that generate an unreasonably large
executable for this trivial test or which require a hairy compiler-linker
invocation to generate it are considered to lose (see X). 3. Greeting
uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting information from anyone
present. "Hello, world! Is the VAX back up yet?"

hex

/n./ 1. Short for hexadecimal, base 16. 2. A 6-pack of anything (compare

quad, sense 2). Neither usage has anything to do with magic or black art,
though the pun is appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story: As
a joke, some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be worn as
protective amulets against hostile magic. The chips were, of course, hex
inverters.

hexadecimal

: /n./ Base 16. Coined in the early 1960s to replace earlier 'sexadecimal',
which was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by the rest of
the industry.

Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take 'binary' to be

paradigmatic, the most etymologically correct term for base 10, for example, is
'denary', which comes from 'deni' (ten at a time, ten each), a Latin
'distributive' number; the corresponding term for base-16 would be something
like 'sendenary'. 'Decimal' is from an ordinal number; the corresponding prefix
for 6 would imply something like 'sextidecimal'. The 'sexa-' prefix is Latin
but incorrect in this context, and 'hexa-' is Greek. The word 'octal' is
similarly incorrect; a correct form would be 'octaval' (to go with decimal), or
'octonary' (to go with binary). If anyone ever implements a base-3 computer,
computer scientists will be faced with the unprecedented dilemma of a choice
between two *correct* forms; both 'ternary' and 'trinary' have a claim to this
throne.

hexit

/hek'sit/ /n./ A hexadecimal digit (0—9, and A—F or a—f). Used by people
who claim that there are only *ten* digits, dammit; sixteen-fingered human
beings are rather rare, despite what some keyboard designs might seem to imply
(see space-cadet keyboard).

HHOK

See ha ha only serious.

HHOS

See ha ha only serious.

hidden flag

/n./ [scientific computation] An extra option added to a routine without

changing the calling sequence. For example, instead of adding an explicit input
variable to instruct a routine to give extra diagnostic output, the programmer
might just add a test for some otherwise meaningless feature of the existing
inputs, such as a negative mass. The use of hidden flags can make a program
very hard to debug and understand, but is all too common wherever programs are
hacked on in a hurry.

high bit

/n./ [from 'high-order bit'] 1. The most significant bit in a byte. 2. By

extension, the most significant part of something other than a data byte: "Spare
me the whole saga, just give me the high bit." See also meta bit, hobbit,
dread high-bit disease, and compare the mainstream slang 'bottom line'.

high moby

/hi:' mohb'ee/ /n./ The high half of a 512K PDP-10's physical address space;
the other half was of course the low moby. This usage has been generalized in a
way that has outlasted the PDP-10; for example, at the 1990 Washington D.C.
Area Science Fiction Conclave (Disclave), when a miscommunication resulted in
two separate wakes being held in commemoration of the shutdown of MIT's last
ITS machines, the one on the upper floor was dubbed the 'high moby' and the
other the 'low moby'. All parties involved grokked this instantly. See
moby.

highly

/adv./ [scientific computation] The preferred modifier for overstating an

understatement. As in: 'highly nonoptimal', the worst possible way to do
something; 'highly nontrivial', either impossible or requiring a major research
project; 'highly nonlinear', completely erratic and unpredictable; 'highly
nontechnical', drivel written for lusers, oversimplified to the point of being
misleading or incorrect (compare drool-proof paper). In other computing
cultures, postfixing of in the extreme might be preferred.
hing

// /n./ [IRC] Fortuitous typo for 'hint', now in wide intentional use among
players of initgame. Compare newsfroup, filk.

hired gun

/n./ A contract programmer, as opposed to a full-time staff member. All the

connotations of this term suggested by innumerable spaghetti Westerns are
intentional.

hirsute

/adj./ Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for hairy.

HLL

/H-L-L/ /n./ [High-Level Language (as opposed to assembler)] Found primarily in

email and news rather than speech. Rarely, the variants 'VHLL' and 'MLL' are
found. VHLL stands for 'Very-High-Level Language' and is used to describe a
bondage-and-discipline language that the speaker happens to like; Prolog and
Backus's FP are often called VHLLs. 'MLL' stands for 'Medium-Level Language'
and is sometimes used half-jokingly to describe C, alluding to its
'structured-assembler' image. See also languages of choice.

hoarding

/n./ See software hoarding.

hobbit

/n./ 1. The High Order BIT of a byte; same as the meta bit or high bit. 2.
The non-ITS name of [email protected] (*Hobbit*), master of lasers.

hog

/n.,vt./ 1. Favored term to describe programs or hardware that seem to eat far
more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which noticeably
degrade interactive response. *Not* used of programs that are simply extremely
large or complex or that are merely painfully slow themselves (see pig, run
like a). More often than not encountered in qualified forms, e.g., 'memory
hog', 'core hog', 'hog the processor', 'hog the disk'. "A controller that never
gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the bus-hog timer expires." 2. Also said
of *people* who use more than their fair share of resources (particularly disk,
where it seems that 10% of the people use 90% of the disk, no matter how big the
disk is or how many people use it). Of course, once disk hogs fill up one
filesystem, they typically find some other new one to infect, claiming to the
sysadmin that they have an important new project to complete.

hole

/n./ A region in an otherwise flat entity which is not actually present. For
example, some Unix filesystems can store large files with holes so that unused
regions of the file are never actually stored on disk. (In techspeak, these are
referred to as 'sparse' files.) As another example, the region of memory in IBM
PCs reserved for memory-mapped I/O devices which may not actually be present is
called 'the I/O hole', since memory-management systems must skip over this area
when filling user requests for memory.
hollised

/hol'ist/ /adj./ [Usenet: sci.space] To be hollised is to have been ordered by

one's employer not to post any even remotely job-related material to USENET (or,
by extension, to other Internet media). The original and most notorious case of
this involved one Ken Hollis, a Lockheed employee and space-program enthusiast
who posted publicly available material on access to Space Shuttle launches to
sci.space. He was gagged under threat of being fired in 1994 at the behest of
NASA public-relations officers. The result was, of course, a huge publicity
black eye for NASA. Nevertheless several other NASA contractor employees were
subsequently hollised for similar activities. Use of this term carries the
strong connotation that the persons doing the gagging are bureaucratic idiots
blinded to their own best interests by territorial reflexes.

holy wars

/n./ [from Usenet, but may predate it] /n./ flame wars over religious
issues. The paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms big-endian and
little-endian in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was
entitled "On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace". Other perennial Holy Wars have
included EMACS vs. vi, my personal computer vs. everyone else's personal
computer, ITS vs. Unix, Unix vs. VMS, BSD Unix vs. USG Unix, C vs.
Pascal, C vs. FORTRAN, etc., ad nauseam. The characteristic that
distinguishes holy wars from normal technical disputes is that in a holy war
most of the participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value
choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. See also
theology.

home box

/n./ A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns. "Yeah? Well,
*my* home box runs a full 4.2 BSD, so there!"

home machine

/n./ 1. Syn. home box. 2. The machine that receives your email. These
senses might be distinct, for example, for a hacker who owns one computer at
home, but reads email at work.

home page

/n./ 1. One's personal billboard on the World Wide Web. The term 'home page'
is perhaps a bit misleading because home directories and physical homes in RL
are private, but home pages are designed to be very public. 2. By extension, a
WWW repository for information and links related to a project or organization.
Compare home box.

hook

/n./ A software or hardware feature included in order to simplify later

additions or changes by a user. For example, a simple program that prints
numbers might always print them in base 10, but a more flexible version would
let a variable determine what base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make
the program print numbers in base 5. The variable is a simple hook. An even
more flexible program might examine the variable and treat a value of 16 or less
as the base to use, but treat any other number as the address of a user-supplied
routine for printing a number. This is a hairy but powerful hook; one can
then write a routine to print numbers as Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew
characters, and plug it into the program through the hook. Often the difference
between a good program and a superb one is that the latter has useful hooks in
judiciously chosen places. Both may do the original job about equally well, but
the one with the hooks is much more flexible for future expansion of
capabilities (EMACS, for example, is *all* hooks). The term 'user exit' is
synonymous but much more formal and less hackish.

hop

1. /n./ One file transmission in a series required to get a file from point A
to point B on a store-and-forward network. On such networks (including
UUCPNET and FidoNet), an important inter-machine metric is the number of
hops in the shortest path between them, which can be more significant than their
geographical separation. See bang path. 2. /v./ To log in to a remote
machine, esp. via rlogin or telnet. "I'll hop over to foovax to FTP that."

hose

1. /vt./ To make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance. "That big

ray-tracing program really hoses the system." See hosed. 2. /n./ A narrow
channel through which data flows under pressure. Generally denotes data paths
that represent performance bottlenecks. 3. /n./ Cabling, especially thick
Ethernet cable. This is sometimes called 'bit hose' or 'hosery' (play on
'hosiery') or 'etherhose'. See also washing machine.

hosed

/adj./ Same as down. Used primarily by Unix hackers. Humorous: also implies
a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. Probably derived from the
Canadian slang 'hoser' popularized by the Bob and Doug Mackenzie skits on SCTV,
but this usage predated SCTV by years in hackerdom (it was certainly already
live at CMU in the 1970s). See hose. It is also widely used of people in the
mainstream sense of 'in an extremely unfortunate situation'.

Once upon a time, a Cray that had been experiencing periodic difficulties
crashed, and it was announced to have been hosed. It was discovered that the
crash was due to the disconnection of some coolant hoses. The problem was
corrected, and users were then assured that everything was OK because the system
had been rehosed. See also dehose.

hot chat

/n./ Sexually explicit one-on-one chat. See teledildonics.

hot spot

/n./ 1. [primarily used by C/Unix programmers, but spreading] It is received

wisdom that in most programs, less than 10% of the code eats 90% of the
execution time; if one were to graph instruction visits versus code addresses,
one would typically see a few huge spikes amidst a lot of low-level noise. Such
spikes are called 'hot spots' and are good candidates for heavy optimization or
hand-hacking. The term is especially used of tight loops and recursions in
the code's central algorithm, as opposed to (say) initial set-up costs or large
but infrequent I/O operations. See tune, bum, hand-hacking. 2. The
active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put the mouse's hot spot on
the 'ON' widget and click the left button." 3. A screen region that is sensitive
to mouse gestures, which trigger some action. World Wide Web pages now provide
the canonical examples; WWW browsers present hypertext links as hot spots
which, when clicked on, point the browser at another document (these are
specifically called hotlinks). 4. In a massively parallel computer with
shared memory, the one location that all 10,000 processors are trying to read or
write at once (perhaps because they are all doing a busy-wait on the same
lock). 5. More generally, any place in a hardware design that turns into a
performance bottleneck due to resource contention.

hotlink

/hot'link/ /n./ A hot spot on a World Wide Web page; an area, which, when
clicked or selected, chases a URL. Also spelled 'hot link'. Use of this term
focuses on the link's role as an immediate part of your display, as opposed to
the timeless sense of logical connection suggested by web pointer. Your screen
shows hotlinks but your document has web pointers, not (in normal usage) the
other way around.

house wizard

/n./ [prob. from ad-agency tradetalk, 'house freak'] A hacker occupying a

technical-specialist, R D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A
really effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to
his/her ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of Unix
wizards. The term 'house guru' is equivalent.

HP-SUX

/H-P suhks/ /n./ Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's Unix port,
which features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and
elsewhere (these occasionally create portability problems). HP-UX is often
referred to as 'hockey-pux' inside HP, and one respondent claims that the proper
pronunciation is /H-P ukkkhhhh/ as though one were about to spit. Another such
alternate spelling and pronunciation is "H-PUX" /H-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo
(the former Apollo Computers which was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard
to complain that Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name first, if for
no other reason than the greater eloquence of the resulting acronym. Compare
AIDX, buglix. See also Nominal Semidestructor, Telerat, Open
DeathTrap, ScumOS, sun-stools.

huff

/v./ To compress data using a Huffman code. Various programs that use such
methods have been called 'HUFF' or some variant thereof. Oppose puff.
Compare crunch, compress.

humma

// /excl./ A filler word used on various 'chat' and 'talk' programs when you
had nothing to say but felt that it was important to say something. The word
apparently originated (at least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare
System (MTS, a now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota
during the 1970s and the early 1980s) but was later sighted on early Unix
systems. Compare the U.K's wibble.

hung

/adj./ [from 'hung up'] Equivalent to wedged, but more common at Unix/C
sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. with locked up, wedged; compare
hosed. See also hang. A hung state is distinguished from crashed or
down, where the program or system is also unusable but because it is not
running rather than because it is waiting for something. However, the recovery
from both situations is often the same.

hungry puppy
/n./ Syn. slopsucker.

hungus

/huhng'g*s/ /adj./ [perhaps related to slang 'humongous'] Large, unwieldy,

usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set
of modifications."

hyperspace

/hi:'per-spays/ /n./ A memory location that is *far* away from where the
program counter should be pointing, especially a place that is inaccessible
because it is not even mapped in by the virtual-memory system. "Another core
dump — looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow." (Compare
jump off into never-never land.) This usage is from the SF notion of a
spaceship jumping 'into hyperspace', that is, taking a shortcut through
higher-dimensional space — in other words, bypassing this universe. The
variant 'east hyperspace' is recorded among CMU and Bliss hackers.

hysterical reasons

/n./ (also 'hysterical raisins') A variant on the stock phrase "for historical
reasons", indicating specifically that something must be done in some stupid way
for backwards compatibility, and moreover that the feature it must be compatible
with was the result of a bad design in the first place. "All IBM PC video
adapters have to support MDA text mode for hysterical reasons." Compare
bug-for-bug compatible.

I didn't change anything!

/interj./ An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression

test. The canonical reply to this assertion is "Then it works just the same
as it did before, doesn't it?" See also one-line fix. This is also heard from
applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications problem on an
unrelated systems software change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after
terminals were added to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be
false. Upon close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the
program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but which
actually hosed the code completely.

I see no X here.

Hackers (and the interactive computer games they write) traditionally favor
this slightly marked usage over other possible equivalents such as "There's no X
here!" or "X is missing." or "Where's the X?". This goes back to the original
PDP-10 ADVENT, which would respond in this wise if you asked it to do
something involving an object not present at your location in the game.

IBM

/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
Machines'. See TLA. These abbreviations 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 overpriced (though that does count against them), 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 them. With
the release of the Unix-based RIOS 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 some rampantly
unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's own beleaguered hacker
underground.

IBM discount

/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 area cause
prices to rise.

ICBM address

/n./ (Also 'missile address') The form used to register a site with the Usenet
mapping project includes a blank for longitude and latitude, preferably to
seconds-of-arc accuracy. This is actually used for generating
geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on a plotter; however, it has become
traditional to refer to this as one's 'ICBM address' or 'missile address', and
many people include it in their sig block with that name. (A real missile
address would include target altitude.)

ice

/n./ [coined by Usenetter Tom Maddox, popularized by William Gibson's cyberpunk

SF novels: a contrived acronym for 'Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics']
Security software (in Gibson's novels, software that responds to intrusion by
attempting to immobilize or even literally kill the intruder). Hence,
'icebreaker': a program designed for cracking security on a system.

Neither term is in serious use yet as of early 1996, but many hackers find the
metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in the future. In the
meantime, the speculative usage could be confused with 'ICE', an acronym for
"in-circuit emulator".

In ironic reference to the speculative usage, however, some hackers and computer
scientists formed ICE (International Cryptographic Experiment) in 1994. ICE is a
consortium to promote uniform international access to strong cryptography. ICE
has a home page at http://www.tis.com/crypto/ice.html.

idempotent

/adj./ [from mathematical techspeak] Acting as if used only once, even if used
multiple times. This term is often used with respect to C header files, which
contain common definitions and declarations to be included by several source
files. If a header file is ever included twice during the same compilation
(perhaps due to nested #include files), compilation errors can result unless the
header file has protected itself against multiple inclusion; a header file so
protected is said to be idempotent. The term can also be used to describe an
initialization subroutine that is arranged to perform some critical action
exactly once, even if the routine is called several times.
If you want X, you know where to find it.

There is a legend that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C, once responded to

demands for features resembling those of what at the time was a much more
popular language by observing "If you want PL/I, you know where to find it."
Ever since, this has been hackish standard form for fending off requests to
alter a new design to mimic some older (and, by implication, inferior and
baroque) one. The case X = Pascal manifests semi-regularly on Usenet's
comp.lang.c newsgroup. Indeed, the case X = X has been reported in discussions of
graphics software (see X).

ifdef out

/if'def owt/ /v./ Syn. for condition out, specific to C.

ill-behaved

/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 things
(like screen, keyboard, and disk I/O) 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 the effect that (owing to gross inadequacies 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

// /abbrev./ [from SF fandom via Usenet; abbreviation 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 seen in variant forms such as IMNSHO (In My Not-So-Humble Opinion)
and IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion).

Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!

/prov./ [Usenet] Since Usenet first got off the ground in 1980—81, it has
grown exponentially, approximately doubling in size every year. On the other
hand, most people feel the signal-to-noise ratio of Usenet has dropped
steadily. These trends led, as far back as mid-1983, to predictions of the
imminent collapse (or death) of the net. Ten years and numerous doublings
later, enough of these gloomy prognostications have been confounded that the
phrase "Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!" has become a running joke, hauled
out any time someone grumbles about the S/N ratio or the huge and steadily
increasing volume, or the possible loss of a key node or link, or the potential
for lawsuits when ignoramuses post copyrighted material, etc., etc., etc.

in the extreme

/adj./ A preferred superlative suffix for many hackish terms. See, for
example, 'obscure in the extreme' under obscure, and compare highly.

inc

/ink/ /v./ Verbal (and only rarely written) shorthand for increment, i.e.
'increase by one'. Especially used by assembly programmers, as many assembly
languages have an 'inc' mnemonic. Antonym: dec.
incantation

/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 that
they must be learned from a wizard. "This compiler normally locates
initialized data in the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation
they will be forced into text space."

include

/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 discussion of inclusion styles
under "Hacker Writing Style". 2. [from C] '#include disclaimer.h ' has
appeared in sig blocks to refer to a notional 'standard disclaimer file'.

include war

/n./ Excessive multi-leveled inclusion 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 flames and the urge to start a kill file.

indent style

/n./ [C programmers] The rules one uses to indent code in a readable fashion.
There are four major C indent styles, described below; all have the aim of
making it easier for the reader to visually track the scope of control
constructs. The significant variable is the placement of '' and '' with
respect to the statement(s) they enclose and to the guard or controlling
statement (`if', 'else', 'for', 'while', or 'do') on the block, if any.

'K R style' — Named after Kernighan Ritchie, because the 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 one tab) per level;
four spaces are occasionally 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 normal
indent style in Pascal and Algol. Basic indent per level shown here is eight
spaces, but four spaces are just as common (esp. in C++ code).

if ( cond ) body

'Whitesmiths style' — popularized by the examples that came with Whitesmiths C,

an early commercial C compiler. Basic indent per level shown here is eight
spaces, but four spaces are occasionally seen.

if ( cond ) body

'GNU style' — Used throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software Foundation code,
and just about nowhere else. Indents are always four spaces per 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. K R/1TBS used to be nearly universal, but 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 important than their
style's relative economy with 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

/n./ See coefficient of X.

infant mortality

/n./ It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large;
this term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of sudden hardware
failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is,
until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices
and thermal-cycling stress in 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 (or, occasionally, as 'sudden infant death syndrome'). See
bathtub curve, burn-in period.

infinite

/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
out that fractals are an excellent example 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 time to optimize my program." See also semi.

infinite loop

/n./ One that never terminates (that is, the machine spins or buzzes
forever and goes catatonic). There is a standard joke that has been made about
each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast machine: "The Cray-3 is so fast it
can execute an infinite loop in under 2 seconds!"

Infinite-Monkey Theorem

/n./ "If you put an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one
will bash out the script for Hamlet." (One may also hypothesize a small number
of monkeys and a very long period of time.) This theorem asserts nothing about
the intelligence of the one random monkey that eventually comes up with the
script (and note that the mob will also type out all the possible *incorrect*
versions of Hamlet). It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a
brute force method; the implication is that, with enough resources thrown at
it, any technical challenge becomes a one-banana problem.

This theorem was first popularized by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. It
became part of the idiom of techies via the classic SF short story "Inflexible
Logic" by Russell Maloney, and many younger hackers know it through a reference
in Douglas Adams's "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy".

infinity

/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
plus infinity. In N-bit twos-complement 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.

inflate

/vt./ To decompress or puff a file. Rare among Internet hackers, used

primarily by MS-DOS/Windows types.

Infocom

/n./ A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that

commercialized the MDL parser technology used for Zork to produce a line of
text adventure games that remain favorites among hackers. Infocom's games were
intelligent, funny, witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical, and most
thoroughly hackish in spirit. The physical game packages from Infocom are now
prized collector's items. The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom
games were written in a kind of P-code and distributed with a P-code interpreter
core, and freeware emulators for that interpreter have been written to permit
the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally graced.

initgame

/in-it'gaym/ /n./ [IRC] An IRC version of the venerable trivia game "20
questions", in which one user changes his nick to the initials of a famous
person or other named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no
questions, with the one to guess the person getting to be "it" next. As a
courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a 4-letter hint of
the form sex, nationality, life-status, reality-status. For example, MAAR means
"Male, American, Alive, Real" (as opposed to "fictional"). Initgame can be
surprisingly addictive. See also hing.

[1996 update: a recognizable version of the initgame has become a staple of some
radio talk shows in the U.S. We had it first! — ESR]

insanely great

/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

/in't*r-kal/ /n./ [said by the authors to stand for 'Compiler Language With No
Pronounceable Acronym'] A computer language designed by Don Woods and James
Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer
languages in all ways but one; it is purely a 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

incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if 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 simplest method, the programmer would be made to 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 peculiar features designed to make it even 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 level
of unpopularity; there is even an alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the
study and ... appreciation of the language on Usenet.

An INTERCAL implementation is available at the Retrocomputing Museum,

http://www.ccil.org/retro.

interesting

/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 interesting
times". Oppose trivial, uninteresting.

Internet

: /n./ The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as

the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been
widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military
command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear
war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to
get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources.

As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is
now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing,
but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual
usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the
Internet's potential as a medium of communication between *humans* and linked up
in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics,
techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon
lie in those early years.

Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The typical
machine/OS combination moved from DEC PDP-10s and PDP-20s, running TOPS-10
and TOPS-20, to PDP-11s and VAXes and Suns running Unix, and in the 1990s to
Unix on Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most
notably in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the implementation of
Domain Name Service in 1983. With TCP/IP and DNS in place. It was around this
time that people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks
with ARPANET at its core as "the Internet".

The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines — connected

institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research project. By the
mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile.
In 1986, the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its
five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the
Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in
1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major
telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely
commercial.

That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered the
Internet. Once again, the killer app was not the anticipated one — rather,
what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and multimedia features of
the World Wide Web. As of early 1996, the Internet has seen off its only
serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecom
monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of of the
proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after
1980. It is now a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a
globally-extended Internet will become the key unifying communications
technology of the next century. See also network, the and Internet address.

Internet address

: /n./ 1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form [email protected],

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
network, the and network address. All 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 network address reachable through Internet;
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 by a selection of
geographical domains:

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 the U.S. or
Canada.

us sites in the U.S. outside the functional domains

su sites in the ex-Soviet Union (see kremvax)
uk sites in the United Kingdom

Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally
with a name identical to the state's postal 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

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. Often
explicitly spoken. "Interrupt — have you seen Joe recently?" See priority
interrupt. 3. Under MS-DOS, nearly synonymous with 'system call', because the
OS and BIOS routines are both called using the INT instruction (see interrupt
list, the) and because programmers so often have to bypass the OS (going
directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get reasonable performance.

interrupt list, the

: /n./ [MS-DOS] 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 [email protected] . As of
late 1992, it had grown to approximately two megabytes in length.

interrupts locked out

/adj./ 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 also common.
Variations abound; "to have one's interrupt mask bit set" and "interrupts masked
out" are also heard. See also spl.

IRC

/I-R-C/ /n./ [Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide "party line" network that allows
one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as a network of
Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from client programs, one
per user. The IRC community and the Usenet and MUD communities overlap to
some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have discovered the
wonders of computer networks. Some Usenet jargon has been adopted on IRC, as
have some conventions such as emoticons. There is also a vigorous native
jargon, represented in this lexicon by entries marked '[IRC]'. See also talk
mode.

iron

/n./ Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of mainframe class with
big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is
also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrase big iron. Oppose
silicon. See also dinosaur.

Iron Age

/n./ In the history of computing, 1961—1971 — the formative era of commercial

mainframe technology, when ferrite-core dinosaurs ruled the earth. The Iron
Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the
PDP-1) and ended with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor
(the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also Stone Age; compare elder days.

iron box

/n./ [Unix/Internet] 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 cracker's movements in unobvious ways, and 'bait' files
designed to keep him interested and logged 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 in Appendix C). Compare
padded cell.

ironmonger

/n./ [IBM] A hardware specialist (derogatory). Compare sandbender, polygon

pusher.

ISP

/I-S-P/ Common abbreviation for Internet Service Provider, a kind of company

that barely existed before 1993. ISPs sell Internet access to the mass market.
While the big nationwide commercial BBSs with Internet access (like America
Online, CompuServe, GEnie, Netcom, etc.) are technically ISPs, the term is
usually reserved for local or regional small providers (often run by hackers
turned entrepreneurs) who resell Internet access cheaply without themselves
being information providers or selling advertising. Compare NSP.

ITS

: /I-T-S/ /n./ 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though

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 have been 'an ITS hacker' qualifies one 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 newer machines, with the remaining
ITS boxes run 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 Technology in Sweden is maintaining one '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). 2. A mythical image of
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-hacking that supported only monocase 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

// Abbreviation for 'It Would Be Nice If'. Compare WIBNI.

IYFEG

// [Usenet] Abbreviation for 'Insert Your Favorite Ethnic Group'. Used as a

meta-name when telling ethnic jokes on the net to avoid offending anyone. See
JEDR.

J. Random

/J rand'm/ /n./ [generalized from J. Random Hacker] Arbitrary; ordinary; any

one; any old. 'J. Random' 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', and 'J. Random Nerd' ("Should J. Random Loser 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

/J rand'm hak'r/ /n./ [MIT] A mythical figure like the Unknown Soldier; the
archetypal hacker nerd. See random, Suzie COBOL. This may originally have
been inspired by 'J. Fred Muggs', a show-biz chimpanzee whose name was a
household word back in the early days of TMRC, and was probably influenced by
'J. Presper Eckert' (one of the co-inventors of the electronic computer).

jack in

/v./ To log on to a machine or connect to a network or BBS, esp. for purposes

of entering a virtual reality simulation such as a MUD or IRC (leaving is
"jacking out"). This term derives from cyberpunk SF, in which it was used for
the act of plugging an electrode set into neural sockets in order to interface
the brain directly to a virtual reality. It is primarily used by MUD and IRC
fans and younger hackers on BBS systems.

jaggies
/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

/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 two
spaces appear where it expects one. Most 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 phone book. It is reported that hackers
at IBM 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
software that a hacker is expected to use. "That's 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.

A (poorly documented, naturally) shell simulating JCL syntax is available at the

Retrocomputing Museum http://www.ccil.org/retro.

JEDR

// /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 initials JEDR after he was offended by an ethnic joke posted there. (The
practice was retconned 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 on the
net.culture was to discredit 'sensitivity' arguments for censorship so
thoroughly that more recent attempts to raise them have met with immediate and
near-universal rejection.

JFCL

/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 set and then CLear the flag"; this does something useful, but is a very
fast no-operation if no flag is specified. Geoff Goodfellow, one of the
Steele-1983 co-authors, had JFCL on the license plate of his BMW for years.
Usage: rare except among old-time PDP-10 hackers.

jiffy

/n./ 1. The duration of one tick of the system clock on your 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
every 6 jiffies" means that the virtual 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. Even more confusingly, physicists semi-jokingly use 'jiffy' to mean
the time required for light to travel one foot in a vacuum, which turns out to
be close to one *nanosecond*. 3. Indeterminate time from a few seconds to
forever. "I'll do it in a jiffy" means 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

/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 security
(i.e., by making himself indispensable 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

/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
'systems jock' seem to be the best-established examples.

joe code

/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 anonymous have fingered a

particular Joe at the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and observed that usage has
drifted slightly; the original sobriquet 'Joe code' was intended in sense 1.

1994 update: This term has now generalized to ' name code', used to
designate code with distinct characteristics traceable to its author. "This
section doesn't check for a NULL return from malloc()! Oh. No wonder! It's Ed
code!". Used most often with a programmer who has left the shop and thus is a
convenient scapegoat for anything that is wrong with the project.

jolix

/joh'liks/ /n.,adj./ 386BSD, the freeware port of the BSD Net/2 release to the
Intel i386 architecture by Bill Jolitz and friends. Used to differentiate from
BSDI's port based on the same source tape, which used to be called BSD/386 and
is now BSD/OS. See BSD.

JR[LN]

/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 and WAITS; they
were understood to be the initials of (fictitious) programmers named 'J. Random
Loser' and 'J. Random Nerd' (see J. Random). For 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

/jerst/ /v. obs./ [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] 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

/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 novel "The
Mote in God's Eye", by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, an alien describes a
very difficult task by saying "We juggle priceless eggs in variable gravity."
See also hack mode.

jump off into never-never land

/v./ [from J. M. Barrie's "Peter Pan"] 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.

jupiter

/vt./ [IRC] To kill an IRC robot or user and then take its place by
adopting its nick so that it cannot reconnect. Named after a particular IRC
user who did this to NickServ, the robot in charge of preventing people from
inadvertently using a nick claimed by another user.

K -

/K/ /n./ [from kilo-] A kilobyte. Used both as a spoken word and a written
suffix (like meg and gig for megabyte and gigabyte). See quantifiers.

K R

[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 New Testament.

k-

/pref./ Extremely. Not commonly used among hackers, but quite common among
crackers and warez d00dz in compounds such as 'k-kool' /K'kool'/, 'k-rad'
/K'rad'/, and 'k-awesome' /K'aw`sm/. Also used to intensify negatives; thus,
'k-evil', 'k-lame', 'k-screwed', and 'k-annoying'. Overuse of this prefix, or
use in more formal or technical contexts, is considered an indicator of lamer
status.

kahuna

/k*-hoo'n*/ /n./ [IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] Synonym for
wizard, guru.

kamikaze packet

/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 packet, lamp test segment, et al.). That 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

/n./ Syn. spaghetti code.

ken

/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 a login name and mail address) in 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 also demigod, Unix. 2. A flaming user.
This was originated by the Software Support group at Symbolics because the two
greatest flamers in the user community were both named Ken.

kgbvax

/K-G-B'vaks/ /n./ See kremvax.

KIBO

/ki:'boh/ 1. [acronym] Knowledge In, Bulls*** Out. A summary of what happens

whenever valid data is passed through an organization (or person) that
deliberately or accidentally disregards or ignores its significance. Consider,
for example, what an advertising campaign can do with a product's actual
specifications. Compare GIGO; see also SNAFU principle. 2. James Parry
[email protected] , a Usenetter infamous for various surrealist
net.pranks and an uncanny, machine-assisted knack for joining any thread in
which his nom de guerre is mentioned.

kiboze

/v./ [Usenet] To grep the Usenet news for a string, especially with the
intention of posting a follow-up. This activity was popularised by Kibo (see
KIBO, sense 2).

kibozo

/ki:-boh'zoh/ /n./ [Usenet] One who kibozes but is not Kibo (see KIBO,
sense 2).

kick

/v./ [IRC] To cause somebody to be removed from a IRC channel, an option only
available to CHOPs. This is an extreme measure, often used to combat extreme
flamage or flooding, but sometimes used at the chop's whim. Compare gun.

kill file

/n./ [Usenet] (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
unwanted) patterns of subject, author, or 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 other media. See also plonk.
killer app

The application that actually makes a mass market for a promising but
under-utilized technology. First used in the mid-1980s to describe Lotus 1-2-3
once it became evident that demand for that product had been the major driver of
the early business market for IBM PCs. The term was then restrospectively
applied to VisiCalc, which had played a similar role in the success of the Apple
II. After 1994 it became commonplace to describe the World Wide Web as the
Internet's killer app. One of the standard questions asked about each new
personal-computer technology as it emerges has become "what's the killer app?"

killer micro

/n./ [popularized by Eugene Brooks] 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 the
downsizers. Used esp. of RISC architectures.

The popularity of the phrase 'attack of the killer micros' is doubtless

reinforced by the title of the movie "Attack Of The Killer Tomatoes" (one of the
canonical examples of so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has even
more flavor now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not just
individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively parallel
computers).

[1996 update: Eugene Brooks was right. Since this term first entered the Jargon
File in 1990, the minicomputer has effectively vanished, the mainframe sector
is in deep and apparently terminal decline (with IBM but a shadow of its former
self), and even the supercomputer business has contracted into a smaller niche.
It's networked killer micros as far as the eye can see. — ESR]

killer poke

/n./ A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of

invalid values (see poke) into a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of
various fairly well-known tricks on bitty boxes without hardware memory
management (such as the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload and trash
analog electronics in the monitor. See also HCF.

kilo-

/pref./ [SI] See quantifiers.

KIPS

/kips/ /n./ [abbreviation, by analogy with MIPS using K] Thousands (*not*

1024s) of Instructions Per Second. Usage: rare.

KISS Principle

/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 presentations,
"Keep It Short and Simple".

kit

/n./ [Usenet; poss. fr. DEC slang for a full software distribution, as opposed
to a patch or upgrade] A source software distribution that has been packaged in
such a way that it can (theoretically) be unpacked and installed according to a
series of steps using only standard Unix tools, and entirely documented by some
reasonable chain of references from the top-level README file. The more
general term distribution may imply that special tools or more stringent
conditions on the host environment are required.

klone

/klohn/ /n./ See clone, sense 4.

kludge

1. /klooj/ /n./ Incorrect (though regrettably common) spelling of kluge (US).

These two words have been confused in American usage since the early 1960s, and
widely confounded in Great Britain since the end of World War II. 2. [TMRC] A
crock that works. (A long-ago "Datamation" article by Jackson Granholme
similarly said: "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a
distressing whole.") 3. /v./ To use a kludge to get around a problem. "I've
kludged around it for now, but I'll fix it up properly later."

This word appears to have derived from Scots 'kludge' or 'kludgie' for a common
toilet, via British military slang. It apparently became confused with U.S.
kluge during or after World War II; some Britons from that era use both words
in definably different ways, but kluge is now uncommon in Great Britain.
'Kludge' in Commonwealth hackish differs in meaning from 'kluge' in that it
lacks the positive senses; a kludge is something no Commonwealth hacker wants to
be associated too closely with. Also, 'kludge' is more widely known in British
mainstream slang than 'kluge' is in the U.S.

kluge

/klooj/ [from the German 'klug', clever; poss. related to Polish 'klucza', a
trick or hook] 1. /n./ A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in
hardware or software. 2. /n./ A clever programming trick intended to solve a
particular nasty case in an expedient, if not clear, manner. Often used to
repair bugs. Often involves ad-hockery and verges on being a crock. 3.
/n./ Something that works for the wrong reason. 4. /vt./ To insert a kluge into
a program. "I've kluged this routine to get around that weird bug, but there's
probably a better way." 5. [WPI] /n./ A feature that is implemented in a rude
manner.

Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling 'kludge'.

Reports from old farts are consistent that 'kluge' was the original spelling,
reported around computers as far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used
exclusively of *hardware* kluges. In 1947, the "New York Folklore Quarterly"
reported a classic shaggy-dog story 'Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker' then current in
the Armed Forces, in which a 'kluge' was a complex and puzzling artifact with a
trivial function. Other sources report that 'kluge' was common Navy slang in
the WWII era for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but
consistently failed at sea.

However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a decade older.
Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of a device called a
"Kluge paper feeder", an adjunct to mechanical printing presses. Legend has it
that the Kluge feeder was designed before small, cheap electric motors and
control electronics; it relied on a fiendishly complex assortment of cams,
belts, and linkages to both power and synchronize all its operations from one
motive driveshaft. It was accordingly temperamental, subject to frequent
breakdowns, and devilishly difficult to repair — but oh, so clever! People who
tell this story also aver that 'Kluge' was the name of a design engineer.

There is in fact a Brandtjen Kluge Inc., an old family business that

manufactures printing equipment — interestingly, their name is pronounced
/kloo'gee/! Henry Brandtjen, president of the firm, told me (ESR, 1994) that
his company was co-founded by his father and an engineer named Kluge /kloo'gee/,
who built and co-designed the original Kluge automatic feeder in 1919. Mr.
Brandtjen claims, however, that this was a *simple* device (with only four
cams); he says he has no idea how the myth of its complexity took hold.

TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to have developed in a
milieu that remembered and still used some WWII military slang (see also
foobar). It seems likely that 'kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many
military electronics projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's
venerable Building 20, in which TMRC is also located) during the war.

The variant 'kludge' was apparently popularized by the Datamation article

mentioned above; it was titled "How to Design a Kludge" (February 1962, pp. 30,
31). This spelling was probably imported from Great Britain, where kludge has
an independent history (though this fact was largely unknown to hackers on
either side of the Atlantic before a mid-1993 debate in the Usenet group
alt.folklore.computers over the First and Second Edition versions of this entry;
everybody used to think kludge was just a mutation of kluge). It now
appears that the British, having forgotten the etymology of their own 'kludge'
when 'kluge' crossed the Atlantic, repaid the U.S. by lobbing the 'kludge'
orthography in the other direction and confusing their American cousins'
spelling!

The result of this history is a tangle. Many younger U.S. hackers pronounce the
word as /klooj/ but spell it, incorrectly for its meaning and pronunciation, as
'kludge'. (Phonetically, consider huge, refuge, centrifuge, and deluge as
opposed to sludge, judge, budge, and fudge. Whatever its failings in other
areas, English spelling is perfectly consistent about this distinction.)
British hackers mostly learned /kluhj/ orally, use it in a restricted negative
sense and are at least consistent. European hackers have mostly learned the
word from written American sources and tend to pronounce it /kluhj/ but use the
wider American meaning!

Some observers consider this mess appropriate in view of the word's meaning.

kluge around

/vt./ To avoid a bug or difficult condition by inserting a kluge. Compare

workaround.

kluge up

/vt./ To lash together a quick hack to perform a task; this is milder than
cruft together and has some of the connotations of hack up (note, however,
that the construction 'kluge on' corresponding to hack on is never used).
"I've kluged up this routine to dump the buffer contents to a safe place."

Knights of the Lambda Calculus

/n./ A semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. The

name refers to a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which
LISP is intimately connected. There is no enrollment list and the criteria for
induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer has been known to give out
buttons and, in general, the *members* know who they are....

Knuth

/knooth'/ /n./ [Donald E. Knuth's "The Art of Computer Programming"]

Mythically, the reference that answers all questions about data structures or
algorithms. A safe answer when you do not know: "I think you can find that in
Knuth." Contrast literature, the. See also bible. There is a Donald Knuth
home page at http://www-cs-faculty.Stanford.EDU/~knuth.

kremvax

/krem-vaks/ /n./ [from the then large number of Usenet VAXen with names of
the form foovax] Originally, a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, announced
on April 1, 1984 in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader
Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema as an
April Fool's joke. Other fictitious sites mentioned in the hoax were moskvax
and kgbvax. This was probably the funniest of the many April Fool's forgeries
perpetrated on Usenet (which has negligible security against them), because the
notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally
absurd at the time.

In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in Moscow,
demos.su, joined Usenet. Some readers needed convincing that the postings from
it weren't just another prank. Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the
major poster from there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to
it frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some credulous
readers by blandly asserting that he *was* a hoax!

Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site named kremvax,
thus neatly turning fiction into fact and demonstrating that the hackish sense
of humor transcends cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the
Russian-language material for this lexicon. — ESR]

In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an electronic center

of the anti-communist resistance during the bungled hard-line coup of August
1991. During those three days the Soviet UUCP network centered on kremvax
became the only trustworthy news source for many places within the USSR. Though
the sysops were concentrating on internal communications, cross-border postings
included immediate transliterations of Boris Yeltsin's decrees condemning the
coup and eyewitness reports of the demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those
hours, years of speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain
its grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer networking
were proved devastatingly accurate — and the original kremvax joke became a
reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian revolutionaries of 'glasnost' and
'perestroika' made kremvax one of the timeliest means of their outreach to the
West.

kyrka

/shir'k*/ /n./ [Swedish] See feature key.

lace card

/n. obs./ A punched card with all holes punched (also called a 'whoopee card'
or 'ventilator card'). Card readers tended to jam when they got to one of these,
as the resulting card had too little structural strength to avoid buckling
inside the mechanism. Card punches could also jam trying to produce these
things owing to power-supply problems. When some practical joker fed a lace
card through the reader, you needed to clear the jam with a 'card knife' —
which you used on the joker first.

lamer

/n./ [prob. originated in skateboarder slang] Synonym for luser, not used
much by hackers but common among warez d00dz, crackers, and phreakers.
Oppose elite. Has the same connotations of self-conscious elitism that use of
luser does among hackers.

Crackers also use it to refer to cracker wannabees. In phreak culture, a lamer

is one who scams codes off others rather than doing cracks or really
understanding the fundamental concepts. In warez d00dz culture, where the
ability to wave around cracked commercial software within days of (or before)
release to the commercial market is much esteemed, the lamer might try to upload
garbage or shareware or something incredibly old (old in this context is read as
a few years to anything older than 3 days).

language lawyer

/n./ A person, usually an experienced or senior software engineer, who is

intimately familiar with many or most of the numerous restrictions and features
(both useful and esoteric) applicable to one or more computer programming
languages. A language lawyer is distinguished by the ability to show you the
five sentences scattered through a 200-plus-page manual that together imply the
answer to your question "if only you had thought to look there". Compare
wizard, legal, legalese.

languages of choice

/n./ C, C++, LISP, and Perl. Nearly every hacker knows one of C or
LISP, and most good ones are fluent in both. C++, despite some serious
drawbacks, is generally preferred to other object-oriented languages (though in
1996 it looks as though Java may soon displace it in the affections of hackers,
if not everywhere). Since around 1990 Perl has rapidly been gaining favor,
especially as a tool for systems-administration utilities and rapid prototyping.
Smalltalk and Prolog are also popular in small but influential communities.

There is also a rapidly dwindling category of older hackers with FORTRAN, or

even assembler, as their language of choice. They often prefer to be known as
Real Programmers, and other hackers consider them a bit odd (see "The Story
of Mel, a Real Programmer" in Appendix A). Assembler is generally no longer
considered interesting or appropriate for anything but HLL implementation,
glue, and a few time-critical and hardware-specific uses in systems programs.
FORTRAN occupies a shrinking niche in scientific programming.

Most hackers tend to frown on languages like Pascal and Ada, which don't
give them the near-total freedom considered necessary for hacking (see
bondage-and-discipline language), and to regard everything even remotely
connected with COBOL or other traditional card walloper languages as a total
and unmitigated loss.

larval stage

/n./ Describes a period of monomaniacal concentration on coding apparently

passed through by all fledgling hackers. Common symptoms include the
perpetration of more than one 36-hour hacking run in a given week; neglect of
all other activities including usual basics like food, sleep, and personal
hygiene; and a chronic case of advanced bleary-eye. Can last from 6 months to 2
years, the apparent median being around 18 months. A few so afflicted never
resume a more 'normal' life, but the ordeal seems to be necessary to produce
really wizardly (as opposed to merely competent) programmers. See also
wannabee. A less protracted and intense version of larval stage (typically
lasting about a month) may recur when one is learning a new OS or programming
language.

lase

/layz/ /vt./ To print a given document via a laser printer. "OK, let's lase
that sucker and see if all those graphics-macro calls did the right things."
laser chicken

/n./ Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken, peanuts, and
hot red peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. Many hackers call it 'laser
chicken' for two reasons: It can zap you just like a laser, and the sauce has
a red color reminiscent of some laser beams.

In a variation on this theme, it is reported that some Australian hackers have

redesignated the common dish 'lemon chicken' as 'Chernobyl Chicken'. The name
is derived from the color of the sauce, which is considered bright enough to
glow in the dark (as, mythically, do some of the inhabitants of Chernobyl).

Lasherism

/n./ [Harvard] A program that solves a standard problem (such as the Eight
Queens puzzle or implementing the life algorithm) in a deliberately
nonstandard way. Distinguished from a crock or kluge by the fact that the
programmer did it on purpose as a mental exercise. Such constructions are quite
popular in exercises such as the Obfuscated C Contest, and occasionally in
retrocomputing. Lew Lasher was a student at Harvard around 1980 who became
notorious for such behavior.

laundromat

/n./ Syn. disk farm; see washing machine.

LDB

/l*'d*b/ /vt./ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] To extract from the middle.
"LDB me a slice of cake, please." This usage has been kept alive by Common
LISP's function of the same name. Considered silly. See also DPB.

leaf site

/n./ A machine that merely originates and reads Usenet news or mail, and does
not relay any third-party traffic. Often uttered in a critical tone; when the
ratio of leaf sites to backbone, rib, and other relay sites gets too high, the
network tends to develop bottlenecks. Compare backbone site, rib site.

leak

/n./ With qualifier, one of a class of resource-management bugs that occur when
resources are not freed properly after operations on them are finished, so they
effectively disappear (leak out). This leads to eventual exhaustion as new
allocation requests come in. memory leak and fd leak have their own
entries; one might also refer, to, say, a 'window handle leak' in a window
system.

leaky heap

/n./ [Cambridge] An arena with a memory leak.

leapfrog attack

/n./ Use of userid and password information obtained illicitly from one host
(e.g., downloading a file of account IDs and passwords, tapping TELNET, etc.) to
compromise another host. Also, the act of TELNETting through one or more hosts
in order to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure).

leech

/n./ Among BBS types, crackers and warez d00dz, one who consumes knowledge
without generating new software, cracks, or techniques. BBS culture
specifically defines a leech as someone who downloads files with few or no
uploads in return, and who does not contribute to the message section. Cracker
culture extends this definition to someone (a lamer, usually) who constantly
presses informed sources for information and/or assistance, but has nothing to
contribute.

legal

/adj./ Loosely used to mean 'in accordance with all the relevant rules', esp.
in connection with some set of constraints defined by software. "The older =+
alternate for += is no longer legal syntax in ANSI C." "This parser processes
each line of legal input the moment it sees the trailing linefeed." Hackers
often model their work as a sort of game played with the environment in which
the objective is to maneuver through the thicket of 'natural laws' to achieve a
desired objective. Their use of 'legal' is flavored as much by this
game-playing sense as by the more conventional one having to do with courts and
lawyers. Compare language lawyer, legalese.

legalese

/n./ Dense, pedantic verbiage in a language description, product specification,

or interface standard; text that seems designed to obfuscate and requires a
language lawyer to parse it. Though hackers are not afraid of high
information density and complexity in language (indeed, they rather enjoy both),
they share a deep and abiding loathing for legalese; they associate it with
deception, suits, and situations in which hackers generally get the short end
of the stick.

LER

/L-E-R/ /n./ [TMRC, from 'Light-Emitting Diode'] A light-emitting resistor

(that is, one in the process of burning up). Ohm's law was broken. See also
SED.

LERP

/lerp/ /vi.,n./ Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a verb or noun

for the operation. "Bresenham's algorithm lerps incrementally between the two
endpoints of the line."

let the smoke out

/v./ To fry hardware (see fried). See magic smoke for a discussion of the
underlying mythology.

letterbomb

1. /n./ A piece of email containing live data intended to do nefarious

things to the recipient's machine or terminal. It is possible, for example, to
send letterbombs that will lock up some specific kinds of terminals when they
are viewed, so thoroughly that the user must cycle power (see cycle, sense 3)
to unwedge them. Under Unix, a letterbomb can also try to get part of its
contents interpreted as a shell command to the mailer. The results of this could
range from silly to tragic. See also Trojan horse; compare nastygram. 2.
Loosely, a mailbomb.

lexer

/lek'sr/ /n./ Common hacker shorthand for 'lexical analyzer', the

input-tokenizing stage in the parser for a language (the part that breaks it
into word-like pieces). "Some C lexers get confused by the old-style compound
ops like '=-'."

lexiphage

/lek'si-fayj`/ /n./ A notorious word chomper on ITS. See bagbiter. This

program would draw on a selected victim's bitmapped terminal the words "THE BAG"
in ornate letters, followed a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off.

life

/n./ 1. A cellular-automata game invented by John Horton Conway and first

introduced publicly by Martin Gardner ("Scientific American", October 1970); the
game's popularity had to wait a few years for computers on which it could
reasonably be played, as it's no fun to simulate the cells by hand. Many
hackers pass through a stage of fascination with it, and hackers at various
places contributed heavily to the mathematical analysis of this game (most
notably Bill Gosper at MIT, who even implemented life in TECO!; see
Gosperism). When a hacker mentions 'life', he is much more likely to mean
this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal, or the human state of
existence. 2. The opposite of Usenet. As in "Get a life!"

Life is hard

/prov./ [XEROX PARC] This phrase has two possible interpretations: (1) "While
your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave as though I hadn't heard it."
(2) "While your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious circumstances
prevent it from being seriously considered." The charm of the phrase lies
precisely in this subtle but important ambiguity.

light pipe

/n./ Fiber optic cable. Oppose copper.

lightweight

/adj./ Opposite of heavyweight; usually found in combining forms such as

'lightweight process'.

like kicking dead whales down the beach

/adj./ Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized

by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's
mainframe OSes. "Well, you *could* write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be
like kicking dead whales down the beach." See also fear and loathing.

like nailing jelly to a tree

/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' arrangement of nodes and
arcs that diagrams a given graph is like nailing jelly to a tree, because
nobody's sure what 'prettiest' means algorithmically."

Hacker use of this term may recall mainstream slang originated early in the 20th
century by President Theodore Roosevelt. There is a legend that, weary of
inconclusive talks with Colombia over the right to dig a canal through its
then-province Panama, he remarked, "Negotiating with those pirates is like
trying to nail currant jelly to the wall." Roosevelt's government subsequently
encouraged the anti-Colombian insurgency that created the nation of Panama.

line 666

[from Christian eschatological myth] /n./ The notional line of source at which
a program fails for obscure reasons, implying either that *somebody* is out to
get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten
(when you are not). "It works when I trace through it, but seems to crash on
line 666 when I run it." "What happens is that whenever a large batch comes
through, mmdf dies on the Line of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a
buffer size."

line eater, the

/n. obs./ [Usenet] 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 bug
was quickly personified as a mythical 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 there *was* a space or tab before it, then the 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 still humorously
referred to. The bug itself was still occasionally reported to be lurking in
some mail-to-netnews gateways as late as 1991. 2. See NSA line eater.

line noise

/n./ 1. [techspeak] Spurious characters due to electrical noise in a

communications link, especially an RS-232 serial connection. Line noise may be
induced by poor connections, interference or crosstalk from other circuits,
electrical storms, cosmic rays, or (notionally) birds crapping on the phone
wires. 2. Any chunk of data in a file or elsewhere that looks like the results
of line noise in sense 1. 3. Text that is theoretically a readable text or
program source but employs syntax so bizarre that it looks like line noise in
senses 1 or 2. Yes, there are languages this ugly. The canonical example is
TECO; it is often claimed that "TECO's input syntax is indistinguishable from
line noise." Other non-WYSIWYG editors, such as Multics 'qed' and Unix 'ed',
in the hands of a real hacker, also qualify easily, as do deliberately
obfuscated languages such as INTERCAL.

line starve

[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
starve, '2', line feed." (The line 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.
ASCII 0011010, also called SUB or control-Z, was one common line-starve
character in the days before microcomputers and the X3.64 terminal standard.
Unlike 'line feed', 'line starve' is *not* standard ASCII 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 and troff) that suppresses a
newline or other character(s) that would normally be emitted.

linearithmic

/adj./ Of an algorithm, having running time that is O(N log N). Coined as a
portmanteau of 'linear' and 'logarithmic' in "Algorithms In C" by Robert
Sedgewick (Addison-Wesley 1990, ISBN 0-201-51425-7).

link farm

/n./ [Unix] A directory tree that contains many links to files in a master
directory tree of files. Link farms save space when one is maintaining several
nearly identical copies of the same source tree — for example, when the only
difference is architecture-dependent 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 preprocessors. However, they can also get completely out
of hand, becoming the filesystem equivalent of spaghetti code.

link-dead

/adj./ [MUD] Said of a MUD character who has frozen in place because of a
dropped Internet connection.

lint

[from Unix's 'lint(1)', named for the bits of fluff it supposedly 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,
most esp. if the Unix utility 'lint(1)' 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./ Excess verbiage in a document, as in
"This draft has too much lint".

Linux

: /lee'nuhks/ or /li'nuks/, *not* /li:'nuhks/ /n./ The free Unix workalike

created by Linus Torvalds and friends starting about 1990 (the pronunciation
/lee'nuhks/ is preferred because the name 'Linus' has an /ee/ sound in Swedish).
This may be the most remarkable hacker project in history — an entire clone of
Unix for 386, 486 and Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over the
net (ports to Alpha and Sparc-based machines are underway). This is what GNU
aimed to be, but the Free Software Foundation has not (as of early 1996)
produced the kernel to go with its Unix toolset (which Linux uses). Other,
similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been much less successful. The
secret of Linux's success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to
keep the development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball
effect.

lion food

/n./ [IBM] Middle management or HQ staff (or, 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 agree to meet after 2 months. When
they finally meet, one is skinny and the other 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 fat one replies: "Well, *I* hid near an
IBM 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, and (2) a commentary on the source 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. Because Western Electric wished to
maintain trade secret status on the kernel, the Lions Book 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 hackers.

[1996 update: The Lions book lives again! It will finally see legal public print
as ISBN 1-57398-013-7 from Peer-To-Peer Communications, with a forward by Dennis
Ritchie.]

LISP

/n./ [from 'LISt Processing language', but mythically from 'Lots of Irritating
Superfluous Parentheses'] AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of
(a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the
interpretation of code as data and 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 are quite different in detail from the original 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 utilization of LISPs, gave rise to Alan 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, such as COBOL and Ada, are full of unnecessary crocks.
When the Right Thing has already been done once, there is no justification for
bogosity in newer languages.

list-bomb

/v./ To mailbomb someone by forging messages causing the victim to become a

subscriber to many mailing lists. This is a self-defeating tactic; it merely
forces mailing list servers to require confirmation by return message for every
subscription.

literature, the

/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 Knuth,
which has no connotation of triviality.

lithium lick

/n./ [NeXT] Steve Jobs. Employees who have gotten too much attention from
their esteemed founder are said to have 'lithium lick' when they begin to show
signs of Jobsian fervor and repeat the most recent catch phrases in normal
conversation — for example, "It just works, right out of the box!"
little-endian

/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
microprocessors and a lot of communications 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,
bits within a byte.

live

/li:v/ /adj.,adv./ Opposite of 'test'. Refers to actual real-world data or a

program working with it. For example, the response to "I think the record
deleter is finished" might be "Is it live yet?" or "Have you tried it out on
live data?" This usage usually carries the connotation that live data is more
fragile and must not be corrupted, or bad things will happen. So a more
appropriate response 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, and a haywire record-deleter running amok live
would probably cause great harm.

live data

/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 commands
that allow one to download strings to 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-known bugs in vi that allow certain texts to send
arbitrary commands back to the machine when they are simply viewed. 2. In C
code, data that includes pointers to function hooks (executable code). 3. An
object, such as a trampoline, that is constructed on the fly by a program and
intended to be executed as code.

Live Free Or Die!

/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 underground
tilting against the windmills of 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 give out fake license plates bearing this motto under a
large Unix, all in New Hampshire colors of green and white. These are now
valued collector's items. Recently (1994) an inferior imitation of these has
been put in circulation with a red corporate logo added.

livelock

/li:v'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 deadlock
in that the process is not blocked or waiting for anything, but has a virtually
infinite amount of work to do and can never catch up.

liveware

/li:v'weir/ /n./ 1. Synonym for wetware. Less common. 2. [Cambridge] Vermin.

"Waiter, there's some liveware in my salad..."

lobotomy

/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 removing
the processor from a microcomputer in order to replace or upgrade it. Some very
cheap clone systems are sold in 'lobotomized' form — everything but the
brain.

locals, the

/pl.n./ The users on one's local network (as opposed, say, to people one
reaches via public Internet or UUCP connects). The marked thing about this
usage is how little it has to do with real-space distance. "I have to do some
tweaking on this mail utility before releasing it to the locals."

locked and loaded

/adj./ [from military slang for an M-16 rifle with magazine inserted and
prepared for firing] Said of a removable disk volume properly prepared for use
— that is, locked into the drive and with the heads loaded. Ironically,
because their heads are 'loaded' whenever the power is up, this description is
never used of Winchester drives (which are named after a rifle).

locked up

/adj./ Syn. for hung, wedged.

logic bomb

/n./ Code surreptitiously inserted into an application or OS that causes it to

perform some destructive or security-compromising activity whenever specified
conditions are met. Compare back door.

logical

/adj./ [from the technical term 'logical device', wherein a physical device is
referred to by an arbitrary 'logical' name] Having the role of. If a person
(say, Les Earnest at SAIL) who had long held a certain post left and were
replaced, the replacement would for a while be 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, 'logical west' is toward the ocean,
etc., 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
giving directions, one might say: "To get to Rincon 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 is reinforced by North American
highways 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
circle surrounding Boston at a radius of 10 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. A hacker might describe these directions
as '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
going northwest, curve around to the south, and finish headed due east, passing
along one infamous stretch of pavement that is simultaneously route 128 south
and Interstate 93 north, and is signed as such!)

loop through

/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
and Unix programmers. ITS hackers used to say 'IRP over' after an obscure
pseudo-op in the MIDAS PDP-10 assembler (the same IRP op can nowadays be found
in Microsoft's assembler).

loose bytes

/n./ Commonwealth hackish term for the padding bytes or shims many compilers
insert between members of a record or structure to cope with alignment
requirements imposed by the machine architecture.

lord high fixer

/n./ [primarily British, from Gilbert Sullivan's 'lord high executioner']

The person in an organization who knows the most about some aspect of a system.
See wizard.

lose

[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 ignorant). See also deserves to lose. 4. /n./ Refers to something
that is losing, especially in the phrases "That's a lose!" and "What a lose!"

lose lose

/interj./ A reply to or comment on an undesirable situation. "I accidentally

deleted all my files!" "Lose, lose."

loser

/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
loser', and 'complete loser' (but not **`moby loser', which would be a
contradiction in terms). See luser.

losing

/adj./ Said of anything that is or causes a lose or lossage.

loss

/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
'moby loss' is OK even though **`moby loser' 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

/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 latter
implies a continuing lose of which the 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

/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 to hackerdom;
physicists, engineers, astronomers, and statisticians all use it.

lost in the underflow

/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 processor tries to
handle quantities smaller 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 alters the path of a thrown baseball, but that effect gets lost in the
underflow." Compare epsilon, epsilon squared; see also overflow bit.

lots of MIPS but no I/O

/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 input-output (in 1991,
the IBM Rios, a.k.a. RS/6000, is a notorious recent example).

low-bandwidth

/adj./ [from communication theory] 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 suits!" Compare zero-content,
bandwidth, math-out.

LPT

/L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ /n./ Line printer, of course. Rare under

Unix, more common among hackers who grew up with ITS, MS-DOS, CP/M and other
operating systems that were strongly influenced by early DEC conventions.

Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology

/prov./ "There is *always* one more bug."

lunatic fringe
/n./ [IBM] Customers who can be relied upon to accept release 1 versions of
software.

lurker

/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 lurking." Often used in 'the lurkers', the hypothetical audience for the
group's flamage-emitting regulars. When a lurker speaks up for the first
time, this is called 'delurking'.

luser

/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 computer's attention, it printed out some 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 great controversy, as some of the users
didn't 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 it
was even money whether it would say "users" 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 on, however, and the term 'luser' is often seen
in program comments.

M -

/pref./ (on units) suff. (on numbers) [SI] See quantifiers.

macdink

/mak'dink/ /vt./ [from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to encourage such
behavior] To make many incremental and unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program
or file. Often the subject of the macdinking would be better off without them.
"When I left at 11 P.M. last night, he was still macdinking the slides for his
presentation." See also fritterware, window shopping.

machinable

/adj./ Machine-readable. Having the softcopy nature.

machoflops

/mach'oh-flops/ /n./ [pun on 'megaflops', a coinage for 'millions of

FLoating-point Operations Per Second'] Refers to artificially inflated
performance figures often quoted by computer manufacturers. Real applications
are lucky to get half the quoted speed. See Your mileage may vary,
benchmark.

Macintoy
/mak'in-toy/ /n./ The Apple Macintosh, considered as a toy. Less pejorative
than Macintrash.

Macintrash

/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 area of
North Carolina. Compare Macintoy. See also beige toaster, WIMP
environment, point-and-drool interface, drool-proof paper, user-friendly.

macro

/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
definition can be found in any technical 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 device. During the early 1970s,
macro assemblers became ubiquitous, and sometimes quite as powerful and
expensive as HLLs, only to fall from favor as improving compiler technology
marginalized assembler programming (see languages of choice). Nowadays the
term is most often used in connection with the C 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 used for code in any special-purpose 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 enhancers).

macro-

/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

/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. Sometimes
studying the macrology of a system is not unlike archeology, ecology, or
theology, hence the sound-alike construction. See also boxology.

macrotape

/mak'roh-tayp/ /n./ An industry-standard reel of tape, as opposed to a

microtape. See also round tape.

maggotbox

/mag'*t-boks/ /n./ See Macintrash. This is even more derogatory.

magic
/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 number of
magic bits." "This routine magically 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 publicized that allows something otherwise 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 A Story About 'Magic' in Appendix A.

magic cookie

/n./ [Unix] 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 strange or
intrinsically machine-dependent way. 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 'it hands you a magic cookie' means it
returns 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 control
functions (see also cookie). Some older terminals would leave a blank on the
screen corresponding to mode-change magic cookies; this was also called a
glitch (or occasionally a 'turd'; compare mouse droppings). See also
cookie.

magic number

/n./ [Unix/C] 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 commented
'#define'. Magic numbers in this sense 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 congruential generator for pseudo-random numbers. This
sense actually predates and was ancestral to the more commonsense 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 programs (especially
the linker) distinguish between 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; 0407, for
example, was octal for 'branch 16 bytes relative'. Many other kinds of files
now have magic numbers somewhere; some magic numbers are, in fact, strings, like
the '! arch ' at the beginning of a Unix archive file or the '%!' leading
PostScript files. Nowadays only a 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!

*The* magic number, on the other hand, is 7+/-2. See "The magical number seven,
plus or minus two: some limits on our capacity for processing information" by
George Miller, in the "Psychological Review" 63:81-97 (1956). This classic
paper established the number of distinct items (such as numeric digits) that
humans can hold in short-term memory. Among other things, this strongly
influenced the interface design of the phone system.

magic smoke

/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 chip
burns up — the magic smoke gets let 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 in
the system, then seeing what happened. 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 EPROM worked fine after I erased it, filled it 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.

mail storm

/n./ [from broadcast storm, influenced by 'maelstrom'] What often happens

when a machine with an Internet connection and active users re-connects after
extended downtime — a flood of incoming mail that brings the machine to its
knees. See also hairball.

mailbomb

(also mail bomb) [Usenet] 1. /v./ To send, or urge others to send, massive
amounts of email to a single system or person, esp. with intent to crash or
spam the recipient's system. Sometimes done in retaliation for a perceived
serious offense. Mailbombing is itself widely regarded as a serious offense —
it can disrupt email traffic or other facilities for innocent users on the
victim's system, and in extreme cases, even at upstream sites. 2. /n./ An
automatic procedure with a similar effect. 3. /n./ The mail sent. Compare
letterbomb, nastygram, BLOB (sense 2), list-bomb.

mailing list

/n./ (often shortened in context to 'list') 1. An email address that is an

alias (or macro, though that word is never used in this connection) for many
other email addresses. Some mailing lists are simple 'reflectors', redirecting
mail sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or
programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by humans are said
to be 'moderated'. 2. The people who receive your email when you send it to
such an address.

Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction, along with
Usenet. They predate Usenet, having originated with the first UUCP and
ARPANET connections. They are often used for private information-sharing on
topics that would be too specialized for or inappropriate to public Usenet
groups. Though some of these maintain almost purely technical content (such as
the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list), others (like the 'sf-lovers'
list maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many are
purely social. Perhaps the most infamous of the social lists was the eccentric
bandykin distribution; its latter-day progeny, lectroids and tanstaafl, still
include a number of the oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom.

Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie up a significant
amount of machine resources (until they get very large, at which point they can
become interesting torture tests for mail software). Thus, they are often
created temporarily by working groups, the members of which can then collaborate
on a project without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the material in
this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such a mailing list (called
'jargon-friends'), which included all the co-authors of Steele-1983.

main loop
/n./ The top-level control flow construct in an input- or event-driven program,
the one which receives and acts or dispatches on the program's input. See also
driver.

mainframe

/n./ Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor
unit or 'main frame' of a room-filling Stone Age batch machine. After the
emergence of smaller 'minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditional
big iron machines were described as 'mainframe computers' and eventually just
as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch
rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing
operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by
IBM, Unisys, and the other great dinosaurs surviving from computing's Stone
Age.

It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s that the mainframe
architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for
number-crunching supercomputers (see cray)), having been swamped by the
recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. As of
1993, corporate America is just beginning to figure this out — the wave of
failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers have
certainly provided sufficient omens (see dinosaurs mating and killer micro).

management

/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, a vast
bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations. Hackers'
satirical public notices are often signed 'The Mgt'; this derives from the
"Illuminatus" novels (see the Bibliography in Appendix C).

mandelbug

/man'del-buhg/ /n./ [from the Mandelbrot set] 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, rather than a heisenbug. See also schroedinbug.

manged

/mahnjd/ /n./ [probably from the French 'manger' or Italian 'mangiare', to eat;
perhaps influenced by English 'mange', 'mangy'] /adj./ Refers to anything that
is mangled or damaged, usually beyond repair. "The disk was manged after the
electrical storm." Compare mung.

mangle

/vt./ Used similarly to mung or scribble, but more violent in its

connotations; something that is mangled has been irreversibly and totally
trashed.

mangler

/n./ [DEC] A manager. Compare management. Note that system mangler is

somewhat different in connotation.

manularity
/man`yoo-la'ri-tee/ /n./ [prob. fr. techspeak 'manual' + 'granularity'] A
notional measure of the manual labor required for some task, particularly one of
the sort that automation is supposed to eliminate. "Composing English on paper
has much higher manularity than using a text editor, especially in the revising
stage." Hackers tend to consider manularity a symptom of primitive methods; in
fact, a true hacker confronted with an apparent requirement to do a computing
task by hand will inevitably seize the opportunity to build another tool (see
toolsmith).

marbles

/pl.n./ [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] 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 up
on its own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or if you need to
rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't even have enough marbles to
compile hello, world."

marginal

/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
sort through it. 2. Of extremely small merit. "This proposed new feature seems
rather marginal to me." 3. Of extremely small probability of winning. "The
power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it fried."

Marginal Hacks

/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

/adv./ Slightly. "The ravs here are only marginally better than at Small
Eating Place." See epsilon.

marketroid

/mar'k*-troyd/ /n./ alt. 'marketing slime', 'marketeer', 'marketing droid',

'marketdroid'. 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 scheduled for inclusion, are extremely difficult 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.

Mars

/n./ A legendary tragic failure, the archetypal Hacker Dream Gone Wrong. Mars
was the code name for a family of PDP-10 compatible computers built by Systems
Concepts (now, The SC Group): the multi-processor SC-30M, the small uniprocessor
SC-25M, and the never-built superprocessor SC-40M. These machines were marvels
of engineering design; although not much slower than the unique Foonly F-1,
they were physically smaller and consumed less power than the much slower DEC
KS10 or Foonly F-2, F-3, or F-4 machines. They were also completely compatible
with the DEC KL10, and ran all KL10 binaries (including the operating system)
with no modifications at about 2—3 times faster than a KL10.
When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts should have
made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software investment
in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of
excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer
of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems
Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or
selling them; the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of
perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as
delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product
ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and
failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups
building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the
price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most
customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually
for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being
purchased by CompuServe.

This tale and the related saga of Foonly hold a lesson for hackers: if you
want to play in the Real World, you need to learn Real World moves.

martian

/n./ A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test
loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means that it will come back 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 martian filter?"

massage

/vt./ Vague term used to describe 'smooth' transformations of 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 bitmap
files into GIF format." Compare slurp.

math-out

/n./ [poss. from 'white-out' (the blizzard variety)] A 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 content-free.
See also numbers, social science number.

Matrix

/n./ [FidoNet] 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call FidoNet. 2.
Fanciful term for a cyberspace expected to emerge from current networking
experiments (see network, the). 3. The totality of present-day computer
networks.

maximum Maytag mode

/n./ What a washing machine or, by extension, any hard disk is in when it's
being used so heavily that it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced
load. If prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming walking
drives.

Mbogo, Dr. Fred

/*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ /n./ [Stanford] The 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 Dry Cleaning."
The name comes from synergy between bogus and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch
doctor who was Gomez Addams' physician on the old "Addams Family" TV show.
Compare Bloggs Family, the, see also fred.

meatware

/n./ Synonym for wetware. Less common.

meeces

/mees'*z/ /n./ [TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who are not urchins. [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*!" —
ESR]

meg

/meg/ /n./ See quantifiers.

mega-

/me'g*/ /pref./ [SI] See quantifiers.

megapenny

/meg'*-pen`ee/ /n./ $10,000 (1 cent * 10^6). Used semi-humorously as a unit in

comparing computer cost and performance figures.

MEGO

/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
because the listener does not want to admit to not understanding what is going
on. MEGO is usually directed at senior management by engineers and contains a
high proportion of TLAs. 2. excl. An appropriate response to MEGO tactics.
3. Among non-hackers, often refers not to behavior that causes the eyes to
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

/n./ See network meltdown.

meme

/meem/ /n./ [coined by analogy with 'gene', by Richard Dawkins] 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' denoting a group of mutually supporting 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 'meme complex'. Use of the term
connotes 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 idea congenial for tolerably obvious reasons.
meme plague

/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 is given point by the historical fact that '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

/me-met'iks/ /n./ [from meme] The study of memes. As of early 1996, 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.
Memetics is a popular topic for speculation among hackers, who like to see
themselves as the architects of the new information ecologies in which memes
live and replicate.

memory farts

/n./ The flatulent sounds that some DOS box BIOSes (most notably AMI's) make
when checking memory on bootup.

memory leak

/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. These problems were severe
on older machines with small, fixed-size address spaces, and special "leak
detection" tools were commonly written to root them out. With the advent of
virtual memory, it is unfortunately easier to be sloppy about wasting a bit of
memory (although when you run out of memory on a VM machine, it means you've got
a *real* leak!). See aliasing bug, fandango on core, smash the stack,
precedence lossage, overrun screw, leaky heap, leak.

memory smash

/n./ [XEROX PARC] Writing through a pointer that doesn't point to what you
think it does. This occasionally reduces your machine to a rubble of bits.
Note that this is subtly different from (and more general than) related terms
such as a memory leak or fandango on core because it doesn't imply an
allocation error or overrun condition.

menuitis

/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
interfaces, especially those customizable via 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

/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, its
nasty primitive interface, and its ties to 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 cleanser.

meta

/me't*/ or /may't*/ or (Commonwealth) /mee't*/ adj.,/pref./ [from analytic

philosophy] One level of description up. A metasyntactic variable is a variable
in notation used to describe syntax, and meta-language is language used to
describe language. This is difficult to explain briefly, but much hacker humor
turns on deliberate confusion between meta-levels. See hacker humor.

meta bit

/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, *mirabile dictu*, keyboards on IBM PC-class machines) have an ALT
key. See also bucky bits.

Historical note: although in modern usage shaped by a universe of 8-bit bytes

the meta bit is invariably hex 80 (octal 0200), things were different on earlier
machines with 36-bit words and 9-bit bytes. The MIT and Stanford keyboards (see
space-cadet keyboard) generated hex 100 (octal 400) from their meta keys.

metasyntactic variable

/n./ A name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is
under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion.
The word foo is the canonical example. To avoid confusion, hackers never
(well, hardly ever) use 'foo' or other words like it as permanent names for
anything. In filenames, a common convention is that any filename beginning with
a metasyntactic-variable name is a scratch file that may be deleted at any
time.

To some extent, the list of one's preferred metasyntactic variables is a

cultural signature. They occur both in series (used for related groups of
variables or objects) and as singletons. Here are a few common signatures:

foo, bar, baz, quux, quuux, quuuux...:

MIT/Stanford usage, now found everywhere (thanks largely to early versions of this
lexicon!). At MIT (but not at Stanford), baz dropped out of use for a while
in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this sequence inserts
qux before quux.

bazola, ztesch: Stanford (from mid-'70s on).

foo, bar, thud, grunt: This series was popular at CMU. Other CMU-associated
variables include gorp.

foo, bar, fum: This series is reported to be common at XEROX PARC.

fred, barney: See the entry for fred. These tend to be Britishisms.

corge, grault, flarp: Popular at Rutgers University and among

GOSMACS hackers.

zxc, spqr, wombat: Cambridge University (England).

shme: Berkeley, GeoWorks, Ingres. Pronounced /shme/ with a short /e/.

snork: Brown University, early 1970s.

foo, bar, zot: Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.

blarg, wibble: New Zealand.

toto, titi, tata, tutu: France.

pippo, pluto, paperino: Italy. Pippo /pee'po/ and Paperino /pa-per-ee'-no/ are the
Italian names for Goofy and Donald Duck.

aap, noot, mies: The Netherlands. These are the first words a child used to learn
to spell on a Dutch spelling board.

Of all these, only 'foo' and 'bar' are universal (and baz nearly so). The
compounds foobar and 'foobaz' also enjoy very wide currency.

Some jargon terms are also used as metasyntactic names; barf and mumble, for
example. See also Commonwealth Hackish for discussion of numerous
metasyntactic variables found in Great Britain and the Commonwealth.

MFTL

/M-F-T-L/ [abbreviation: '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,
has any content (see content-free). More 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 talk". 2. /n./ Describes a
language about which the developers are passionate (often to the point of
proselytic 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 first great goal in the mind of the designer of an 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 anything besides its own
compiler?" On the other hand, a language that cannot even be used to write its
own compiler is beneath contempt. See break-even point.

(On a related note, Doug McIlroy once proposed a test of the generality and
utility of a language and the operating system under which it is compiled: "Is
the output of a FORTRAN program acceptable as input to the FORTRAN compiler?"
In other words, can you write programs that write programs? (See toolsmith.)
Alarming numbers of (language, OS) pairs fail this test, particularly when the
language is FORTRAN; aficionados are quick to point out that Unix (even using
FORTRAN) passes it handily. That the test could ever be failed is only
surprising to those who have had the good fortune to have worked only under
modern systems which lack OS-supported and -imposed "file types".)

mickey

/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

/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 very useful.

micro-
/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 them
both around rather more freely than 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, and especially microfortnight). 3. Personal 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
meaning 'large'). 4. Local as opposed to 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 distance, or (best of all)
telecommuting.

MicroDroid

/n./ [Usenet] A Microsoft employee, esp. one who posts to various operating-system
advocacy newsgroups. MicroDroids post follow-ups to any messages critical of
Microsoft's operating systems, and often end up sounding like visiting Mormon
missionaries.

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 floats a sub-3-inch
floppy standard. See stiffy, minifloppies.

microfortnight

/n./ 1/1000000 of the fundamental unit of time in the Furlong/Firkin/Fortnight

system of measurement; 1.2096 sec. (A furlong is 1/8th of a mile; a firkin is
1/4th of a barrel; the mass unit of the system is taken to be a firkin of
water). 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 time at boot if it
realizes that the current value is bogus. This time is specified in
microfortnights!

Multiple uses of the millifortnight (about 20 minutes) and nanofortnight have

also been reported.

microLenat

/mi:`-kroh-len'-*t/ /n./ The unit of bogosity, written uL; the consensus is

that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use. The microLenat,
originally invented by David Jefferson, was promulgated as an attack against
noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a tenured graduate student at CMU.
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 considered unmerited, but
it has become a running 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 microReid.

microReid

/mi:'kroh-reed/ /n./ See microLenat.

Microsloth Windows

/mi:'kroh-sloth` win'dohz/ /n./ Hackerism for 'Microsoft Windows', a windowing

system for the IBM-PC which is so limited by bug-for-bug compatibility with
mess-dos that it is agonizingly slow on anything less than a fast 486. Also
just called 'Windoze', with the implication that you can fall asleep waiting for
it to do anything; the latter term is extremely common on Usenet. See Black
Screen of Death; compare X, sun-stools.

microtape

/mi:'kroh-tayp/ /n./ Occasionally used to mean a DECtape, as opposed to a

macrotape. A DECtape is a small reel, about 4 inches in diameter, of magnetic
tape about an inch wide. Unlike those for today's macrotapes, microtape
drivers allowed random access to the data, and therefore could be used to
support file systems and even for swapping (this was generally done purely for
hack value, as they were far too slow for practical use). In their heyday
they were used in pretty much the same ways one would now use a floppy disk: as
a small, portable way to save and transport files and programs. Apparently the
term 'microtape' was actually the official term used within DEC for these tapes
until someone coined the word 'DECtape', which, of course, sounded sexier to the
marketroids; another version of the story holds that someone discovered a
conflict with another company's 'microtape' trademark.

middle-endian

/adj./ Not big-endian or little-endian. Used of perverse byte orders such

as 3-4-1-2 or 2-1-4-3, occasionally found in the packed-decimal formats of
minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless. See NUXI problem.
Non-US hackers use this term to describe the American mm/dd/yy style of writing
dates (Europeans write dd/mm/yy).

milliLampson

/mil'*-lamp`sn/ /n./ A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run
about 200 milliLampsons. The eponymous Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and
systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A few people
speak faster. This unit is sometimes used to compare the (sometimes widely
disparate) rates at which people can generate ideas and actually emit them in
speech. For example, noted computer architect C. Gordon Bell (designer of the
PDP-11) is said, with some awe, to think at about 1200 mL but only talk at about
300; he is frequently reduced to fragments of sentences as his mouth tries to
keep up with his speeding brain.

minifloppies

/n./ 5.25-inch vanilla floppy disks, as opposed to 3.5-inch or

microfloppies and the now-obsolescent 8-inch variety. At one time, this term
was a trademark of Shugart Associates for their SA-400 minifloppy drive. Nobody
paid any attention. See stiffy.

MIPS

/mips/ /n./ [abbreviation] 1. A measure of computing speed; formally, 'Million

Instructions Per Second' (that's 10^6 per second, not 2^(20)!); often rendered
by hackers as 'Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed' or in other
unflattering ways. This joke expresses a nearly universal attitude about the
value of most benchmark claims, said attitude being one of the great cultural
divides between hackers and marketroids. The singular is sometimes '1 MIP'
even though this is clearly etymologically wrong. See also KIPS and GIPS.
2. Computers, especially large computers, considered abstractly as sources of
computrons. "This is just a workstation; the heavy MIPS are hidden in the
basement." 3. The corporate name of a particular RISC-chip company; among other
things, they designed the processor chips used in DEC's 3100 workstation series.
4. Acronym for 'Meaningless Information per Second' (a joke, prob. from sense
1).

misbug

/mis-buhg/ /n./ [MIT] An unintended property of a program that turns out to be

useful; something that should have been a bug but turns out to be a feature.
Usage: rare. Compare green lightning. See miswart.

misfeature

/mis-fee'chr/ or /mis'fee`chr/ /n./ A feature that eventually causes lossage,

possibly because it is not adequate for a new situation that has evolved. Since
it results from a deliberate and properly implemented feature, a misfeature is
not a bug. Nor is it a simple unforeseen side effect; the term implies that the
feature in question was carefully planned, but its long-term consequences were
not accurately or adequately predicted (which is quite different from not having
thought ahead at all). A misfeature can be a particularly stubborn problem to
resolve, because fixing it usually involves a substantial philosophical change
to the structure of the system involved.

Many misfeatures (especially in user-interface design) arise because the

designers/implementors mistake their personal tastes for laws of nature. Often
a former feature becomes a misfeature because trade-offs were made whose
parameters subsequently change (possibly only in the judgment of the
implementors). "Well, yeah, it is kind of a misfeature that file names are
limited to six characters, but the original implementors wanted to save
directory space and we're stuck with it for now."

Missed'em-five

/n./ Pejorative hackerism for AT T System V Unix, generally used by BSD

partisans in a bigoted mood. (The synonym 'SysVile' is also encountered.) See
software bloat, Berzerkeley.

missile address

/n./ See ICBM address.

miswart

/mis-wort/ /n./ [from wart by analogy with misbug] A feature that

superficially appears to be a wart but has been determined to be the Right
Thing. For example, in some versions of the EMACS text editor, the
'transpose characters' command exchanges the character under the cursor with the
one before it on the screen, *except* when the cursor is at the end of a line,
in which case the two characters before the cursor are exchanged. While this
behavior is perhaps surprising, and certainly inconsistent, it has been found
through extensive experimentation to be what most users want. This feature is a
miswart.

moby

/moh'bee/ [MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago.
Derived from Melville's "Moby Dick" (some say from 'Moby Pickle').] 1. /adj./
Large, immense, complex, impressive. "A Saturn V rocket is a truly moby frob."
"Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the Harvard-Yale game." (See
"The Meaning of 'Hack'"). 2. /n./ obs. The maximum address space of a machine
(see below). For a 680[234]0 or VAX or most modern 32-bit architectures, it is
4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes). 3. A title of address (never of
third-person reference), usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or
friendliness to a competent hacker. "Greetings, moby Dave. How's that
address-book thing for the Mac going?" 4. /adj./ In backgammon, doubles on the
dice, as in 'moby sixes', 'moby ones', etc. Compare this with bignum (sense
3): double sixes are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums
(the use of 'moby' to describe double ones is sarcastic). Standard emphatic
forms: 'Moby foo', 'moby win', 'moby loss'. 'Foby moo': a spoonerism due to
Richard Greenblatt. 5. The largest available unit of something which is
available in discrete increments. Thus, ordering a "moby Coke" at the local
fast-food joint is not just a request for a large Coke, it's an explicit request
for the largest size they sell.

This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory added to the MIT AI
PDP-6 machine, which was considered unimaginably huge when it was installed in
the 1960s (at a time when a more typical memory size for a timesharing system
was 72 kilobytes). Thus, a moby is classically 256K 36-bit words, the size of a
PDP-6 or PDP-10 moby. Back when address registers were narrow the term was more
generally useful, because when a computer had virtual memory mapping, it might
actually have more physical memory attached to it than any one program could
access directly. One could then say "This computer has 6 mobies" meaning that
the ratio of physical memory to address space is 6, without having to say
specifically how much memory there actually is. That in turn implied that the
computer could timeshare six 'full-sized' programs without having to swap
programs between memory and disk.

Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address spaces are usually
larger than the most physical memory you can cram onto a machine, so most
systems have much *less* than one theoretical 'native' moby of core. Also,
more modern memory-management techniques (esp. paging) make the 'moby count'
less significant. However, there is one series of widely-used chips for which
the term could stand to be revived — the Intel 8088 and 80286 with their
incredibly brain-damaged segmented-memory designs. On these, a 'moby' would
be the 1-megabyte address span of a segment/offset pair (by coincidence, a
PDP-10 moby was exactly 1 megabyte of 9-bit bytes).

mockingbird

/n./ Software that intercepts communications (especially login transactions)

between users and hosts and provides system-like responses to the users while
saving their responses (especially account IDs and passwords). A special case
of Trojan horse.

mod

/vt.,n./ 1. Short for 'modify' or 'modification'. Very commonly used — in fact

the full terms are considered markers that one is being formal. The plural
'mods' is used esp. with reference to bug fixes or minor design changes in
hardware or software, most esp. with respect to patch sets or a diff. 2.
Short for modulo but used *only* for its techspeak sense.

mode

/n./ A general state, usually used with an adjective describing the state. Use
of the word 'mode' rather than 'state' implies that the state is extended over
time, and probably also that some activity characteristic of that state is being
carried out. "No time to hack; I'm in thesis mode." In its jargon sense, 'mode'
is most often attributed to people, though it is sometimes applied to programs
and inanimate objects. In particular, see hack mode, day mode, night mode,
demo mode, fireworks mode, and yoyo mode; also talk mode.

One also often hears the verbs 'enable' and 'disable' used in connection with
jargon modes. Thus, for example, a sillier way of saying "I'm going to crash"
is "I'm going to enable crash mode now". One might also hear a request to
"disable flame mode, please".

In a usage much closer to techspeak, a mode is a special state that certain user
interfaces must pass into in order to perform certain functions. For example,
in order to insert characters into a document in the Unix editor 'vi', one must
type the "i" key, which invokes the "Insert" command. The effect of this
command is to put vi into "insert mode", in which typing the "i" key has a quite
different effect (to wit, it inserts an "i" into the document). One must then
hit another special key, "ESC", in order to leave "insert mode". Nowadays,
modeful interfaces are generally considered losing but survive in quite a few
widely used tools built in less enlightened times.

mode bit

/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
explicitly read, and seldom change over the 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 set.

modulo

/mod'yu-loh/ /prep./ Except for. An overgeneralization of mathematical

terminology; one can consider saying that 4 equals 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 headache."

molly-guard

/mol'ee-gard/ /n./ [University of Illinois] A shield to prevent tripping of

some Big Red Switch by clumsy or ignorant hands. Originally used of the
plexiglass covers improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's
toddler daughter (named Molly) frobbed it twice in one day. Later generalized
to covers over stop/reset switches on disk drives and networking equipment.

Mongolian Hordes technique

/n./ [poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression 'Mongolian clusterf**k'

for a public orgy] Development by gang bang. Implies that large numbers of
inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better performed by a few
skilled ones. Also called 'Chinese Army technique'; see also Brooks's Law.

monkey up

/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.

monkey, scratch

/n./ See scratch monkey.

monstrosity

1. /n./ A ridiculously elephantine program or system, esp. one that is buggy

or only marginally functional. 2. /adj./ The quality of being monstrous (see
'Overgeneralization' in the discussion of jargonification). See also baroque.

monty

/mon'tee/ /n./ 1. [US Geological Survey] A program with a ludicrously complex

user interface written to perform extremely trivial tasks. An example would be
a menu-driven, button clicking, pulldown, pop-up windows program for listing
directories. The original monty was an infamous weather-reporting program, Monty
the Amazing Weather Man, written at the USGS. Monty had a widget-packed
X-window interface with over 200 buttons; and all monty actually *did* was FTP
files off the network. 2. [Great Britain; commonly capitalized as 'Monty' or as
'the Full Monty'] 16 megabytes of memory, when fitted to an IBM-PC or
compatible. A standard PC-compatible using the AT- or ISA-bus with a normal
BIOS cannot access more than 16 megabytes of RAM. Generally used of a PC, Unix
workstation, etc. to mean 'fully populated with' memory, disk-space or some
other desirable resource. This usage is possibly derived from a TV commercial
for Del Monte fruit juice, in which one of the characters insisted on "the full
Del Monte". Compare American moby.

Moof

/moof/ [Macintosh users] 1. /n./ The call of a semi-legendary creature,

properly called the dogcow. (Some previous versions of this entry claimed,
incorrectly, that Moof was the name of the *creature*.) 2. /adj./ Used to flag
software that's a hack, something untested and on the edge. On one Apple
CD-ROM, certain folders such as "Tools Apps (Moof!)" and "Development
Platforms (Moof!)", are so marked to indicate that they contain software not
fully tested or sanctioned by the powers that be. When you open these folders
you cross the boundary into hackerland. 3. /v./ On the Microsoft Network, the
term 'moof' has gained popularity as a verb meaning 'to be suddenly disconnected
by the system'. One might say "I got moofed".

Moore's Law

/morz law/ /prov./ The observation that the logic density of silicon integrated
circuits has closely followed the curve (bits per square inch) = 2^((t - 1962))
where t is time in years; that is, the amount of information storable on a given
amount of silicon has roughly doubled every year since the technology was
invented. This relation, first uttered in 1964 by semiconductor engineer Gordon
Moore (who co-founded Intel four years later) held until the late 1970s, at
which point the doubling period slowed to 18 months. It remained at that value
through time of writing (late 1995). See also Parkinson's Law of Data.

moose call

/n./ See whalesong.

moria

/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. The name is from Tolkien's Mines of Moria;
compare elder days, elvish. The game is extremely addictive and a major
consumer of time better used for hacking.

MOTAS
/moh-tahz/ /n./ [Usenet: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after MOTOS and
MOTSS] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See also SO.

MOTOS

/moh-tohs/ /n./ [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet: Member Of
The Opposite Sex] A potential or (less often) actual sex partner. See MOTAS,
MOTSS, SO. Less common than MOTSS or MOTAS, which have largely displaced
it.

MOTSS

/mots/ or /M-O-T-S-S/ /n./ [from the 1970 U.S. census forms via Usenet] Member
Of The Same Sex, esp. one considered as a possible sexual partner. The
gay-issues newsgroup on Usenet is called soc.motss. See MOTOS and MOTAS,
which derive from it. See also SO.

mouse ahead

/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
such input, in anticipation of the program 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

/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

/n./ See rat belt.

mouse droppings

/n./ [MS-DOS] 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 major causes
for this problem are programs 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

/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

/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

: /M-S-dos/ /n./ [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] A clone of CP/M for

the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson at Seattle Computer
Products, who called the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is
said to have regretted it ever since. Microsoft licensed QDOS order to have
something to demo for IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features,
including vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O
redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 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 use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive. The
resulting appalling 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, when it was
attached to IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name further
annoys those who know what the term operating system does (or ought to)
connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively simple interrupt services.
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-DOS: Just say No!"). See
mess-dos, ill-behaved.

mu

/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 wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse because it suggests that you
have one and are still beating her. According to various Discordians and
Douglas Hofstadter the correct answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged
to mean "Your question cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect
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
that sense, but native speakers do not recognize 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 retorted, "Mu!"

See also has the X nature, AI Koans, and Douglas Hofstadter's "G"odel,
Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (pointer in the Bibliography in
Appendix C.

MUD

/muhd/ /n./ [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] 1. A

class of virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet. These are
real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple 'locations' like an
adventure game, and may include combat, traps, puzzles, magic, a simple economic
system, and the capability for characters to build more structure onto the
database that represents the existing world. 2. /vi./ To play a MUD. The
acronym MUD is often lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of 'going
mudding', etc.

Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU- form) derive
from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the University of Essex's
DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that game still exist today and are
sometimes generically called BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated,
unfortunately, by earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was
trademarked to the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto:
"You haven't *lived* 'til you've *died* on MUD!"); however, this is false —
Richard Bartle explicitly placed 'MUD' in the public domain in 1985. BT was
upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on some maps and
posters, which were released and created the myth.

Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD concept,
spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of these had associated
bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as
'research' they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general.
This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult
to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction
there.

AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained
popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with
only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the
growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and
variants) tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative
world-building as opposed to combat and competition. By 1991, over 50% of MUD
sites were of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle
aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996
the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more extensible
using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward greater
programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.

The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new
simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991 there was an
unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term MUD itself, as newer designs
exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation
styles being explored. It survived. See also bonk/oif, FOD, link-dead,
mudhead, talk mode.

muddie

/n./ Syn. mudhead. More common in Great Britain, possibly because system
administrators there like to mutter "bloody muddies" when annoyed at the
species.

mudhead

/n./ Commonly used to refer to a MUD player who eats, sleeps, and breathes
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,
on a MUD, or in a chat system, all a mudhead will talk about is three topics:
the tactic, character, or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping
him/her from becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD; why the specific game
he/she has experience with is so much better than any other; and the MUD he or
she is writing or going to write because his/her design ideas are so much better
than in any existing MUD. See also wannabee.

To the anthropologically literate, this term may recall the Zuni/Hopi legend of
the mudheads or 'koyemshi', mythical half-formed children of an unnatural union.
Figures representing them act as clowns in Zuni sacred ceremonies. Others may
recall the 'High School Madness' sequence from the Firesign Theater album "Don't
Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers", in which there is a character named
"Mudhead".

multician

/muhl-ti'shn/ /n./ [coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] Competent user of Multics.

Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted the analogous 'Unician'.

Multics
 : /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. Multics was very innovative for its
time — among other things, it introduced the idea of 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 question was CTSS).
Honeywell commercialized 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 project's breakup was Ken Thompson, a circumstance 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

/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 at the same
time), is used similarly.

mumblage

/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 c**p" when 'mumble' is being used
as an implicit replacement for pejoratives.

mumble

/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 we
could improve LISP performance by using 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. [MIT] Expression of not-quite-articulated agreement, often used as an
informal vote of consensus in a meeting: "So, shall we dike out the COBOL
emulation?" "Mumble!" 3. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement
(distinguished from sense 2 by tone of voice and other cues). "I think we
should buy a VAX." "Mumble!" Common variant: 'mumble frotz' (see frotz;
interestingly, one does not say 'mumble frobnitz' even though 'frotz' is short
for 'frobnitz'). 4. Yet another metasyntactic variable, like foo. 5. When
used as a question ("Mumble?") means "I didn't understand you". 6. 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 has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the
card I'm testing for Mumbleco." 7. A conversational wild card used to designate
something one doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be glarked
from context. Compare blurgle. 8. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to
suggest that further discussion would be fruitless.

munch

/vt./ [often confused with mung, q.v.] 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 less pain.

munching
/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

/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 items 146—148) to
produce an impressive 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 machine, have been christened 'munching triangles' (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 a display terminal, and does
it using a 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

/muhnch'kin/ /n./ [from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's

"The Wizard of Oz"] A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking BASIC or
something else equally constricted. A term of mild derision — munchkins are
annoying but some grow up to be hackers after passing through a larval stage.
The term urchin is also used. See also wannabee, bitty box.

mundane

/n./ [from SF fandom] 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

/muhng/ /vt./ [in 1960 at MIT, 'Mash Until No Good'; sometime after that the
derivation from the recursive acronym 'Mung Until No Good' became standard;
but see munge] 1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable
changes. See BLT. 2. To destroy, 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 /muhnj/ is now usual in speech, but the
spelling 'mung' is still common in program comments (compare the widespread
confusion over the proper spelling of kluge). 3. The kind of beans the sprouts
of which are used in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans!
Really!)

Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at TMRC; it
was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of the original TMRC
lexicon) thinks it may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a
relay spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that during the
World Wars, 'mung' was U.S. army slang for the ersatz creamed chipped beef
better known as 'SOS', and it seems quite likely that the word in fact goes back
to Scots-dialect munge.

munge

/muhnj/ /vt./ 1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform information. 2. A

comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or the whole program. 3. To
modify data in some way the speaker doesn't need to go into right now or cannot
describe succinctly (compare mumble).

This term is often confused with mung, which probably was derived from it.
However, it also appears the word 'munge' was in common use in Scotland in the
1940s, and in Yorkshire in the 1950s, as a verb, meaning to munch up into a
masticated mess, and as a noun, meaning the result of munging something up (the
parallel with the kluge/kludge pair is amusing).

Murphy's Law

/prov./ The correct, *original* Murphy's Law reads: "If there are two or more
ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then
someone will do it." This is a principle of defensive design, cited here
because it is usually given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges
of design for lusers. For example, you don't make a two-pin plug symmetrical
and then label it 'THIS WAY UP'; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then
you make the design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote under magic smoke).

Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments
that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration
tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16
accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two
ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically
installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of
his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a
news conference a few days later.

Within months 'Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical cultures connected
to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed
into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants
on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is correctly referred to as
Finagle's Law. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly
demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself!

music

: /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 been
at least one large-scale statistical study 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 instrumental jazz/rock that used to
be called '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, Pat Metheny, Scott Joplin, Tangerine Dream, Dream
Theater, King Sunny Ade, The Pretenders, Screaming Trees, or the Brandenburg
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

/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 -
/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 least
N + 1; see Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology.) 2. A variable whose
value 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 dinner for N - 1" you can deduce that one 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 context "Nth-year grad
student", N is generally assumed to be at least 4, and is usually 5 or more (see
tenured graduate student). See also random numbers, two-to-the-N.

nadger

/nad'jr/ /v./ [UK] Of software or hardware (not people), to twiddle some object
in a hidden manner, generally so that it conforms better to some format. For
instance, string printing routines on 8-bit processors often take the string
text from the instruction stream, thus a print call looks like 'jsr print:"Hello
world"'. The print routine has to 'nadger' the saved instruction pointer so
that the processor doesn't try to execute the text as instructions when the
subroutine returns.

Apparently this word originated on a now-legendary 1950s radio comedy program

called "The Goon Show". The Goon Show usage of "nadger" was definitely in the
sense of "jinxed" "clobbered" "fouled up". The American mutation adger seems
to have preserved more of the original flavor.

nagware

/nag'weir/ /n./ [Usenet] The variety of shareware that displays a large

screen at the beginning or end reminding you to register, typically requiring
some sort of keystroke to continue so that you can't use the software in batch
mode. Compare crippleware.

nailed to the wall

/adj./ [like a trophy] Said of a bug finally eliminated after protracted, and
even heroic, effort.

nailing jelly

/vi./ See like nailing jelly to a tree.

naive

/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 the
appropriate sense). This trait is completely 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 user' but is really more like 'cynical
user'.

naive user

/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

/nak/ /interj./ [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0010101] 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
understand their point or that they have suddenly 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

/nan'oh/ /n./ [CMU: from 'nanosecond'] 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
different — see jiffy).

nano-

/pref./ [SI: the next quantifier below micro-; meaning * 10^(-9)] 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
'microtechnology'; and a few machine 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

/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-setup
costs.

nanobot

/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

/nan'oh-k*m-pyoo'tr/ /n./ A computer with molecular-sized switching elements.

Designs for mechanical nanocomputers which use single-molecule sliding rods for
their logic have been proposed. The controller for a nanobot would be a
nanocomputer.

nanofortnight

/n./ [Adelaide University] 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

: /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 took
place in 1990, for example 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 K. Eric Drexler in his book "Engines of Creation"
(Anchor/Doubleday, ISBN 0-385-19973-2), 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.

nasal demons

/n./ Recognized shorthand on the Usenet group comp.std.c for any unexpected
behavior of a C compiler on encountering an undefined construct. During a
discussion on that group in early 1992, a regular remarked "When the compiler
encounters [a given undefined construct] it is legal for it to make demons fly
out of your nose" (the implication is that the compiler may choose any
arbitrarily bizarre way to interpret the code without violating the ANSI C
standard). Someone else followed up with a reference to "nasal demons", which
quickly became established.

nastygram

/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 a
net.god, pursuant to a violation of netiquette or a complaint about failure
to correct some mail- or news-transmission problem. Compare s***ogram,
mailbomb. 3. A status report from an unhappy, and probably picky, customer.
"What'd Corporate say in today's nastygram?" 4. [deprecated] An error reply by
mail from a daemon; in particular, a bounce message.

Nathan Hale

/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 hanged.
Hale was a (failed) spy for the rebels in the American War of Independence.

nature

/n./ See has the X nature.

neat hack

/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 "The Meaning of 'Hack'", Appendix
A). See also hack.

neats vs. scruffies

/n./ The label used to refer to one of the continuing holy wars in AI
research. This conflict tangles together two separate issues. One is the
relationship between human reasoning and AI; 'neats' tend to try to build
systems that 'reason' in some way identifiably similar to the way humans report
themselves as doing, while 'scruffies' profess not to care whether an algorithm
resembles human reasoning in the least as long as it works. More importantly,
neats tend to believe that logic is king, while scruffies favor looser, more
ad-hoc methods driven by empirical knowledge. To a neat, scruffy methods appear
promiscuous, successful only by accident, and not productive of insights about
how intelligence actually works; to a scruffy, neat methods appear to be hung up
on formalism and irrelevant to the hard-to-capture 'common sense' of living
intelligences.

neep-neep

/neep neep/ /n./ [onomatopoeic, widely spread through SF fandom but reported to
have originated at Caltech in the 1970s] One who is fascinated by computers.
Less specific than hacker, as it need not imply more skill than is required to
boot games on a PC. The derived noun 'neeping' applies specifically to the long
conversations about computers that tend to develop in the corners at most
SF-convention parties (the term 'neepery' is also in wide use). Fandom has a
related proverb to the effect that "Hacking is a conversational black hole!".

neophilia

/nee`oh-fil'-ee-*/ /n./ The trait of being excited and pleased by novelty.

Common among most hackers, SF fans, and members of several other connected
leading-edge subcultures, including the pro-technology 'Whole Earth' wing of the
ecology movement, space activists, many 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. The opposite tendency is 'neophobia'.

nerd

/n./ 1. [mainstream slang] Pejorative applied to anyone with an above-average

IQ and few gifts at small talk and ordinary social rituals. 2. [jargon] Term of
praise applied (in conscious ironic reference to sense 1) to someone who knows
what's really important and interesting and doesn't care to be distracted by
trivial chatter and silly status games. Compare the two senses of computer
geek.

The word itself appears to derive from the lines "And then, just to show them,
I'll sail to Ka-Troo / And Bring Back an It-Kutch, a Preep and a Proo, / A
Nerkle, a Nerd, and a Seersucker, too!" in the Dr. Seuss book "If I Ran the Zoo"
(1950). (The spellings 'nurd' and 'gnurd' also used to be current at MIT.) How
it developed its mainstream meaning is unclear, but sense 1 seems to have
entered mass culture in the early 1970s (there are reports that in the mid-1960s
it meant roughly "annoying misfit" without the connotation of intelligence).

An IEEE Spectrum article (4/95, page 16) once derived 'nerd' in its variant form
'knurd' from the word 'drunk' backwards, but this bears all the earmarks of a
bogus folk etymology.

Hackers developed sense 2 in self-defense perhaps ten years later, and some
actually wear "Nerd Pride" buttons, only half as a joke. At MIT one can find
not only buttons but (what else?) pocket protectors bearing the slogan and the
MIT seal.

net.-

/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.gods, 'net.goddesses'
(various charismatic net.women with circles of 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
/net god/ /n./ Accolade referring 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
software, or knows Gene, Mark, Rick, Mel, 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

/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.godhood.

net.police

/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
used sarcastically or pejoratively. Also spelled 'net police'. See also
net.-, code police.

NetBOLLIX

/n./ [from bollix: to bungle] IBM's NetBIOS, an extremely brain-damaged

network protocol that, like Blue Glue, is used at commercial shops that don't
know any better.

netburp

/n./ [IRC] When netlag gets really bad, and delays between servers exceed a
certain threshhold, the IRC network effectively becomes partitioned for a
period of time, and large numbers of people seem to be signing off at the same
time and then signing back on again when things get better. An instance of this
is called a 'netburp' (or, sometimes, netsplit).

netdead

/n./ [IRC] The state of someone who signs off IRC, perhaps during a
netburp, and doesn't sign back on until later. In the interim, he is "dead to
the net".

nethack

/net'hak/ /n./ [Unix] 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 dungeon games). The earliest versions, 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 contact address (as of early 1996) is
[email protected].

netiquette

/net'ee-ket/ or /net'i-ket/ /n./ [portmanteau from "network etiquette"] The

conventions of politeness recognized on Usenet, such as avoidance of
cross-posting to inappropriate groups and refraining from commercial pluggery
outside the biz groups.
netlag

/n./ [IRC, MUD] A condition that occurs when the delays in the IRC network or
on a MUD become severe enough that servers briefly lose and then reestablish
contact, causing messages to be delivered in bursts, often with delays of up to
a minute. (Note that this term has nothing to do with mainstream "jet lag", a
condition which hackers tend not to be much bothered by.)

netnews

/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

/net'rok/ /n./ [IBM] A flame; used esp. on VNET, IBM's internal corporate
network.

netsplit

/n./ Syn. netburp.

netter

/n./ 1. Loosely, anyone with a network address. 2. More specifically, a

Usenet regular. Most often found in the plural. "If you post *that* in a
technical group, you're going to be flamed by angry netters for the rest of
time!"

network address

/n./ (also 'net address') As used by hackers, means an address on 'the' network
(see network, the; this used to include bang path addresses but now almost
always implies an Internet address).

Display of a network address is essential if one wants to be to be taken

seriously by hackers; in particular, persons 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). Hackers often put their net addresses on their
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 hackerdom (like lodge
pins among Masons or 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 learning each others' 'legal' monikers. See also sitename, domainist.

[1996 update: the lodge-pin function of the network address has been gradually
eroding in the last two years as Internet and World Wide Web usage have become
common outside hackerdom. — ESR]

network meltdown

/n./ A state of complete network overload; the network equivalent of

thrashing. This may be induced by a Chernobyl packet. See also broadcast
storm, kamikaze packet.

Network meltdown is often a result of network designs that are optimized for a
steady state of moderate load and don't cope well with the very jagged, bursty
usage patterns of the real world. One amusing instance of this is triggered by
the the popular and very bloody shoot-'em-up game Doom on the PC. When used in
multiplayer mode over a network, the game uses broadcast packets to inform other
machines when bullets are fired. This causes problems with weapons like the
chain gun which fire rapidly — it can blast the network into a meltdown state
just as easily as it shreds opposing monsters.

network, the

/n./ 1. The union of all the major noncommercial, academic, and hacker-oriented
networks, such as Internet, the pre-1990 ARPANET, NSFnet, BITNET, and the
virtual UUCP and Usenet 'networks', plus the corporate in-house networks and
commercial time-sharing services (such as CompuServe, GEnie and AOL) 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 Internet, bang path, Internet address, network address.
Following the mass-culture discovery of the Internet in 1994 and subsequent
proliferation of cheap TCP/IP connections, "the network" is increasingly
synonymous with the Internet itself (as it was before the second wave of
wide-area computer networking began around 1980). 2. A fictional 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 example of ha ha only serious).

In sense 1, '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

/adj./ [primarily Stanford/Silicon Valley] 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 compiler
bites the bag, but what can you expect from a compiler designed in New Jersey?"
Compare Berkeley Quality Software. See also Unix conspiracy.

New Testament

/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; this version is also called 'K R2'.

newbie

/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 wildly; a person can be called a newbie in one 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. See
B1FF.

newgroup wars

/n[y]oo'groop worz/ /n./ [Usenet] 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, or (even more frequently)
whether an obsolete one should be removed. These usually settle out within a
week or two as it becomes 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 of alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork from alt.tv.muppets in
early 1990, or any number of specialized abuse groups named after particularly
notorious flamers, e.g., alt.weemba.

newline

/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 to
have originally been an IBM usage. (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) required to terminate a text record or separate
lines. See crlf, terpri.

NeWS

/nee'wis/, /n[y]oo'is/ or /n[y]ooz/ /n./ [acronym; the 'Network Window System']

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
been proprietary to Sun Microsystems. There 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

/n./ See netnews.

newsfroup

// /n./ [Usenet] Silly synonym for newsgroup, originally a typo but now in
regular use on Usenet's talk.bizarre and other lunatic-fringe groups. Compare
hing, grilf, and filk.

newsgroup

/n./ [Usenet] 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 posts
the results). Some newsgroups have parallel mailing lists 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 mailing lists) are distributed as 'digests', 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),
rec.arts.sf.written and siblings (for science-fiction fans), and
talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political discussions and flamage).

nick

/n./ [IRC] Short for nickname. On IRC, every user must pick a nick, which is
sometimes the same as the user's real name or login name, but is often more
fanciful. Compare handle.
nickle

/ni'kl/ /n./ [from 'nickel', common name for the U.S. 5-cent coin] 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 also
deckle, and nybble for names of other bit units.

night mode

/n./ See phase (of people).

Nightmare File System

/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 access the
down one, and (getting no response) 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 tries to reach either the down machine or the 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 situation snowballs very quickly, and
soon the entire network of machines is frozen — worst of all, the user can't
even abort the file access that started the problem! Many of NFS's problems are
excused by partisans as being an inevitable result of its statelessness, which
is held to be a great feature (critics, of course, call it a great
misfeature). (ITS partisans are apt to cite this as proof of Unix's alleged
bogosity; ITS had a working NFS-like shared file system with none of these
problems in the early 1970s.) See also broadcast storm.

NIL

/nil/ No. Used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the '-P'
convention. Most hackers assume this derives simply from LISP terminology for
'false' (see also T), but NIL as a negative reply was well-established among
radio hams decades before the advent of LISP. The historical connection between
early hackerdom and the ham radio world was strong enough that this may have
been an influence.

Ninety-Ninety Rule

/n./ "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development
time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the
development time." Attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs, and popularized by
Jon Bentley's September 1985 "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" column in
"Communications of the ACM". It was there called the "Rule of Credibility", a
name which seems not to have stuck.

NMI

/N-M-I/ /n./ Non-Maskable Interrupt. An IRQ 7 on the PDP-11 or 680[01234]0;

the NMI line on an 80[1234]86. In contrast with a priority interrupt (which
might be ignored, although that is unlikely), an NMI is *never* ignored.
Except, that is, on clone boxes, where NMI is often ignored on the motherboard
because flaky hardware can generate many spurious ones.

no-op
/noh'op/ /n.,v./ alt. NOP /nop/ [no operation] 1. 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 also
JFCL. 2. A person who contributes 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 vending machine and having it fall immediately
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 is
having hot-and-sour.

noddy

/nod'ee/ /adj./ [UK: from the children's books] 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
code may be used to demonstrate a feature or 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 connote uselessness, but describes a hack
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 be
called a mickey mouse program. See toy program.

node

/n./ 1. [Internet, UUCP] A host machine on the network. 2. [MS-DOS BBSes] A

dial-in line on a BBS. Thus an MS-DOS sysop might say that his BBS has 4
nodes even though it has a single machine and no Internet link, confusing an
Internet hacker no end.

NOMEX underwear

/noh'meks uhn'-der-weir/ /n./ [Usenet] 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 resistance
measure and required in some racing series.

Nominal Semidestructor

/n./ Soundalike slang for 'National Semiconductor', found among other places in
the Networking/2 networking sources. During the late 1970s to mid-1980s this
company marketed a series of microprocessors including the NS16000 and NS32000
and several variants. At one point early in the great microprocessor race, the
specs on these chips made them look like serious competition for the rising
Intel 80x86 and Motorola 680x0 series. Unfortunately, the actual parts were
notoriously flaky and never implemented the full instruction set promised in
their literature, apparently because the company couldn't get any of the mask
steppings to work as designed. They eventually sank without trace, joining the
Zilog Z8000 and a few even more obscure also-rans in the graveyard of forgotten
microprocessors. Compare HP-SUX, AIDX, buglix, Macintrash, Telerat,
Open DeathTrap, ScumOS, sun-stools.

non-optimal solution

/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 stunning. See also
Bad Thing.

nonlinear

/adj./ [scientific computation] 1. Behaving in an erratic and unpredictable

fashion; unstable. 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 specifications. This behavior may be 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 Bob, don't mention the drug problem or
he'll go nonlinear for hours." In this context, 'go nonlinear' connotes 'blow
up out of proportion' (proportion connotes linearity).

nontrivial

/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 emphatic
form is 'decidedly nontrivial'. See trivial, uninteresting, interesting.

not ready for prime time

/adj./ Usable, but only just so; not very robust; for internal use only. Said
of a program or device. Often connotes that the thing will be made more solid
Real Soon Now. This term comes from the ensemble name of the original cast of
"Saturday Night Live", the "Not Ready for Prime Time Players". It has extra
flavor for hackers because of the special (though now semi-obsolescent) meaning
of prime time. Compare beta.

notwork

/not'werk/ /n./ A network, when it is acting flaky or is down. Compare

nyetwork. Said at IBM to have originally referred to a particular period of
flakiness on IBM's VNET corporate network ca. 1988; but there are independent
reports of the term from elsewhere.

NP-

/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' This
is generalized from the computer-science terms 'NP-hard' and 'NP-complete';
NP-complete problems all seem to be very hard, but so far no one has found a
good a priori reason that they should be. NP is the set of
Nondeterministic-Polynomial algorithms, those that can be completed by a
nondeterministic Turing machine in an 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. "Coding a BitBlt implementation to perform correctly in
every case is NP-annoying."

nroff

: /N'rof/ /n./ [Unix, from "new roff" (see troff)] A companion program to
the Unix typesetter troff, accepting identical input but preparing output for
terminals and line printers.

NSA line eater

/n./ The National Security Agency trawling program sometimes assumed to be

reading the net for the U.S. Government's spooks. Most hackers describe it as a
mythical beast, but some believe it actually exists, more aren't sure, and many
believe in acting as though it exists just in case. Some netters put loaded
phrases like 'KGB', 'Uzi', 'nuclear materials', 'Palestine', 'cocaine', and
'assassination' in their sig blocks in a (probably futile) attempt to confuse
and overload the creature. The GNU version of EMACS actually has a command
that randomly inserts a bunch of insidious anarcho-verbiage into your edited
text.

There is a mainstream variant of this myth involving a 'Trunk Line Monitor',

which supposedly used speech recognition to extract words from telephone trunks.
This one was making the rounds in the late 1970s, spread by people who had no
idea of then-current technology or the storage, signal-processing, or speech
recognition needs of such a project. On the basis of mass-storage costs alone
it would have been cheaper to hire 50 high-school students and just let them
listen in. Speech-recognition technology can't do this job even now (1996), and
almost certainly won't in this millennium, either. The peak of silliness came
with a letter to an alternative paper in New Haven, Connecticut, laying out the
factoids of this Big Brotherly affair. The letter writer then revealed his
actual agenda by offering — at an amazing low price, just this once, we take
VISA and MasterCard — a scrambler guaranteed to daunt the Trunk Trawler and
presumably allowing the would-be Baader-Meinhof gangs of the world to get on
with their business.

NSP

/N-S-P/ /n./ Common abbreviation for 'Network Service Provider', one of the big
national or regional companies that maintains a portion of the Internet backbone
and resells connectivity to ISPs. In 1996, major NSPs include ANS, MCI,
UUNET, and Sprint. An Internet wholesaler.

nude

/adj./ Said of machines delivered without an operating system (compare bare

metal). "We ordered 50 systems, but they all arrived nude, so we had to spend
a an extra weekend with the installation tapes." This usage is a recent
innovation reflecting the fact that most PC clones are now delivered with DOS or
Microsoft Windows pre-installed at the factory. Other kinds of hardware are
still normally delivered without OS, so this term is particular to PC support
groups.

nuke

/n[y]ook/ /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 dike, applied to smaller things such as files, 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 Unix. 4. On IBM PCs, a
bug that results in 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 used of analogous lossages on Macintoshes and other micros without
memory protection.

number-crunching

/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 slang, but has
additional hackish 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. if such pictures can be used as wallpaper. See also crunch.

numbers

/n./ [scientific computation] 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 program because output — any output, not necessarily meaningful output — is
needed as a demonstration of progress. See pretty pictures, math-out,
social science number.

NUXI problem

/nuk'see pro'bl*m/ /n./ 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 from a
little-endian to a big-endian, or vice-versa). See also middle-endian,
swab, and bytesexual.

nybble

/nib'l/ (alt. 'nibble') /n./ [from /v./ 'nibble' by analogy with 'bite' =
'byte'] Four bits; one hex digit; a half-byte. Though 'byte' is now
techspeak, this useful relative is still jargon. Compare byte; see also
bit, Apparently the 'nybble' spelling is uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as
British orthography suggests the pronunciation /ni:'bl/.

Following 'bit', 'byte' and 'nybble' there have been quite a few analogical
attempts to construct unambiguous terms for bit blocks of other sizes. All of
these are strictly jargon, not techspeak, and not very common jargon at that
(most hackers would recognize them in context but not use them spontaneously).
We collect them here for reference together with the ambiguous techspeak terms
'word', 'half-word' and 'quadwords'; some (indicated) have substantial
information separate entries.

2 bits: crumb, quad, quarter, tayste

4 bits: nybble
5 bits: nickle
10 bits: deckle
16 bits: playte, chawmp (on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 16-bit machine),
half-word (on a 32-bit machine).
18 bits: chawmp (on a 36-bit machine), half-word (on a 36-bit machine)
32 bits: dynner, gawble (on a 32-bit machine), word (on a 32-bit machine),
longword (on a 16-bit machine).
36 bits: word (on a 36-bit machine)
48 bits: gawble (under circumstances that remain obscure)

The fundamental motivation for most of these jargon terms (aside from the normal
hackerly enjoyment of punning wordplay) is the extreme ambiguity of the term
'word' and its derivatives.

nyetwork

/nyet'werk/ /n./ [from Russian 'nyet' = no] A network, when it is acting

flaky or is down. Compare notwork.

O
Ob-

/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
particularly to do with sex, the author may 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 one's Obs are more interesting than other
people's whole postings.

Obfuscated C Contest

/n./ (in full, the 'International Obfuscated C Code Contest', or IOCCC) 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 awarded at the judges' whim.
C's terse syntax 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
code in C.

This relatively short and sweet 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 execlp(*c,*c,c[!!c]+!!c,!c));
**c=!c)write(!!*c,*c,!!**c);_

Here's another good one:

/* * Program to compute an approximation of pi * by Brian Westley, 1988

*/

#define -F 00||--F-OO--; int F=00,OO=00;

main()_F_OO();printf("%1.3f\n",4.*-F/OO/OO);_F_OO() _ _-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_
_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_-_-_-_-_ _-_-_-_

Note that this program works by computing its own area. For more digits, write a
bigger program. See also hello, world.

The IOCC has an official home page at http://reality.sgi.com/csp/ioccc.

obi-wan error

/oh'bee-won` er'*r/ /n./ [RPI, from 'off-by-one' and the Obi-Wan Kenobi
character in "Star Wars"] 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. A
kind of off-by-one error. See also zeroth.

Objectionable-C

/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
syntax, but lacks the flexibility of Smalltalk method calls, and (like many such
efforts) comes frustratingly close to attaining the Right Thing without
actually doing so.

obscure

/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 something could be figured out but probably isn't worth the trouble. The
construction 'obscure in the extreme' is the preferred emphatic form.

octal forty

/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

/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

/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 person next
to the one who should have gotten it. Often confounded with fencepost error,
which is properly a particular subtype of it.

offline

/adv./ Not now or not here. "Let's take this discussion offline."
Specifically used on Usenet to suggest that a discussion be moved off a public
newsgroup to email.

ogg

/og/ /v./ [CMU] 1. In the multi-player space combat game Netrek, to execute
kamikaze attacks against enemy ships which are carrying armies or occupying
strategic positions. Named during a game in which one of the players repeatedly
used the tactic while playing Orion ship G, showing up in the player list as
"Og". This trick has been roundly denounced by those who would return to the
good old days when the tactic of dogfighting was dominant, but as Sun Tzu wrote,
"What is of supreme importance in war is to attack the enemy's strategy."
However, the traditional answer to the newbie question "What does ogg mean?" is
just "Pick up some armies and I'll show you." 2. In other games, to forcefully
attack an opponent with the expectation that the resources expended will be
renewed faster than the opponent will be able to regain his previous advantage.
Taken more seriously as a tactic since it has gained a simple name. 3. To do
anything forcefully, possibly without consideration of the drain on future
resources. "I guess I'd better go ogg the problem set that's due tomorrow."
"Whoops! I looked down at the map for a sec and almost ogged that oncoming car."

old fart

/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 blocks attached to Jargon File contributions of great archeological
significance. This is a term of insult in the second or third person but one of
pride in first person.

Old Testament

/n./ [C programmers] The first edition of K R, the sacred text describing

Classic C.

one-banana problem

/n./ At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine
administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on the
operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is frequently
observed that the incentives that would be offered said monkeys can be used as a
scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A one-banana problem is simple;
hence, "It's only a one-banana job at the most; what's taking them so long?"

At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana problems.
Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them more finely; at
ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. Their upper limit for
the in-house sysapes is said to be two bananas and three grapes (another
source claims it's three bananas and one grape, but observes "However, this is
subject to local variations, cosmic rays and ISO"). At a complication level any
higher than that, one asks the manufacturers to send someone around to check
things.

See also Infinite-Monkey Theorem.

one-line fix

/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

/n./ A game popular among hackers who code in the language APL (see write-only
language and line noise). 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 hairy primitive set. A similar amusement was practiced among
TECO hackers and is now popular among Perl aficionados.

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 o.| T) / T - iN

where 'o' is the APL null character, the assignment arrow is a single character,
and 'i' represents the APL iota.

ooblick

/oo'blik/ /n./ [from the Dr. Seuss title "Bartholomew and the Oobleck"; the
spelling 'oobleck' is still current in the mainstream] 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-Newtonian behavior;
it pours and splatters, but 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 of food coloring

This recipe isn't quite as 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 the
various mixed states the cornstarch goes 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.

op

/op/ /n./ 1. In England and Ireland, common verbal abbreviation for 'operator',
as in system operator. Less common in the U.S., where sysop seems to be
preferred. 2. [IRC] Someone who is endowed with privileges on IRC, not
limited to a particular channel. These are generally people who are in charge
of the IRC server at their particular site. Sometimes used interchangeably with
CHOP. Compare sysop.

open

/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 close."

Open DeathTrap

/n./ Abusive hackerism for the Santa Cruz Operation's 'Open DeskTop' product, a
Motif-based graphical interface over their Unix. The funniest part is that this
was coined by SCO's own developers.... Compare AIDX, Macintrash Nominal
Semidestructor, ScumOS, sun-stools, HP-SUX.

open switch

/n./ [IBM: prob. from railroading] An unresolved question, issue, or problem.

operating system

: /n./ [techspeak] (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
operating system provides and its general 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, TOPS-20/TWENEX, WAITS, CP/M, MS-DOS, and
Multics operating systems (most importantly by ITS and Unix).

optical diff

/n./ See vdiff.

optical grep

/n./ See vgrep.

optimism

/n./ What a programmer is full of after fixing the last bug and before
discovering the *next* last bug. Fred Brooks's book "The Mythical Man-Month"
(See "Brooks's Law") contains the following paragraph that describes this
extremely well:

All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery especially

attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy godmothers. Perhaps the
hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away all but those who habitually focus
on the end goal. Perhaps it is merely that computers are young, programmers
are younger, and the young are always optimists. But however the selection
process works, the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or
"I just found the last bug.".

See also Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology.

Orange Book

/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 (least). Stock Unixes are roughly C1, and can be upgraded to about C2
without excessive pain. See also crayola books, book titles.

oriental food

: /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 heavily with hackerdom, most notably 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 out of four. See also ravs, great-wall,
stir-fried random, laser chicken, Yu-Shiang Whole Fish. Thai, Indian,
Korean, and Vietnamese cuisines are also quite popular.

orphan

/n./ [Unix] A process whose parent has died; one inherited by 'init(1)'.
Compare zombie.

orphaned i-node

/or'f*nd i:'nohd/ /n./ [Unix] 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 no longer serving a useful function within some
organization, esp. lion food without subordinates.

orthogonal

/adj./ [from mathematics] 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, span
the entire 'capability space' of the 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 instruction, the register set is said to be
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 discourse:
"This may be orthogonal to the discussion, but...."

OS

/O-S/ 1. [Operating System] /n./ An abbreviation heavily used in email,

occasionally in speech. 2. /n. obs./ On ITS, an output spy. See "OS and
JEDGAR" in Appendix A.

OS/2

/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.
Often called 'Half-an-OS'. Mentioning it is usually good for a cheap laugh among
hackers — the design was so baroque, and the implementation of 1.x so bad,
that 3 years after introduction you could still count the major apps shipping
for it on the fingers of two hands — in unary. The 2.x versions are said to
have improved somewhat, and informed hackers now rate them superior to Microsoft
Windows (an endorsement which, however, could easily be construed as damning
with faint praise). See monstrosity, cretinous, second-system effect.

OSU

/O-S-U/ /n. obs./ [TMRC] Acronym for Officially Sanctioned User; a user who is
recognized as such by the computer authorities and allowed to use the computer
above the objections of the security monitor.

OTOH

// [USENET] On The Other Hand.

out-of-band

/adj./ [from telecommunications and network theory] 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 functions,
for example, return a nonnegative integral value, but indicate failure with an
out-of-band return value of -1. Compare hidden flag, green bytes, fence.
2. Also sometimes used to describe what communications people call 'shift
characters', such as the ESC that leads control sequences for many 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

/n./ 1. [techspeak] A flag on some processors indicating an attempt to

calculate a result too large for a register to hold. 2. More generally, an
indication of any kind of capacity overload condition. "Well, the Ada
description was baroque all right, 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 process an internal interrupt before the overflow bit gets
set".

overflow pdl

/n./ [MIT] The place where you put things when your pdl is full. If you
don't have one and too many things get pushed, you forget something. The
overflow pdl for a person's memory might be a memo pad. This usage inspired the
following doggerel:

Hey, diddle, diddle

The overflow pdl
To get a little more stack;
If that's not enough
Then you lose it all,
And have to pop all the way back.

—The Great Quux

The term pdl seems to be primarily an MITism; outside MIT this term is
replaced by 'overflow stack'.

overrun

/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 a silo
can hold only two characters and the 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 phone calls in 3 minutes last night and lost your
message to overrun." When thrashing at tasks, the next person to make a
request might be told "Overrun!" Compare firehose syndrome. 3. More loosely,
may refer to a buffer overflow not necessarily related to processing time (as
in overrun screw).

overrun screw

/n./ [C programming] A variety of fandango on core produced by scribbling

past the end of an array (C implementations typically have no checks for this
error). This is relatively benign and easy to spot if the array is static; if
it is auto, the result may be to smash the stack — often resulting in
heisenbugs 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 arena,
producing massive lossage within 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, memory smash, aliasing bug, precedence lossage,
fandango on core, secondary damage.

P-mail

/n./ Physical mail, as opposed to email. Synonymous with snail-mail, but

much less common.

P.O.D.

/P-O-D/ Acronym for 'Piece Of Data' (as opposed to a code section). Usage:
pedantic and rare. See also pod.

padded cell

/n./ Where you put lusers 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 different
from an iron box because it is overt and not aimed at enforcing security so
much as protecting others (and the luser) from the consequences of the luser's
boundless naivete (see naive). Also 'padded cell environment'.

page in

/v./ [MIT] 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!" 2. Syn. 'swap in'; see swap.

page out

/vi./ [MIT] 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

/n./ A flamer.

Pangloss parity

/n./ [from Dr. Pangloss, the eternal optimist in Voltaire's "Candide"] In

corporate DP shops, a common condition of severe but equally shared lossage
resulting from the theory that as long as everyone in the organization has the
exactly the *same* model of obsolete computer, everything will be fine.

paper-net

/n./ Hackish way of referring to the postal service, analogizing it to a very

slow, low-reliability network. Usenet sig blocks sometimes include a
"Paper-Net:" header just before the sender's postal address; common variants of
this are "Papernet" and "P-Net". Note that the standard netiquette guidelines
discourage this practice as a waste of bandwidth, since netters are quite
unlikely to casually use postal addresses. Compare voice-net, snail-mail,
P-mail.

param

/p*-ram'/ /n./ Shorthand for 'parameter'. See also parm; compare arg,
var.

PARC

/n./ See XEROX PARC.

parent message

/n./ What a followup follows up.

parity errors

/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."
Derives from a relatively common but nearly always correctable transient error
in RAM hardware. Parity errors can also afflict mass storage and serial
communication lines; this is more serious because not always correctable.

Parkinson's Law of Data

/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 systems tends
to double roughly once every 18 months. Fortunately, memory density available
for constant dollars also tends to double about once every 12 months (see
Moore's Law); unfortunately, the laws of physics guarantee that the latter
cannot continue indefinitely.

parm

/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

[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 understand
or comprehend. "It's very simple; you 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 fish' has been deboned. There is some
controversy over whether 'unparsed' should mean 'bony', or also mean 'deboned'.

Pascal

: /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 and thus extremely restrictive from a 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). The hackish point of view on Pascal was
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 turned down by the technical
journals but circulated widely via photocopies. It was eventually published in
"Comparing and Assessing Programming Languages", edited by Alan Feuer and Narain
Gehani (Prentice-Hall, 1984). 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 the end of a summary of the case against
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 the type-checking when necessary. There 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 into a fatal trap.
Because the language 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, internal static variables, initialization, octal 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 form, Pascal is a toy language, suitable 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 in the MS-DOS and Macintosh worlds.

pastie

/pay'stee/ /n./ An adhesive-backed label designed to be attached to a key on a

keyboard to indicate some non-standard character which can be accessed through
that key. Pasties are likely to be used in APL environments, where almost every
key is associated with a special character. A pastie on the R key, for example,
might remind the user that it is used to generate the rho character. The term
properly refers to nipple-concealing devices formerly worn by strippers in
concession to indecent-exposure laws; compare tits on a keyboard.

patch

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.
Distinguished from a diff or mod by the fact 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 originally written in an HLL.
Compare one-line 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 operating system in the form of absolute 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 often a convoluted patch
space and headaches galore. 5. [Unix] the 'patch(1)' program, written by Larry
Wall, which automatically applies a patch (sense 3) to a set of source code.

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
patches that you can't — or don't — inspect and examine before installing).
They couldn't find any trap doors or 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. The patch was actually the trapdoor they
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
about proper procedures.

patch space

/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 contain a
jump or call to the patch space). 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

/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
directory; the latter is sometimes called a '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, similar constructs abound under Unix
(for example, the C preprocessor has a 'search path' it uses in looking for
'#include' files).

pathological

/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 inputs
may still be useful if such inputs 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 had to explicitly set out to break the 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 just crash."
"Yes, but that's a pathological case." Often used to dismiss the case from
discussion, with the implication that the consequences are acceptable, since
they will happen so infrequently (if at all) that it doesn't seem worth going to
the extra trouble to handle that case (see sense 1).

payware

/pay'weir/ /n./ Commercial software. Oppose shareware or freeware.

PBD

/P-B-D/ /n./ [abbrev. of 'Programmer Brain Damage'] 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

/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
hard timing loops. Compare ill-behaved, vaxism, unixism. Also, 'PC-ware'
n., a program full of PC-isms on a machine with a more capable operating system.
Pejorative.

PD

/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 copyrights granting reproduction and use rights to anyone who can
snarf a copy. See copyleft.

PDL

/P-D-L/, /pid'l/, /p*d'l/ or /puhd'l/ 1. /n./ 'Program Design Language'. Any

of a large class of formal and profoundly useless pseudo-languages in which
management forces one to design programs. Too often, management expects PDL
descriptions to be maintained in parallel with the code, imposing massive
overhead to little or no benefit. See also flowchart. 2. /v./ To design using
a program design language. "I've been pdling so long my eyes won't focus beyond
2 feet." 3. /n./ 'Page Description Language'. Refers to any language which is
used to control a graphics device, usually a laserprinter. The most common
example is, of course, Adobe's PostScript language, but there are many others,
such as Xerox InterPress, etc.

pdl

/pid'l/ or /puhd'l/ /n./ [abbreviation for 'Push Down List'] 1. In ITS days,
the preferred MITism for stack. See overflow pdl. 2. Dave Lebling, one of
the co-authors of Zork; (his network address on the ITS machines was at one
time pdl@dms). 3. Rarely, any sense of PDL, as these are not invariably
capitalized.

PDP-10

/n./ [Programmed Data Processor model 10] 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 AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU. Some aspects of 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 were competing with each other and
decided to 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 other companies to market clones came to nothing; see Foonly and
Mars.) 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 have cut one's teeth on a
PDP-10. See TOPS-10, ITS, AOS, BLT, DDT, DPB, EXCH, HAKMEM,
JFCL, LDB, pop, push.

PDP-20

/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 labeled 'DECSYSTEM-20' (the block capitals 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 system and the color of the paint. Most
(but not 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

/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 hacking on small, non-MMU micros consists of '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). The results of 'poke's at
these addresses may be highly useful, mildly amusing, useless but neat, or (most
likely) total lossage (see killer poke).
Since a real operating system provides useful, higher-level services for the
tasks commonly performed with peeks and pokes on micros, and real languages tend
not to encourage low-level memory groveling, a question like "How do I do a peek
in C?" is diagnostic of the newbie. (Of course, OS kernels often have to do
exactly this; a real C hacker would unhesitatingly, if unportably, assign an
absolute address to a pointer variable and indirect through it.)

pencil and paper

/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 which use
tiny rolling heads similar to mouse 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 had terrible handwriting to begin with, and 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.

peon

/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

/per-sent' es'/ /n./ [From the code in C's 'printf(3)' library function used to
insert an arbitrary string argument] An unspecified person or object. "I was
just talking to some percent-s in administration." Compare random.

perf

/perf/ /n./ Syn. chad (sense 1). The term 'perfory' /per'f*-ree/ is also
heard. The term perf may also refer to the perforations themselves, rather
than the chad they produce when torn (philatelists use it this way).

perfect programmer syndrome

/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 perceptions may be
distorted by a history of excellent performance at solving toy problems). "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
mode."

Perl

/perl/ /n./ [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a. Pathologically

Eclectic Rubbish Lister] An interpreted language developed by Larry Wall
( [email protected] , author of 'patch(1)' and 'rn(1)') and distributed
over Usenet. Superficially resembles awk, but is much hairier, including many
facilities reminiscent of 'sed(1)' and shells and a comprehensive Unix
system-call interface. 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 chainsaw" of Unix programming. See also Camel Book.
person of no account

/n./ [University of California at Santa Cruz] Used when referring to a person

with no network address, frequently to forestall confusion. Most often as
part of an introduction: "This is Bill, a person of no account, but he used

to be [email protected]". Compare return from the dead.

pessimal

/pes'im-l/ /adj./ [Latin-based antonym for 'optimal'] 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', but for
some reason they do not appear in most English dictionaries, although
'pessimize' is listed in the OED.

pessimizing compiler

/pes'*-mi:z`ing k*m-pi:l'r/ /n./ A compiler that produces object [antonym of

'optimizing compiler'] code that is worse than the straightforward or obvious
hand translation. The implication is that the compiler is actually trying to
optimize the program, but through excessive cleverness is doing the opposite. A
few pessimizing compilers have been written on purpose, however, as pranks or
burlesques.

peta-

/pe't*/ pref [SI] See quantifiers.

PETSCII

/pet'skee/ /n. obs./ [abbreviation of PET ASCII] 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
machines. The PETSCII set used left-arrow 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.

phage

/n./ A program that modifies other programs or databases in unauthorized ways;

esp. one that propagates a virus or Trojan horse. See also worm,
mockingbird. The analogy, of course, is with phage viruses in biology.

phase

1. /n./ The offset of one's waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the

standard 24-hour cycle; 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 phase
by as much as 6 hours per day on a 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'. (The term 'day mode' is also (but less 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': To stay awake
for a very long time in order 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 is really hard (see wrap around). The 'jet lag' that afflicts
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 period of
time, particularly the hard way, experience something very like jet lag without
traveling.

phase of the moon

/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
determine. "This feature depends on having the channel open in mumble mode,
having the foo switch set, and on the phase of the moon." See also heisenbug.

True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend on the phase
of the moon. There was a little subroutine that had traditionally been used in
various programs at 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
the first line of the message would be too long 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 specification when the timestamp was printed, and so the 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. This has since been described as the phase-of-the-moon-bug bug.

phase-wrapping

/n./ [MIT] Syn. wrap around, sense 2.

phreaker

/freek'r/ /n./ One who engages in phreaking.

phreaking

/freek'ing/ /n./ [from 'phone phreak'] 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 communications networks) (see cracking).

At one time 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 crossover between the hacker community and the 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 the hands of less responsible
phreaks. Around 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 and punishments of gangs like the '414 group' 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-
/pref./ [SI: a quantifier meaning * 10^-12] 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
recognizable to any hacker. See also quantifiers, micro-.

pig, run like a

/v./ To run very slowly on given hardware, said of software. Distinct from
hog.

pilot error

/n./ [Sun: from aviation] 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
not a bug, that's pilot error. His 'sendmail.cf' is hosed."

ping

[from 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
alertness of another. The Unix command 'ping(8)' can be used to do this
manually (note that 'ping(8)''s author denies the widespread folk etymology that
the name was ever intended as acronym 'Packet INternet Groper'). Occasionally
used as a phone greeting. See ACK, also ENQ. 2. /vt./ To verify the
presence of. 3. /vt./ To get the attention of. 4. /vt./ To send a message to
all members of a mailing list requesting an ACK (in 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." 5.
/n./ A quantum packet of happiness. People who are very happy tend to exude
pings; furthermore, one can intentionally create pings and aim them at a needy
party (e.g., a depressed person). This sense of ping may appear as an
exclamation; "Ping!" (I'm happy; I am emitting a quantum of happiness; I have
been struck by a quantum of happiness). The form "pingfulness", which is used
to describe people who exude pings, also occurs. (In the standard abuse of
language, "pingfulness" can also be used as an exclamation, in which case it's a
much stronger exclamation than just "ping"!). Oppose blargh.

The funniest use of 'ping' to date was described in January 1991 by Steve Hayman
on the Usenet group 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 through. So he used the sound-recording feature 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 ... ping ..."
as long as the network was up. He 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

"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 a
different picture of Norton wearing a pink shirt. See also book titles.

PIP

/pip/ vt.,obs. [Peripheral Interchange Program] To copy; from the program PIP
on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, TOPS-10, 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 operation you might want to do). It is said that when the program was
originated, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was called ATLATL
(`Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord'; this played on the Nahuatl word 'atlatl'
for a spear-thrower, with connotations of utility and primitivity that were no
doubt quite intentional). See also BLT, dd, cat.

pistol

/n./ [IBM] A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the
foot. "Unix 'rm *' makes such a nice pistol!"

pixel sort

/n./ [Commodore users] Any compression routine which irretrievably loses

valuable data in the process of crunching it. Disparagingly used for 'lossy'
methods such as JPEG. The theory, of course, is that these methods are only used
on photographic images in which minor loss-of-data is not visible to the human
eye. The term 'pixel sort' implies distrust of this theory. Compare
bogo-sort.

pizza box

/n./ [Sun] 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 used to be called pizzas, and the
huge drive 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.

pizza, ANSI standard

/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; compare tea,
ISO standard cup of.

plaid screen

/n./ [XEROX PARC] A 'special effect' that occurs when certain kinds of memory
smashes overwrite the control blocks or image memory of a bit-mapped display.
The term "salt and pepper" may refer to a different pattern of similar origin.
Though the term as coined at PARC refers to the result of an error, some of the
X demos induce plaid-screen effects deliberately as a display hack.

plain-ASCII

/playn-as'kee/ Syn. flat-ASCII.

plan file

/n./ [Unix] On systems that support finger, the '.plan' file in a user's home
directory is displayed when the user is fingered. This feature was originally
intended to be used to keep potential fingerers apprised of one's location and
near-future plans, but has been turned almost universally to humorous and
self-expressive purposes (like a sig block). See also Hacking X for Y.
A recent innovation in plan files has been the introduction of "scrolling plan
files" which are one-dimensional animations made using only the printable ASCII
character set, carriage return and line feed, avoiding terminal specific escape
sequences, since the finger command will (for security reasons; see
letterbomb) not pass the escape character.

Scrolling .plan files have become art forms in miniature, and some sites have
started competitions to find who can create the longest running, funniest, and
most original animations. Various animation characters include:

Centipede: mmmmme Lorry/Truck: oo-oP Andalusian Video Snail: _@/

and a compiler (ASP) is available on Usenet for producing them. See also
twirling baton.

platinum-iridium

/adj./ Standard, against which all others of the same category are measured.
Usage: silly. The notion is that one of whatever it is has actually been cast
in platinum-iridium alloy and placed in the vault beside the Standard Kilogram
at the International Bureau of Weights and Measures near Paris. (From 1889 to
1960, the meter was defined to be the distance between two scratches in a
platinum-iridium bar kept in that same vault — this replaced an earlier
definition as 10^(-7) times the distance between the North Pole and the Equator
along a meridian through Paris; unfortunately, this had been based on an inexact
value of the circumference of the Earth. From 1960 to 1984 it was defined to be
1650763.73 wavelengths of the orange-red line of krypton-86 propagating in a
vacuum. It is now defined as the length of the path traveled by light in a
vacuum in the time interval of 1/299,792,458 of a second. The kilogram is now
the only unit of measure officially defined in terms of a unique artifact.)
"This garbage-collection algorithm has been tested against the platinum-iridium
cons cell in Paris." Compare golden.

playpen

/n./ [IBM] A room where programmers work. Compare salt mines.

playte

/playt/ 16 bits, by analogy with nybble and byte. Usage: rare and
extremely silly. See also dynner and crumb. General discussion of such
terms is under nybble.

plingnet

/pling'net/ /n./ Syn. UUCPNET. Also see Commonwealth Hackish, which uses
'pling' for bang (as in bang path).

plokta

/plok't*/ /v./ [acronym: Press Lots Of Keys To Abort] To press random keys in
an attempt to get some response from the system. One might plokta when the
abort procedure for a program is not known, or when trying to figure out if the
system is just sluggish or really hung. Plokta can also be used while trying to
figure out any unknown key sequence for a particular operation. Someone going
into 'plokta mode' usually places both hands flat on the keyboard and mashes
them down, hoping for some useful response.

A slightly more directed form of plokta can often be seen in mail messages or
Usenet articles from new users — the text might end with
 ^X^C q quit :q ^C end x exit ZZ ^D ? help

as the user vainly tries to find the right exit sequence, with the incorrect
tries piling up at the end of the message....

plonk

/excl.,vt./ [Usenet: possibly influenced by British slang 'plonk' for cheap

booze, or 'plonker' for someone behaving stupidly (latter is lit. equivalent to
Yiddish 'schmuck')] The sound a newbie makes as he falls to the bottom of a
kill file. While it originated in the newsgroup talk.bizarre, this term
(usually written "*plonk*") is now (1994) widespread on Usenet as a form of
public ridicule.

plugh

/ploogh/ /v./ [from the ADVENT game] See xyzzy.

plumbing

/n./ [Unix] Term used for shell code, so called because of the prevalence of
'pipelines' that feed the output of one program to the input of another. Under
Unix, user utilities can often be implemented or at least prototyped by a
suitable collection of pipelines and temp-file grinding encapsulated in a shell
script; this is much less effort than writing C every time, and the capability
is considered one of Unix's major winning features. A few other OSs such as
IBM's VM/CMS support similar facilities. Esp. used in the construction 'hairy
plumbing' (see hairy). "You can kluge together a basic spell-checker out of
'sort(1)', 'comm(1)', and 'tr(1)' with a little plumbing." See also tee.

PM

/P-M/ 1. /v./ (from 'preventive maintenance') To bring down a machine for

inspection or test purposes. See provocative maintenance; see also scratch
monkey. 2. /n./ Abbrev. for 'Presentation Manager', an elephantine OS/2
graphical user interface.

pnambic

/p*-nam'bik/ [Acronym from the scene in the film version of "The Wizard of Oz"
in which the true nature of the wizard is first discovered: "Pay no attention to
the man behind the curtain."] 1. A stage of development of a process or
function that, owing to incomplete 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 apparent operations are wholly or partially
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 advanced technology is indistinguishable from a
rigged demo." See magic, sense 1, for illumination of this point.

pod

/n./ [allegedly from abbreviation POD for 'Prince Of Darkness'] A Diablo 630
(or, latterly, any letter-quality impact printer). From the DEC-10 PODTYPE
program used to feed formatted text to it. Not to be confused with P.O.D..
point-and-drool interface

/n./ Parody of the techspeak term 'point-and-shoot interface', describing a

windows, icons, and mouse-based interface such as is found on the Macintosh.
The implication, of course, is that such an interface is only suitable for
idiots. See for the rest of us, WIMP environment, Macintrash,
drool-proof paper. Also 'point-and-grunt interface'.

poke

/n.,vt./ See peek.

poll

/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 not answering his phone; he must be swapped out." 3. To ask. "Lunch?
I poll for a takeout order daily."

polygon pusher

/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

/P-O-M/ /n./ Common abbreviation for phase of the moon. Usage: usually in
the phrase 'POM-dependent', which means flaky.

pop

/pop/ [from the operation that removes the top of a stack, and the fact that
procedure return addresses are usually saved on the stack] (also capitalized
'POP') 1. /vt./ To remove something from a stack or pdl. If a person says
he/she has popped something from his stack, that means 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 a level of detail so deep that the main
point of the discussion is being lost, someone will shout "Pop!", meaning "Get
back up to a higher level!" The shout is frequently accompanied by an upthrust
arm with a finger pointing to the ceiling.

POPJ

/pop'J/ /n.,v./ [from a PDP-10 return-from-subroutine instruction] To return

from a digression. By verb doubling, "Popj, popj" means roughly "Now let's see,
where were we?" See RTI.

poser

/n./ A wannabee; not hacker slang, but used among crackers, phreaks and
warez d00dz. Not as negative as lamer or leech. Probably derives from a
similar usage among punk-rockers and metalheads, putting down those who "talk
the talk but don't walk the walk".

post
/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?"

postcardware

/n./ A kind of shareware that borders on freeware, in that the author

requests only that satisfied users send a postcard of their home town or
something. (This practice, silly as it might seem, serves to remind users that
they are otherwise getting something for nothing, and may also be
psychologically related to real estate 'sales' in which $1 changes hands just to
keep the transaction from being a gift.)

posting

/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 small mailing list are postings or email; perhaps the best dividing line is
that if you don't know the names of all the potential recipients, it is a
posting.

postmaster

/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. The
Internet standard for electronic mail (RFC-822) requires each machine to have
a 'postmaster' address; usually it is aliased to this person.

PostScript

: /n./ A Page Description Language (PDL), based on work originally done by

John Gaffney at Evans and Sutherland in 1976, evolving through 'JaM' (`John and
Martin', Martin Newell) at XEROX PARC, and finally implemented in its current
form by John Warnock et al. after he and Chuck Geschke founded Adobe Systems
Incorporated in 1982. PostScript gets its leverage by using a full programming
language, rather than a series of low-level escape sequences, to describe an
image to be printed on a laser printer or other output device (in this it
parallels EMACS, which exploited a similar insight about editing tasks). It is
also noteworthy for implementing on-the fly rasterization, from Bezier curve
descriptions, of high-quality fonts at low (e.g. 300 dpi) resolution (it was
formerly believed that hand-tuned bitmap fonts were required for this task).
Hackers consider PostScript to be among the most elegant hacks of all time, and
the combination of technical merits and widespread availability has made
PostScript the language of choice for graphical output.

pound on

/vt./ Syn. bang on.

power cycle

/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
gronked state. Syn. 120 reset; see also Big Red Switch. Compare Vulcan
nerve pinch, bounce (sense 4), and boot, and see the "AI Koans" (in
Appendix A) about Tom Knight and the novice.
power hit

/n./ A spike or drop-out in the electricity supplying your machine; a power

glitch. These can cause crashes and even permanent damage to your machine(s).

PPN

/P-P-N/, /pip'n/ /n. obs./ [from 'Project-Programmer Number'] 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 other systems as well.

precedence lossage

/pre's*-dens los'*j/ /n./ [C programmers] 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 nonintuitively low
precedence levels of ' ', '|', '^', ' ', 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 fans enjoy pointing out that this can't
happen in *their* favorite language, which eschews precedence entirely,
requiring one to use explicit parentheses everywhere. See aliasing bug,
memory leak, memory smash, smash the stack, fandango on core, overrun
screw.

prepend

/pree`pend'/ /vt./ [by analogy with 'append'] 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 you
prepend a semicolon to the line, the translation routine will pass it through
unaltered."

prestidigitization

/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

/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 management.

prettyprint

/prit'ee-print/ /v./ (alt. 'pretty-print') 1. To generate 'pretty'

human-readable output from a hairy internal representation; esp. used for the
process of grinding (sense 1) program code, and most esp. for LISP code. 2. To
format in some particularly slick and nontrivial way.

pretzel key

/n./ [Mac users] See feature key.

priesthood
/n. obs./ [TMRC] The select group of system managers responsible for the
operation and maintenance of a batch operated computer system. On these
computers, a user never had direct access to a computer, but had to submit
his/her data and programs to a priest for execution. Results were returned days
or even weeks later. See acolyte.

prime time

/n./ [from TV programming] Normal high-usage hours on a timesharing system; the

day shift. Avoidance of prime time was traditionally given as a major reason
for night mode hacking. The rise of the personal workstation has rendered
this term, along with timesharing itself, almost obsolete. The hackish tendency
to late-night hacking runs has changed not a bit.

printing discussion

/n./ [XEROX PARC] A protracted, low-level, time-consuming, generally pointless

discussion of something only peripherally interesting to all.

priority interrupt

/n./ [from the hardware term] 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 interruptions
such as a fire alarm going off in the near vicinity. Also called an NMI
(non-maskable interrupt), especially in PC-land.

profile

/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
(see also dot file, rc file). 2. [techspeak] A report on the amounts of
time spent in each routine of a program, used to find and tune away the hot
spots 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 than
per-routine, but the idea is similar. 3.[techspeak] A subset of a standard used
for a particular purpose. This sense confuses hackers who wander into the weird
world of ISO standards no end!

progasm

/proh'gaz-m/ /n./ [University of Wisconsin] The euphoria experienced upon the

completion of a program or other computer-related project.

proglet

/prog'let/ /n./ [UK] A short extempore program written to meet an immediate,

transient need. Often written in BASIC, rarely more than a dozen lines long,
and containing no subroutines. The largest amount of code that can be written
off the top of one's head, that does not need any editing, and that runs
correctly the first time (this amount varies significantly according to one's
skill and the language one is using). Compare toy program, noddy,
one-liner wars.

program

/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 nevertheless
almost inevitably a failure if other programmers can't understand it.

Programmer's Cheer

"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

/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). "Bloody instructions which,
being taught, return to plague their inventor" ("Macbeth", Act 1, Scene 7) 2. A
pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer opportunities
for reward. 3. The most fun you can have with your clothes on (although clothes
are not mandatory).

programming fluid

/n./ 1. Coffee. 2. Cola. 3. Any caffeinacious stimulant. Many hackers

consider these essential for those all-night hacking runs. See wirewater.

propeller head

/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 beanies as
fannish insignia (though nobody actually wears them except as a joke).

propeller key

/n./ [Mac users] See feature key.

proprietary

/adj./ 1. In marketroid-speak, superior; implies a product imbued with

exclusive magic by the unmatched brilliance of the company's own hardware or
software designers. 2. In the language of hackers and users, inferior; implies a
product not conforming to open-systems 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.

protocol

/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
things. It is used instead to describe any 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 which one should use the forks in the
Dining 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. See also handshaking, do protocol.

provocative maintenance
/n./ [common ironic mutation of 'preventive maintenance'] 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 performed by a
field servoid who doesn't know what he is doing; such 'maintenance' often
*induces* problems, or otherwise results in the machine's remaining in an
*un*usable state for an indeterminate amount of time. See also scratch
monkey.

prowler

/n./ [Unix] 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 the
corners of a file system. See also GFR, reaper, skulker.

pseudo

/soo'doh/ /n./ [Usenet: truncation of 'pseudonym'] 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
associated with forged postings designed to conceal message origins. Perhaps
the best-known and funniest hoax of this type is B1FF. See also tentacle.
2. Notionally, a flamage-generating AI program simulating a Usenet user. Many
flamers have been accused of actually being such entities, despite the fact that
no AI program of the required 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 their back postings (compare Dissociated 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

/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),
uses a statistical technique to decide whether the number is 'probably' prime.
A number that passes this test was, before about 1985, called a 'pseudoprime'
(the terminology used by number theorists has since changed slightly; pre-1985
pseudoprimes are now 'probable primes' and 'pseudoprime' has a more restricted
meaning in modular arithmetic). The hacker backgammon usage stemmed from the
idea that a pseudoprime is almost as good as a prime: it does the job of a prime
until proven otherwise, and that probably won't happen.

pseudosuit

/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

/si:`k*-del'-ik-weir/ /n./ [UK] Syn. display hack. See also smoking

clover.

psyton

/si:'ton/ /n./ [TMRC] 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
likely to fail when lots of people are watching. [This term appears to have
been largely superseded by bogon; see also quantum bogodynamics. — ESR]

pubic directory

/pyoob'ik d*-rek't*-ree/) /n./ [NYU] (also 'pube directory' /pyoob'

d*-rek't*-ree/) 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 pube directory by Friday."

puff

/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, see
inflate.

punched card

: n.obs. [techspeak] (alt. 'punch card') 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
device for mechanical looms. The version 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. There is a widespread myth that it was designed to fit
in the currency trays used for that era's larger dollar bills, but recent
investigations have falsified this.

IBM (which originated as a tabulating-machine 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 were tried at various times.

The 80-column 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 card, dusty deck, lace card, card walloper.

punt

/v./ [from the punch line of an old joke referring to American football: "Drop
back 15 yards and punt!"] 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 this feature in, but I decided to punt" may 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. A design decision to defer
solving a 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 implementation problem off to some other section of the design. "It's
too hard to get the compiler to do that; let's punt to the runtime system."

Purple Book

/n./ 1. The "System V Interface Definition". The covers of the first editions
were an amazingly nauseating shade of off-lavender. 2. Syn. Wizard Book.
Donald Lewine's "POSIX Programmer's Guide" (O'Reilly, 1991, ISBN 0-937175-73-0).
See also book titles.
purple wire

/n./ [IBM] Wire installed by Field Engineers to work around problems discovered
during testing or debugging. These are called 'purple wires' even when (as is
frequently the case) their actual physical color is yellow.... Compare blue
wire, yellow wire, and red wire.

push

[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 put
something onto a stack or pdl. If 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 items; otherwise one might say that the thing 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 (compare hex, sense 2). 3. The rectangle or box glyph used in the
APL language for various arcane purposes mostly related to I/O. Former
Ivy-Leaguers and Oxford types are said to associate it with nostalgic memories
of dear old University.

quadruple bucky

/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 typing a
fifth character, where the four 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 right-meta keys with your right hand, and the 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 that a program has ridiculously many commands 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

: 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
retain their usual meanings of multiplication 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).

Here are the SI magnifying prefixes, along with the corresponding binary
interpretations in common use:
 prefix decimal binary
kilo- 1000^1 1024^1 = 2^10 = 1,024
mega- 1000^2 1024^2 = 2^20 = 1,048,576
giga- 1000^3 1024^3 = 2^30 = 1,073,741,824
tera- 1000^4 1024^4 = 2^40 = 1,099,511,627,776
peta- 1000^5 1024^5 = 2^50 = 1,125,899,906,842,624
exa- 1000^6 1024^6 = 2^60 = 1,152,921,504,606,846,976
zetta- 1000^7 1024^7 = 2^70 = 1,180,591,620,717,411,303,424
yotta- 1000^8 1024^8 = 2^80 = 1,208,925,819,614,629,174,706,176

Here are the SI fractional prefixes:

prefix decimal jargon usage

milli- 1000^-1 (seldom used in jargon)
micro- 1000^-2 small or human-scale (see micro-)
nano- 1000^-3 even smaller (see nano-)
pico- 1000^-4 even smaller yet (see pico-)
femto- 1000^-5 (not used in jargon—yet)
atto- 1000^-6 (not used in jargon—yet)
zepto- 1000^-7 (not used in jargon—yet)
yocto- 1000^-8 (not used in jargon—yet)

The prefixes zetta-, yotta-, zepto-, and yocto- have been included in these
tables purely for completeness and giggle value; they were adopted in 1990 by
the '19th Conference Generale des Poids et Mesures'. The binary peta- and exa-
loadings, though well established, are not in jargon use either — yet. The
prefix milli-, denoting multiplication by 1/1000, has always been rare in jargon
(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- for more information on connotative jargon 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 required realms of magnitude
(however, see 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 jargon abbreviations and
words for the corresponding power of 2. The B-suffixed forms are commonly used
for byte quantities; the words 'meg' and 'gig' are nouns that may (but do not
always) pluralize with 's'.

prefix decimal binary pronunciation

kilo- k K, KB, /kay/
mega- M M, MB, meg /meg/
giga- G G, GB, gig /gig/,/jig/

Confusingly, hackers often use K or M as though they were suffix or numeric

multipliers rather than a prefix; thus "2K dollars", "2M of disk space". This
is also true (though less commonly) of G.

Note that the formal SI metric prefix for 1000 is 'k'; some use this strictly,
reserving 'K' for multiplication by 1024 (KB is thus 'kilobytes').

K, M, and G used alone refer to quantities of 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 pronunciation of 'giga-' is.

Confusing 1000 and 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. One example of this: it is common to refer to
the capacity of 3.5" microfloppies as '1.44 MB' In fact, this is a completely
bogus number. The correct size is 1440 KB, that is, 1440 * 1024 = 1474560
bytes. So the 'mega' in '1.44 MB' is compounded of two 'kilos', one of which is
1024 and the other of which is 1000. The correct number of megabytes would of
course be 1440 / 1024 = 1.40625. Alas, this fine point is probably lost on the
world forever.

[1993 update: hacker Morgan Burke has proposed, to general approval on Usenet,
the following additional prefixes:

groucho 10^(-30)
harpo 10^(-27)
harpi 10^(27)
grouchi 10^(30)

We observe that this would leave the prefixes zeppo-, gummo-, and chico-
available for future expansion. Sadly, there is little immediate prospect that
Mr. Burke's eminently sensible proposal will be ratified.]

quantum bogodynamics

/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 suits in general), bogon sinks (such as taxpayers and computers), and
bogosity potential fields. 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 yet understood and remain to be elucidated. 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, psyton.

quarter

/n./ Two bits. This in turn comes from the 'pieces of eight' famed in pirate
movies — Spanish silver crowns that could be broken into eight pie-slice-shaped
'bits' to make change. Early in American history the Spanish coin was
considered equal to a dollar, so each of these 'bits' was considered worth 12.5
cents. Syn. tayste, crumb, quad. Usage: rare. General discussion of
such terms is under nybble.

ques

/kwes/ 1. /n./ The question mark character (`?', ASCII 0111111). 2. /interj./
What? Also frequently verb-doubled as "Ques ques?" See wall.

quick-and-dirty

/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 tonight, but
I'll have to rewrite the whole module to solve the underlying design problem."
See also kluge.

quine

/kwi:n/ /n./ [from the name of the logician Willard van Orman Quine, via
Douglas Hofstadter] A program that generates a copy of its own source text as
its complete output. Devising the shortest possible quine in some given
programming language is a common hackish amusement. Here is one classic quine:

((lambda (x) (list x (list (quote quote) x))) (quote(lambda (x)

(list x (list (quote quote) x)))))

This one works in LISP or Scheme. It's relatively easy to write quines in other
languages such as Postscript which readily handle programs as data; much harder
(and thus more challenging!) in languages like C which do not. Here is a
classic C quine for ASCII machines:

char*f="char*f=%c%s%c;main() printf(f,34,f,34,10);%c";main()_printf(f,34,f,34,10);

For excruciatingly exact quinishness, remove the interior line breaks. Some
infamous Obfuscated C Contest entries have been quines that reproduced in
exotic ways.

quote chapter and verse

/v./ [by analogy with the mainstream phrase] To cite 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 chapter and verse if you
don't believe me." See also legalese, language lawyer, RTFS (sense 2).

quotient

/n./ See coefficient of X.

quux

/kwuhks/ /n./ [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 all, using up all the 'u' letters in Scrabble).] 1. Originally, a
metasyntactic variable like foo and foobar. Invented by Guy Steele for
precisely this purpose when he was young and naive and not yet interacting with
the real computing community. Many people invent such words; this one seems
simply to have 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 for the sake of the sound of it. 3. Guy Steele in his persona as
'The Great Quux', which is somewhat infamous for light verse and for the
'Crunchly' cartoons. 4. In some circles, used as a punning opposite of 'crux'.
"Ah, that's the quux of the matter!" implies that the point is *not* crucial
(compare tip of the ice-cube). 5. quuxy: /adj./ Of or pertaining to a quux.

qux

/kwuhks/ The fourth of the standard metasyntactic variable, 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 (especially older versions)
of the standard series just run foo, bar, baz, quux, ....

QWERTY

/kwer'tee/ /adj./ [from the keycaps at the upper left] 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
space-cadet keyboard or APL keyboard.

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
obsolete. In early typewriters, fast typing using 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, putting the letters of 'typewriter'
on one line allowed it to be typed with particular speed and accuracy for
demos. The jamming problem was essentially solved soon afterward by a
suitable use of springs, but the keyboard layout lives on.

rabbit job

/n./ [Cambridge] A batch job that does little, if any, real work, but creates
one or more copies of itself, breeding like rabbits. Compare wabbit, fork
bomb.

rain dance

/n./ 1. Any ceremonial action taken to correct a hardware problem, 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. Any arcane
sequence of actions performed with 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, cargo cult programming, wave a dead chicken; see
also casting the runes.

rainbow series

/n./ Any of several series of technical manuals distinguished by cover color.

The original rainbow series was the NCSC security manuals (see Orange Book,
crayola books); the term has also been commonly applied to the PostScript
reference set (see Red Book, Green Book, Blue Book, White Book). Which
books are meant by "`the' rainbow series" unqualified is thus dependent on one's
local technical culture.

random

/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) Frivolous; unproductive; undirected. "He's 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. In no particular order, though
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 apparent
reason. For example, a program that 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 else can invoke it without first
saving four 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 hacker speaking); the noun form of sense 2. "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

: /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
following:
 17 Long described at MIT 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 this answer is completely fortuitous. ':-)')
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, study the "Principia Discordia", "The Hitchhiker's

Guide to the Galaxy", "The Joy of Sex", and the Christian Bible (Revelation
13:18). See also Discordianism or consult your pineal gland. See also for
values of.

randomness

/n./ 1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. 2. 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
malfunction). "This hack can output characters 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!" 3. Of
people, synonymous with 'flakiness'. The connotation is that the person so
described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or inappropriately for reasons
which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are probably as
inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to pass with time.
"Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's just randomness. See if he calls
back."

rape

/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 raping the master directory." 2. To strip a piece of hardware for parts. 3.
[CMU/Pitt] To mass-copy files from an anonymous ftp site. "Last night I raped
Simtel's dskutl directory."

rare mode

/adj./ [Unix] 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: rare.

raster blaster

/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

/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

/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'.

rat dance

/n./ [From the Dilbert comic strip of November 14, 1995] A hacking run that
produces results which, while superficially coherent, have little or nothing to
do with its original objectives. There are strong connotations that the coding
process and the objectives themselves were pretty random. (In the original
comic strip, the Ratbert is invited to dance on Dilbert's keyboard in order to
produce bugs for him to fix, and authors a Web browser instead.) Compare
Infinite-Monkey Theorem.

This term seems to have become widely recognized quite rapidly after the
original strip, a fact which testifies to Dilbert's huge popularity among
hackers. All too many find the perverse incentives and Kafkaesque atmosphere of
Dilbert's mythical workplace reflective of their own experiences.

rave

/vi./ [WPI] 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
annoy another person verbally. 5. To evangelize. See flame. 6. Also used to
describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly bulls***ting. 'Rave'
differs slightly from flame in that 'rave' implies that it is the persistence
or obliviousness of the person speaking that is annoying, while flame implies
somewhat more strongly that the tone or content is offensive as well.

rave on!

/imp./ Sarcastic invitation to continue a rave, often by someone who wishes

the raver would get a clue but realizes this is unlikely.

ravs

/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'. The term 'rav' is short for 'ravioli', and 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 include Chinese chives), and is cooked
differently, 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 orders of ravs." See also oriental food.

raw mode

/n./ A mode that allows a program to transfer bits directly to or from an I/O
device (or, under bogus systems that make a distinction, a disk file) without
any processing, abstraction, or interpretation by the operating system. Compare
rare mode, cooked mode. This is techspeak under Unix, jargon elsewhere.

rc file

/R-C fi:l/ /n./ [Unix: from 'runcom files' on the CTSS system ca.1955, via
the startup script '/etc/rc'] Script file containing startup instructions for an
application program (or an entire operating system), usually a text file
containing 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, profile (sense 1).

RE

/R-E/ /n./ Common spoken and written shorthand for regexp.

read-only user

/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

/n./ Hacker's-eye introduction traditionally included in the top-level

directory of a Unix source distribution, containing a pointer to more detailed
documentation, credits, miscellaneous revision history, notes, etc. (The file
may be named README, or READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or readme.txt or some other
variant.) In the Mac and PC worlds, software is not usually distributed in
source form, and the README is more likely to contain user-oriented material
like last-minute documentation changes, error workarounds, and restrictions.
When asked, hackers invariably relate the README convention to the famous scene
in Lewis Carroll's "Alice's Adventures In Wonderland" in which Alice confronts
magic munchies labeled "Eat Me" and "Drink Me".

real

/adj./ Not simulated. Often used as a specific antonym to virtual in any of

its jargon senses.

real estate

/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
floor space in a dinosaur pen, or even space on a crowded desktop (whether
physical or electronic).

real hack

/n./ A crock. This is sometimes used affectionately; see hack.

real operating system

/n./ The sort the speaker is used to. People from the BSDophilic 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
known to complain "BSD? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?", and
people from IBM object "Unix? Why don't you use a *real* operating system?"
Only MS-DOS is universally considered unreal. See holy wars, religious
issues, proprietary, Get a real computer!

Real Programmer

/n./ [indirectly, from the book "Real Men Don't Eat Quiche"] 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
Programmer' likes to program on the bare 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 Programmers aren't satisfied with code that hasn't
been bummed into a state of tenseness 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
Programmers can make machines do things that 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 and coffee, hang line-printer art on their walls,
and terrify the c**p 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 aren't many Real
Programmers around any more. For a famous (and somewhat more positive) portrait
of a Real Programmer, see "The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer" in Appendix A.
The term itself was popularized by a 1983 Datamation article "Real Programmers
Don't Use Pascal" by Ed Post, still circulating on Usenet and Internet in
on-line form.

You can browse "Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" from the Datamation home page
http://www.datamation.com.

Real Soon Now

/adv./ [orig. from SF's fanzine community, popularized by Jerry Pournelle's

column in "BYTE"] 1. Supposed to be available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever)
real soon now according to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical. 2.
When one's gods, fates, or other time commitments permit one to get to it (in
other words, don't hold your breath). Often abbreviated RSN. Compare copious
free time.

real time

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
example. Such applications often require 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 calling procedure's program
counter on the stack and she came up with an algorithm in real time."

real user

/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.
Hackers who are also students may also be 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

/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 as
generating payroll checks and invoices. 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). 4. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor
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. It is also noteworthy
that on the campus of Cambridge University in England, there is a gaily-painted
lamp-post which bears the label 'REALITY CHECKPOINT'. It marks the boundary
between university and the Real World; check your notions of reality before
passing. This joke is funnier because the Cambridge 'campus' is actually
coextensive with the center of Cambridge town. See also fear and loathing,
mundane, and uninteresting.

reality check

/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 prototype software.
Compare sanity check.

reaper

/n./ A prowler that GFRs files. A file removed in this way is said to have
been 'reaped'.

rectangle slinger

/n./ See polygon pusher.

recursion

/n./ See recursion. See also tail recursion.

recursive acronym

: /n./ A hackish (and especially MIT) tradition is to choose

acronyms/abbreviations that refer humorously to themselves or to other
acronyms/abbreviations. The classic examples were two MIT editors called EINE
("EINE Is Not EMACS") and ZWEI ("ZWEI Was EINE Initially"). More recently,
there 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,
EMACS.

Red Book

/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, or the 1990 second edition ISBN
0-201-18127-4); the others are known as the Green Book, the Blue Book, and
the White Book (sense 2). 2. Informal name for 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 books). 3. Any of the 1984 standards
issued by the CCITT eighth plenary assembly. These include, among other things,
the X.400 email spec 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 USA as "the Ugly Red Book That Won't Fit On The Shelf" 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.
red wire

/n./ [IBM] Patch wires installed by programmers who have no business mucking
with the hardware. It is said that the only thing more dangerous than a
hardware guy with a code patch is a softy with a soldering iron.... Compare
blue wire, yellow wire, purple wire.

regexp

/reg'eksp/ /n./ [Unix] (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
conventions similar to but more elaborate than 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 of a well-known PD regexp-handling package
in portable C, written by revered Usenetter Henry Spencer
[email protected] .

register dancing

/n./ Many older processor architectures suffer from a serious shortage of

general-purpose registers. This is especially a problem for compiler-writers,
because their generated code needs places to store temporaries for things like
intermediate values in expression evaluation. Some designs with this problem,
like the Intel 80x86, do have a handful of special-purpose registers that can be
pressed into service, providing suitable care is taken to avoid unpleasant side
effects on the state of the processor: while the special-purpose register is
being used to hold an intermediate value, a delicate minuet is required in which
the previous value of the register is saved and then restored just before the
official function (and value) of the special-purpose register is again needed.

reincarnation, cycle of

/n./ See cycle of reincarnation.

reinvent the wheel

/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 wooden
rollers, and some kinds of wheel have to 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.

religion of CHI

/ki:/ /n./ [Case Western Reserve University] Yet another hackish parody
religion (see also Church of the SubGenius, Discordianism). In the mid-70s,
the canonical "Introduction to Programming" courses at CWRU were taught in
Algol, and student exercises were punched on cards and run on a Univac 1108
system using a homebrew operating system named CHI. The religion had no
doctrines and but one ritual: whenever the worshipper noted that a digital clock
read 11:08, he or she would recite the phrase "It is 11:08; ABS, ALPHABETIC,
ARCSIN, ARCCOS, ARCTAN." The last five words were the first five functions in
the appropriate chapter of the Algol manual; note the special pronunciations
/obz/ and /ark'sin/ rather than the more common /ahbz/ and /ark'si:n/. Using an
alarm clock to warn of 11:08's arrival was considered harmful.

religious issues
/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 guy,
eh?", "What should we add to the new Jargon File?" See holy wars; see also
theology, bigot.

This term is a prime example of ha ha only serious. People actually develop

the most amazing and religiously intense attachments to their tools, even when
the tools are intangible. The most constructive thing one can do when one
stumbles into the crossfire is mumble Get a life! and leave — unless, of
course, one's *own* unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are
being slammed.

replicator

/n./ Any construct that acts to produce copies of itself; this could be a
living organism, an idea (see meme), a program (see quine, worm, wabbit,
fork bomb, and virus), a pattern in a cellular automaton (see life, sense
1), or (speculatively) a robot or nanobot. It is even claimed by some that
Unix and C are the symbiotic halves of an extremely successful replicator;
see Unix conspiracy.

reply

/n./ See followup.

restriction

/n./ A bug or design error that limits a program's capabilities, and which is
sufficiently egregious that nobody can quite work up enough nerve to describe it
as a feature. Often used (esp. by marketroid types) to make it sound as
though some crippling bogosity had been intended by the designers all along, or
was forced upon them by arcane technical constraints of a nature no mere user
could possibly comprehend (these claims are almost invariably false).

Old-time hacker Joseph M. Newcomer advises that whenever choosing a quantifiable

but arbitrary restriction, you should make it either a power of 2 or a power of
2 minus 1. If you impose a limit of 107 items in a list, everyone will know it
is a random number — on the other hand, a limit of 15 or 16 suggests some deep
reason (involving 0- or 1-based indexing in binary) and you will get less
flamage for it. Limits which are round numbers in base 10 are always
especially suspect.

retcon

/ret'kon/ [short for 'retroactive continuity', from the Usenet newsgroup

rec.arts.comics] 1. /n./ The common situation in pulp fiction (esp. comics or
soap operas) where a new story 'reveals' things about events in previous
stories, usually leaving the 'facts' the same (thus preserving continuity) while
completely changing their interpretation. For example, revealing that a whole
season of "Dallas" was a dream was a retcon. 2. /vt./ To write such a story
about a character or fictitious object. "Byrne has retconned Superman's cape so
that it is no longer unbreakable." "Marvelman's old adventures were retconned
into synthetic dreams." "Swamp Thing was retconned from a transformed person
into a sentient vegetable." "Darth Vader was retconned into Luke Skywalker's
father in "The Empire Strikes Back".

[This term is included because it is a good example of hackish linguistic

innovation in a field completely unrelated to computers. The word 'retcon' will
probably spread through comics fandom and lose its association with hackerdom
within a couple of years; for the record, it started here. — ESR]
[1993 update: some comics fans on the net now claim that retcon was
independently in use in comics fandom before rec.arts.comics. In lexicography,
nothing is ever simple. — ESR]

RETI

/v./ Syn. RTI

retrocomputing

/ret'-roh-k*m-pyoo'ting/ /n./ Refers to emulations of

way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or software, or implementations of
never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if such implementations are elaborate practical
jokes and/or parodies, written mostly for hack value, of more 'serious'
designs. Perhaps the most widely distributed retrocomputing utility was the
'pnch(6)' or 'bcd(6)' program on V7 and other early Unix versions, which would
accept up to 80 characters of text argument and display the corresponding
pattern in punched card code. Other well-known retrocomputing hacks have
included the programming language INTERCAL, a JCL-emulating shell for Unix,
the card-punch-emulating editor named 029, and various elaborate PDP-11 hardware
emulators and RT-11 OS emulators written just to keep an old, sourceless Zork
binary running.

A tasty selection of retrocomputing programs are made available at the

Retrocomputing Museum, http://www.ccil.org/retro.

return from the dead

/v./ To regain access to the net after a long absence. Compare person of no
account.

RFC

/R-F-C/ /n./ [Request For Comment] One of a long-established series of numbered

Internet informational documents and standards widely followed by commercial
software and freeware in the Internet and Unix communities. Perhaps the single
most influential one has been RFC-822 (the Internet mail-format standard). The
RFCs are unusual in that they are floated by technical experts acting on their
own initiative and reviewed by the Internet at large, rather than formally
promulgated through an institution such as ANSI. For this reason, they remain
known as RFCs even once adopted as standards.

The RFC tradition of pragmatic, experience-driven, after-the-fact standard

writing done by individuals or small working groups has important advantages
over the more formal, committee-driven process typical of ANSI or ISO.
Emblematic of some of these advantages is the existence of a flourishing
tradition of 'joke' RFCs; usually at least one a year is published, usually on
April 1st. Well-known joke RFCs have included 527 ("ARPAWOCKY", R. Merryman,
UCSD; 22 June 1973), 748 ("Telnet Randomly-Lose Option", Mark R. Crispin; 1
April 1978), and 1149 ("A Standard for the Transmission of IP Datagrams on Avian
Carriers", D. Waitzman, BBN STC; 1 April 1990). The first was a Lewis Carroll
pastiche; the second a parody of the TCP-IP documentation style, and the third a
deadpan skewering of standards-document legalese, describing protocols for
transmitting Internet data packets by carrier pigeon.

The RFCs are most remarkable for how well they work — they manage to have
neither the ambiguities that are usually rife in informal specifications, nor
the committee-perpetrated misfeatures that often haunt formal standards, and
they define a network that has grown to truly worldwide proportions.
RFE

/R-F-E/ /n./ 1. [techspeak] Request For Enhancement (compare RFC). 2. [from

'Radio Free Europe', Bellcore and Sun] Radio Free Ethernet, a system (originated
by Peter Langston) for broadcasting audio among Sun SPARCstations over the
ethernet.

rib site

/n./ [by analogy with backbone site] A machine that has an on-demand
high-speed link to a backbone site and serves as a regional distribution point
for lots of third-party traffic in email and Usenet news. Compare leaf site,
backbone site.

rice box

/n./ [from ham radio slang] Any Asian-made commodity computer, esp. an
80x86-based machine built to IBM PC-compatible ISA or EISA-bus standards.

Right Thing

/n./ That which is *compellingly* the correct or appropriate thing to use, do,
say, etc. Often capitalized, always emphasized in speech as though capitalized.
Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable people may disagree.
"What's the right thing for LISP to do when it sees '(mod a 0)'? Should it
return 'a', or give a divide-by-0 error?" Oppose Wrong Thing.

RL

// /n./ [MUD community] Real Life. "Firiss laughs in RL" means that Firiss's
player is laughing. Oppose VR.

roach

/vt./ [Bell Labs] To destroy, esp. of a data structure. Hardware gets

toasted or fried, software gets roached.

robot

/n./ [IRC, MUD] An IRC or MUD user who is actually a program. On IRC,
typically the robot provides some useful service. Examples are NickServ, which
tries to prevent random users from adopting nicks already claimed by others,
and MsgServ, which allows one to send asynchronous messages to be delivered when
the recipient signs on. Also common are 'annoybots', such as KissServ, which
perform no useful function except to send cute messages to other people.
Service robots are less common on MUDs; but some others, such as the 'Julia'
robot active in 1990—91, have been remarkably impressive Turing-test
experiments, able to pass as human for as long as ten or fifteen minutes of
conversation.

robust

/adj./ Said of a system that has demonstrated an ability to recover gracefully

from the whole range of exceptional inputs and situations in a given
environment. One step below bulletproof. Carries the additional connotation
of elegance in addition to just careful attention to detail. Compare smart,
oppose brittle.
rococo

/adj./ Terminally baroque. Used to imply that a program has become so

encrusted with the software equivalent of gold leaf and curlicues that they have
completely swamped the underlying design. Called after the later and more
extreme forms of Baroque architecture and decoration prevalent during the
mid-1700s in Europe. Alan Perlis said: "Every program eventually becomes
rococo, and then rubble." Compare critical mass.

rogue

/n./ [Unix] A Dungeons-and-Dragons-like game using character graphics, written

under BSD Unix and subsequently ported to other Unix systems. The original BSD
'curses(3)' screen-handling package was hacked together by Ken Arnold to support
'rogue(6)' and has since become one of Unix's most important and heavily used
application libraries. Nethack, Omega, Larn, and an entire subgenre of computer
dungeon games all took off from the inspiration provided by 'rogue(6)'. See
also nethack.

room-temperature IQ

/quant./ [IBM] 80 or below (nominal room temperature is 72 degrees Fahrenheit,

22 degrees Celsius). Used in describing the expected intelligence range of the
luser. "Well, but how's this interface going to play with the room-temperature
IQ crowd?" See drool-proof paper. This is a much more insulting phrase in
countries that use Celsius thermometers.

root

/n./ [Unix] 1. The superuser account (with user name 'root') that ignores
permission bits, user number 0 on a Unix system. The term avatar is also
used. 2. The top node of the system directory structure; historically the home
directory of the root user, but probably named after the root of an (inverted)
tree. 3. By extension, the privileged system-maintenance login on any OS. See
root mode, go root, see also wheel.

root mode

/n./ Syn. with wizard mode or 'wheel mode'. Like these, it is often generalized
to describe privileged states in systems other than OSes.

rot13

/rot ther'teen/ /n.,v./ [Usenet: from 'rotate alphabet 13 places'] The simple
Caesar-cypher encryption that replaces each English letter with the one 13
places forward or back along the alphabet, so that "The butler did it!" becomes
"Gur ohgyre qvq vg!" Most Usenet news reading and posting programs include a
rot13 feature. It is used to enclose the text in a sealed wrapper that the
reader must choose to open — e.g., for posting things that might offend some
readers, or spoilers. A major advantage of rot13 over rot(N) for other N is
that it is self-inverse, so the same code can be used for encoding and decoding.

rotary debugger

/n./ [Commodore] Essential equipment for those late-night or early-morning

debugging sessions. Mainly used as sustenance for the hacker. Comes in many
decorator colors, such as Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage. See pizza, ANSI
standard.
round tape

/n./ Industry-standard 1/2-inch magnetic tape (7- or 9-track) on traditional

circular reels. See macrotape, oppose square tape.

RSN

/R-S-N/ /adj./ See Real Soon Now.

RTBM

/R-T-B-M/ /imp./ [Unix] Commonwealth Hackish variant of RTFM; expands to

'Read The Bloody Manual'. RTBM is often the entire text of the first reply to a
question from a newbie; the *second* would escalate to "RTFM".

RTFAQ

/R-T-F-A-Q/ /imp./ [Usenet: primarily written, by analogy with RTFM] Abbrev.

for 'Read the FAQ!', an exhortation that the person addressed ought to read the
newsgroup's FAQ list before posting questions.

RTFB

/R-T-F-B/ /imp./ [Unix] Acronym for 'Read The F***ing Binary'. Used when
neither documentation nor source for the problem at hand exists, and the only
thing to do is use some debugger or monitor and directly analyze the assembler
or even the machine code. "No source for the buggy port driver? Aaargh! I
*hate* proprietary operating systems. Time to RTFB."

Of the various RTF? forms, 'RTFB' is the least pejorative against anyone asking
a question for which RTFB is the answer; the anger here is directed at the
absence of both source *and* adequate documentation.

RTFM

/R-T-F-M/ /imp./ [Unix] Acronym for 'Read The F***ing Manual'. 1. Used by
gurus to brush off questions they consider trivial or annoying. Compare
Don't do that, then!. 2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you
aren't just asking out of randomness. "No, I can't figure out how to
interface Unix to my toaster, and yes, I have RTFM." Unlike sense 1, this use
is considered polite. See also FM, RTFAQ, RTFB, RTFS, RTM, all of
which mutated from RTFM, and compare UTSL.

RTFS

/R-T-F-S/ [Unix] 1. /imp./ Acronym for 'Read The F***ing Source'. Variant form
of RTFM, used when the problem at hand is not necessarily obvious and not
answerable from the manuals — or the manuals are not yet written and maybe
never will be. For even trickier situations, see RTFB. Unlike RTFM, the
anger inherent in RTFS is not usually directed at the person asking the
question, but rather at the people who failed to provide adequate documentation.
2. /imp./ 'Read The F***ing Standard'; this oath can only be used when the
problem area (e.g., a language or operating system interface) has actually been
codified in a ratified standards document. The existence of these standards
documents (and the technically inappropriate but politically mandated
compromises that they inevitably contain, and the impenetrable legalese in
which they are invariably written, and the unbelievably tedious bureaucratic
process by which they are produced) can be unnerving to hackers, who are used to
a certain amount of ambiguity in the specifications of the systems they use.
(Hackers feel that such ambiguities are acceptable as long as the Right Thing
to do is obvious to any thinking observer; sadly, this casual attitude towards
specifications becomes unworkable when a system becomes popular in the Real
World.) Since a hacker is likely to feel that a standards document is both
unnecessary and technically deficient, the deprecation inherent in this term may
be directed as much against the standard as against the person who ought to read
it.

RTI

/R-T-I/ /interj./ The mnemonic for the 'return from interrupt' instruction on
many computers including the 6502 and 6800. The variant 'RETI' is found among
former Z80 hackers (almost nobody programs these things in assembler anymore).
Equivalent to "Now, where was I?" or used to end a conversational digression.
See pop; see also POPJ.

RTM

/R-T-M/ [Usenet: abbreviation for 'Read The Manual'] 1. Politer variant of

RTFM. 2. Robert T. Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988
(see Great Worm, the); villain to many, naive hacker gone wrong to a few.
Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign
experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the
storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris's username on ITS
was hacked from RTM to RTFM.

RTS

/R-T-S/ /imp./ Acronym for 'Read The Screen'. Mainly used by hackers in the
microcomputer world. Refers to what one would like to tell the suit one is
forced to explain an extremely simple application to. Particularly appropriate
when the suit failed to notice the 'Press any key to continue' prompt, and
wishes to know 'why won't it do anything'. Also seen as 'RTFS' in especially
deserving cases.

rude

[WPI] /adj./ 1. (of a program) Badly written. 2. Functionally poor, e.g., a

program that is very difficult to use because of gratuitously poor (random?)
design decisions. Oppose cuspy. 3. Anything that manipulates a shared
resource without regard for its other users in such a way as to cause a
(non-fatal) problem. Examples: programs that change tty modes without resetting
them on exit, or windowing programs that keep forcing themselves to the top of
the window stack. Compare all-elbows.

runes

/pl.n./ 1. Anything that requires heavy wizardry or black art to parse:

core dumps, JCL commands, APL, or code in a language you haven't a clue how to
read. Not quite as bad as line noise, but close. Compare casting the
runes, Great Runes. 2. Special display characters (for example, the
high-half graphics on an IBM PC). 3. [borderline techspeak] 16-bit characters
from the Unicode multilingual character set.

runic

/adj./ Syn. obscure. VMS fans sometimes refer to Unix as 'Runix'; Unix fans
return the compliment by expanding VMS to 'Very Messy Syntax' or 'Vachement
Mauvais Syst`eme' (French idiom, "Hugely Bad System").
rusty iron

/n./ Syn. tired iron. It has been claimed that this is the inevitable fate
of water MIPS.

rusty memory

/n./ Mass-storage that uses iron-oxide-based magnetic media (esp. tape and the
pre-Winchester removable disk packs used in washing machines). Compare
donuts.

rusty wire

/n./ [Amateur Packet Radio] Any very noisy network medium, in which the packets
are subject to frequent corruption. Most prevalent in reference to wireless
links subject to all the vagaries of RF noise and marginal propagation
conditions. "Yes, but how good is your whizbang new protocol on really rusty
wire?".

S/N ratio

// /n./ (also 's/n ratio', 's:n ratio'). Syn. signal-to-noise ratio. Often
abbreviated 'SNR'.

sacred

/adj./ Reserved for the exclusive use of something (an extension of the
standard meaning). Often means that anyone may look at the sacred object, but
clobbering it will screw whatever it is sacred to. The comment "Register 7 is
sacred to the interrupt handler" appearing in a program would be interpreted by
a hacker to mean that if any *other* part of the program changes the contents of
register 7, dire consequences are likely to ensue.

saga

/n./ [WPI] A cuspy but bogus raving story about N random broken people.

Here is a classic example of the saga form, as told by Guy L. Steele:

Jon L. White (login name JONL) and I (GLS) were office mates at MIT for many
years. One April, we both flew from Boston to California for a week on
research business, to consult face-to-face with some people at Stanford,
particularly our mutual friend Richard P. Gabriel (RPG; see gabriel).

RPG picked us up at the San Francisco airport and drove us back to Palo Alto
(going logical south on route 101, parallel to El Camino Bignum). Palo
Alto is adjacent to Stanford University and about 40 miles south of San
Francisco. We ate at The Good Earth, a 'health food' restaurant, very
popular, the sort whose milkshakes all contain honey and protein powder. JONL
ordered such a shake — the waitress claimed the flavor of the day was
"lalaberry". I still have no idea what that might be, but it became a running
joke. It was the color of raspberry, and JONL said it tasted rather bitter.
I ate a better tostada there than I have ever had in a Mexican restaurant.

After this we went to the local Uncle Gaylord's Old Fashioned Ice Cream
Parlor. They make ice cream fresh daily, in a variety of intriguing flavors.
It's a chain, and they have a slogan: "If you don't live near an Uncle
Gaylord's — MOVE!" Also, Uncle Gaylord (a real person) wages a constant
battle to force big-name ice cream makers to print their ingredients on the
package (like air and plastic and other non-natural garbage). JONL and I had
first discovered Uncle Gaylord's the previous August, when we had flown to a
computer-science conference in Berkeley, California, the first time either of
us had been on the West Coast. When not in the conference sessions, we had
spent our time wandering the length of Telegraph Avenue, which (like Harvard
Square in Cambridge) was lined with picturesque street vendors and
interesting little shops. On that street we discovered Uncle Gaylord's
Berkeley store. The ice cream there was very good. During that August visit
JONL went absolutely bananas (so to speak) over one particular flavor, ginger
honey.

Therefore, after eating at The Good Earth — indeed, after every lunch and
dinner and before bed during our April visit — a trip to Uncle Gaylord's (the
one in Palo Alto) was mandatory. We had arrived on a Wednesday, and by
Thursday evening we had been there at least four times. Each time, JONL would
get ginger honey ice cream, and proclaim to all bystanders that "Ginger was
the spice that drove the Europeans mad! That's why they sought a route to
the East! They used it to preserve their otherwise off-taste meat." After
the third or fourth repetition RPG and I were getting a little tired of this
spiel, and began to paraphrase him: "Wow! Ginger! The spice that makes
rotten meat taste good!" "Say! Why don't we find some dog that's been run
over and sat in the sun for a week and put some *ginger* on it for dinner?!"
"Right! With a lalaberry shake!" And so on. This failed to faze JONL; he
took it in good humor, as long as we kept returning to Uncle Gaylord's. He
loves ginger honey ice cream.

Now RPG and his then-wife KBT (Kathy Tracy) were putting us up (putting up
with us?) in their home for our visit, so to thank them JONL and I took them
out to a nice French restaurant of their choosing. I unadventurously chose
the filet mignon, and KBT had je ne sais quoi du jour, but RPG and JONL had
lapin (rabbit). (Waitress: "Oui, we have fresh rabbit, fresh today." RPG:
"Well, JONL, I guess we won't need any *ginger*!")

We finished the meal late, about 11 P.M., which is 2 A.M Boston time, so
JONL and I were rather droopy. But it wasn't yet midnight. Off to Uncle
Gaylord's!

Now the French restaurant was in Redwood City, north of Palo Alto. In
leaving Redwood City, we somehow got onto route 101 going north instead of
south. JONL and I wouldn't have known the difference had RPG not mentioned
it. We still knew very little of the local geography. I did figure out,
however, that we were headed in the direction of Berkeley, and half-jokingly
suggested that we continue north and go to Uncle Gaylord's in Berkeley.

RPG said "Fine!" and we drove on for a while and talked. I was drowsy, and
JONL actually dropped off to sleep for 5 minutes. When he awoke, RPG said,
"Gee, JONL, you must have slept all the way over the bridge!", referring to
the one spanning San Francisco Bay. Just then we came to a sign that said
"University Avenue". I mumbled something about working our way over to
Telegraph Avenue; RPG said "Right!" and maneuvered some more. Eventually we
pulled up in front of an Uncle Gaylord's.

Now, I hadn't really been paying attention because I was so sleepy, and I
didn't really understand what was happening until RPG let me in on it a few
moments later, but I was just alert enough to notice that we had somehow come
to the Palo Alto Uncle Gaylord's after all.

JONL noticed the resemblance to the Palo Alto store, but hadn't caught on.
(The place is lit with red and yellow lights at night, and looks much
different from the way it does in daylight.) He said, "This isn't the Uncle
Gaylord's I went to in Berkeley! It looked like a barn! But this place looks
*just like* the one back in Palo Alto!"

RPG deadpanned, "Well, this is the one *I* always come to when I'm in
Berkeley. They've got two in San Francisco, too. Remember, they're a chain."
 JONL accepted this bit of wisdom. And he was not totally ignorant — he
knew perfectly well that University Avenue was in Berkeley, not far from
Telegraph Avenue. What he didn't know was that there is a completely
different University Avenue in Palo Alto.

JONL went up to the counter and asked for ginger honey. The guy at the
counter asked whether JONL would like to taste it first, evidently their
standard procedure with that flavor, as not too many people like it.

JONL said, "I'm sure I like it. Just give me a cone." The guy behind the
counter insisted that JONL try just a taste first. "Some people think it
tastes like soap." JONL insisted, "Look, I *love* ginger. I eat Chinese
food. I eat raw ginger roots. I already went through this hassle with the
guy back in Palo Alto. I *know* I like that flavor!"

At the words "back in Palo Alto" the guy behind the counter got a very
strange look on his face, but said nothing. KBT caught his eye and winked.
Through my stupor I still hadn't quite grasped what was going on, and thought
RPG was rolling on the floor laughing and clutching his stomach just because
JONL had launched into his spiel ("makes rotten meat a dish for princes") for
the forty-third time. At this point, RPG clued me in fully.

RPG, KBT, and I retreated to a table, trying to stifle our chuckles. JONL
remained at the counter, talking about ice cream with the guy b.t.c.,
comparing Uncle Gaylord's to other ice cream shops and generally having a good
old time.

At length the g.b.t.c. said, "How's the ginger honey?" JONL said, "Fine! I
wonder what exactly is in it?" Now Uncle Gaylord publishes all his recipes
and even teaches classes on how to make his ice cream at home. So the
g.b.t.c. got out the recipe, and he and JONL pored over it for a while. But
the g.b.t.c. could contain his curiosity no longer, and asked again, "You
really like that stuff, huh?" JONL said, "Yeah, I've been eating it
constantly back in Palo Alto for the past two days. In fact, I think this
batch is about as good as the cones I got back in Palo Alto!"

G.b.t.c. looked him straight in the eye and said, "You're *in* Palo Alto!"

JONL turned slowly around, and saw the three of us collapse in a fit of
giggles. He clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, "I've been hacked!"

[My spies on the West Coast inform me that there is a close relative of the
raspberry found out there called an 'ollalieberry' — ESR]

[Ironic footnote: it appears that the meme about ginger vs. rotting meat may
be an urban legend. It's not borne out by an examination of medieval recipes or
period purchase records for spices, and appears full-blown in the works of
Samuel Pegge, a gourmand and notorious flake case who originated numerous food
myths. — ESR]

sagan

/say'gn/ /n./ [from Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos"; think "billions and
billions"] A large quantity of anything. "There's a sagan different ways to
tweak EMACS." "The U.S. Government spends sagans on bombs and welfare — hard to
say which is more destructive."

SAIL

: /sayl/, not /S-A-I-L/ /n./ 1. The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab. An

important site in the early development of LISP; with the MIT AI Lab, BBN, CMU,
XEROX PARC, and the Unix community, one of the major wellsprings of technical
innovation and hacker-culture traditions (see the WAITS entry for details).
The SAIL machines were shut down in late May 1990, scant weeks after the MIT AI
Lab's ITS cluster was officially decommissioned. 2. The Stanford Artificial
Intelligence Language used at SAIL (sense 1). It was an Algol-60 derivative
with a coroutining facility and some new data types intended for building search
trees and association lists.

salescritter

/sayls'kri`tr/ /n./ Pejorative hackerism for a computer salesperson. Hackers

tell the following joke:

Q. What's the difference between a used-car dealer and a computer salesman?

A. The used-car dealer knows he's lying. [Some versions add:
...and probably knows how to drive.]

This reflects the widespread hacker belief that salescritters are self-selected
for stupidity (after all, if they had brains and the inclination to use them,
they'd be in programming). The terms 'salesthing' and 'salesdroid' are also
common. Compare marketroid, suit, droid.

salt

/n./ A tiny bit of near-random data inserted where too much regularity would be
undesirable; a data frob (sense 1). For example, the Unix crypt(3) man page
mentions that "the salt string is used to perturb the DES algorithm in one of
4096 different ways."

salt mines

/n./ Dense quarters housing large numbers of programmers working long hours on
grungy projects, with some hope of seeing the end of the tunnel in N years.
Noted for their absence of sunshine. Compare playpen, sandbox.

salt substrate

/n./ [MIT] Collective noun used to refer to potato chips, pretzels, saltines,
or any other form of snack food designed primarily as a carrier for sodium
chloride. Also 'sodium substrate'. From the technical term 'chip substrate',
used to refer to the silicon on the top of which the active parts of integrated
circuits are deposited.

same-day service

/n./ Ironic term used to describe long response time, particularly with respect
to MS-DOS system calls (which ought to require only a tiny fraction of a
second to execute). Such response time is a major incentive for programmers to
write programs that are not well-behaved. See also PC-ism.

samizdat

/sahm-iz-daht/ /n./ [Russian, literally "self publishing"] The process of

disseminating documentation via underground channels. Originally referred to
underground duplication and distribution of banned books in the Soviet Union;
now refers by obvious extension to any less-than-official promulgation of
textual material, esp. rare, obsolete, or never-formally-published computer
documentation. Samizdat is obviously much easier when one has access to
high-bandwidth networks and high-quality laser printers. Note that samizdat is
properly used only with respect to documents which contain needed information
(see also hacker ethic) but which are for some reason otherwise unavailable,
but *not* in the context of documents which are available through normal
channels, for which unauthorized duplication would be unethical copyright
violation. See Lions Book for a historical example.

samurai

/n./ A hacker who hires out for legal cracking jobs, snooping for factions in
corporate political fights, lawyers pursuing privacy-rights and First Amendment
cases, and other parties with legitimate reasons to need an electronic
locksmith. In 1991, mainstream media reported the existence of a loose-knit
culture of samurai that meets electronically on BBS systems, mostly bright
teenagers with personal micros; they have modeled themselves explicitly on the
historical samurai of Japan and on the "net cowboys" of William Gibson's
cyberpunk novels. Those interviewed claim to adhere to a rigid ethic of
loyalty to their employers and to disdain the vandalism and theft practiced by
criminal crackers as beneath them and contrary to the hacker ethic; some quote
Miyamoto Musashi's "Book of Five Rings", a classic of historical samurai
doctrine, in support of these principles. See also sneaker, Stupids, social
engineering, cracker, hacker ethic, and dark-side hacker.

sandbender

/n./ [IBM] A person involved with silicon lithography and the physical design
of chips. Compare ironmonger, polygon pusher.

sandbox

/n./ 1. (also 'sandbox, the') Common term for the R D department at many
software and computer companies (where hackers in commercial environments are
likely to be found). Half-derisive, but reflects the truth that research is a
form of creative play. Compare playpen. 2. Syn. link farm.

sanity check

/n./ 1. The act of checking a piece of code (or anything else, e.g., a Usenet
posting) for completely stupid mistakes. Implies that the check is to make sure
the author was sane when it was written; e.g., if a piece of scientific software
relied on a particular formula and was giving unexpected results, one might
first look at the nesting of parentheses or the coding of the formula, as a
'sanity check', before looking at the more complex I/O or data structure
manipulation routines, much less the algorithm itself. Compare reality check.
2. A run-time test, either validating input or ensuring that the program hasn't
screwed up internally (producing an inconsistent value or state).

Saturday-night special

/n./ [from police slang for a cheap handgun] A quick-and-dirty program or

feature kluged together during off hours, under a deadline, and in response to
pressure from a salescritter. Such hacks are dangerously unreliable, but all
too often sneak into a production release after insufficient review.

say

/vt./ 1. To type to a terminal. "To list a directory verbosely, you have to

say 'ls -l'." Tends to imply a newline-terminated command (a 'sentence'). 2.
A computer may also be said to 'say' things to you, even if it doesn't have a
speech synthesizer, by displaying them on a terminal in response to your
commands. Hackers find it odd that this usage confuses mundanes.

scag
/vt./ To destroy the data on a disk, either by corrupting the filesystem or by
causing media damage. "That last power hit scagged the system disk." Compare
scrog, roach.

scanno

/skan'oh/ /n./ An error in a document caused by a scanner glitch, analogous to

a typo or thinko.

schroedinbug

/shroh'din-buhg/ /n./ [MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in

quantum physics] A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't
manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way
notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly
stops working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot) this sounds
impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs for
years. Compare heisenbug, Bohr bug, mandelbug.

science-fiction fandom

: /n./ Another voluntary subculture having a very heavy overlap with

hackerdom; most hackers read SF and/or fantasy fiction avidly, and many go to
'cons' (SF conventions) or are involved in fandom-connected activities such as
the Society for Creative Anachronism. Some hacker jargon originated in SF
fandom; see defenestration, great-wall, cyberpunk, h, ha ha only
serious, IMHO, mundane, neep-neep, Real Soon Now. Additionally, the
jargon terms cowboy, cyberspace, de-rezz, go flatline, ice, phage,
virus, wetware, wirehead, and worm originated in SF stories.

scram switch

/n./ [from the nuclear power industry] An emergency-power-off switch (see Big
Red Switch), esp. one positioned to be easily hit by evacuating personnel. In
general, this is *not* something you frob lightly; these often initiate
expensive events (such as Halon dumps) and are installed in a dinosaur pen for
use in case of electrical fire or in case some luckless field servoid should
put 120 volts across himself while Easter egging. (See also molly-guard,
TMRC.)

scratch

1. [from 'scratchpad'] /adj./ Describes a data structure or recording medium

attached to a machine for testing or temporary-use purposes; one that can be
scribbled on without loss. Usually in the combining forms 'scratch memory',
'scratch register', 'scratch disk', 'scratch tape', 'scratch volume'. See also
scratch monkey. 2. [primarily IBM] /vt./ To delete (as in a file).

scratch monkey

/n./ As in "Before testing or reconfiguring, always mount a scratch monkey",

a proverb used to advise caution when dealing with irreplaceable data or
devices. Used to refer to any scratch volume hooked to a computer during any
risky operation as a replacement for some precious resource or data that might
otherwise get trashed.

This term preserves the memory of Mabel, the Swimming Wonder Monkey, star of a
biological research program at the University of Toronto. Mabel was not (so the
legend goes) your ordinary monkey; the university had spent years teaching her
how to swim, breathing through a regulator, in order to study the effects of
different gas mixtures on her physiology. Mabel suffered an untimely demise one
day when a DEC engineer troubleshooting a crash on the program's VAX
inadvertently interfered with some custom hardware that was wired to Mabel.

It is reported that, after calming down an understandably irate customer

sufficiently to ascertain the facts of the matter, a DEC troubleshooter called
up the field circus manager responsible and asked him sweetly, "Can you swim?"

Not all the consequences to humans were so amusing; the sysop of the machine in
question was nearly thrown in jail at the behest of certain clueless droids at
the local 'humane' society. The moral is clear: When in doubt, always mount a
scratch monkey.

[The actual incident occured in 1979 or 1980. There is a version of this story,
complete with reported dialogue between one of the project people and DEC field
service, that has been circulating on Internet since 1986. It is hilarious and
mythic, but gets some facts wrong. For example, it reports the machine as a
PDP-11 and alleges that Mabel's demise occurred when DEC PMed the machine.
Earlier versions of this entry were based on that story; this one has been
corrected from an interview with the hapless sysop. — ESR]

scream and die

/v./ Syn. cough and die, but connotes that an error message was printed or
displayed before the program crashed.

screaming tty

/n./ [Unix] A terminal line which spews an infinite number of random characters
at the operating system. This can happen if the terminal is either disconnected
or connected to a powered-off terminal but still enabled for login;
misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck can start such a
terminal screaming. A screaming tty or two can seriously degrade the
performance of a vanilla Unix system; the arriving "characters" are treated as
userid/password pairs and tested as such. The Unix password encryption
algorithm is designed to be computationally intensive in order to foil
brute-force crack attacks, so although none of the logins succeeds; the overhead
of rejecting them all can be substantial.

screw

/n./ [MIT] A lose, usually in software. Especially used for user-visible

misbehavior caused by a bug or misfeature. This use has become quite widespread
outside MIT.

screwage

/skroo'*j/ /n./ Like lossage but connotes that the failure is due to a
designed-in misfeature rather than a simple inadequacy or a mere bug.

scribble

/n./ To modify a data structure in a random and unintentionally destructive

way. "Bletch! Somebody's disk-compactor program went berserk and scribbled on
the i-node table." "It was working fine until one of the allocation routines
scribbled on low core." Synonymous with trash; compare mung, which conveys
a bit more intention, and mangle, which is more violent and final.

scrog
/skrog/ /vt./ [Bell Labs] To damage, trash, or corrupt a data structure. "The
list header got scrogged." Also reported as 'skrog', and ascribed to the comic
strip "The Wizard of Id". Compare scag; possibly the two are related.
Equivalent to scribble or mangle.

scrool

/skrool/ /n./ [from the pioneering Roundtable chat system in Houston ca. 1984;
prob. originated as a typo for 'scroll'] The log of old messages, available for
later perusal or to help one get back in synch with the conversation. It was
originally called the 'scrool monster', because an early version of the
roundtable software had a bug where it would dump all 8K of scrool on a user's
terminal.

scrozzle

/skroz'l/ /vt./ Used when a self-modifying code segment runs incorrectly and
corrupts the running program or vital data. "The damn compiler scrozzled itself
again!"

scruffies

/n./ See neats vs. scruffies.

SCSI

/n./ [Small Computer System Interface] A bus-independent standard for

system-level interfacing between a computer and intelligent devices. Typically
annotated in literature with 'sexy' (/sek'see/), 'sissy' (/sis'ee/), and
'scuzzy' (/skuh'zee/) as pronunciation guides — the last being the
overwhelmingly predominant form, much to the dismay of the designers and their
marketing people. One can usually assume that a person who pronounces it
/S-C-S-I/ is clueless.

ScumOS

/skuhm'os/ or /skuhm'O-S/ /n./ Unflattering hackerism for SunOS, the BSD Unix
variant supported on Sun Microsystems's Unix workstations (see also
sun-stools), and compare AIDX, Macintrash, Nominal Semidestructor, Open
DeathTrap, HP-SUX. Despite what this term might suggest, Sun was founded by
hackers and still enjoys excellent relations with hackerdom; usage is more often
in exasperation than outright loathing.

search-and-destroy mode

/n./ Hackerism for a noninteractive search-and-replace facility in an editor,

so called because an incautiously chosen match pattern can cause infinite
damage.

second-system effect

/n./ (sometimes, more euphoniously, 'second-system syndrome') When one is

designing the successor to a relatively small, elegant, and successful system,
there is a tendency to become grandiose in one's success and design an
elephantine feature-laden monstrosity. The term was first used by Fred Brooks
in his classic "The Mythical Man-Month: Essays on Software Engineering"
(Addison-Wesley, 1975; ISBN 0-201-00650-2). It described the jump from a set of
nice, simple operating systems on the IBM 70xx series to OS/360 on the 360
series. A similar effect can also happen in an evolving system; see Brooks's
Law, creeping elegance, creeping featurism. See also Multics, OS/2,
X, software bloat.

This version of the jargon lexicon has been described (with altogether too much
truth for comfort) as an example of second-system effect run amok on
jargon-1....

secondary damage

/n./ When a fatal error occurs (esp. a segfault) the immediate cause may be
that a pointer has been trashed due to a previous fandango on core. However,
this fandango may have been due to an *earlier* fandango, so no amount of
analysis will reveal (directly) how the damage occurred. "The data structure was
clobbered, but it was secondary damage."

By extension, the corruption resulting from N cascaded fandangoes on core is

'Nth-level damage'. There is at least one case on record in which 17 hours of
grovelling with 'adb' actually dug up the underlying bug behind an instance of
seventh-level damage! The hacker who accomplished this near-superhuman feat was
presented with an award by his fellows.

security through obscurity

(alt. 'security by obscurity') A term applied by hackers to most OS vendors'

favorite way of

coping with security holes — namely, ignoring them, documenting neither any
known holes nor the underlying security algorithms, trusting that nobody will
find out about them and that people who do find out about them won't exploit
them. This "strategy" never works for long and occasionally sets the world up
for debacles like the RTM worm of 1988 (see Great Worm, the), but once the
brief moments of panic created by such events subside most vendors are all too
willing to turn over and go back to sleep. After all, actually fixing the bugs
would siphon off the resources needed to implement the next user-interface frill
on marketing's wish list — and besides, if they started fixing security bugs
customers might begin to *expect* it and imagine that their warranties of
merchantability gave them some sort of *right* to a system with fewer holes in
it than a shotgunned Swiss cheese, and *then* where would we be?

Historical note: There are conflicting stories about the origin of this term.
It has been claimed that it was first used in the Usenet newsgroup in
comp.sys.apollo during a campaign to get HP/Apollo to fix security problems in
its Unix-clone Aegis/DomainOS (they didn't change a thing). ITS fans, on
the other hand, say it was coined years earlier in opposition to the incredibly
paranoid Multics people down the hall, for whom security was everything. In
the ITS culture it referred to (1) the fact that by the time a tourist figured
out how to make trouble he'd generally gotten over the urge to make it, because
he felt part of the community; and (2) (self-mockingly) the poor coverage of the
documentation and obscurity of many commands. One instance of *deliberate*
security through obscurity is recorded; the command to allow patching the
running ITS system (altmode altmode control-R) echoed as $$^D. If you
actually typed alt alt ^D, that set a flag that would prevent patching the
system even if you later got it right.

SED

/S-E-D/ /n./ [TMRC, from 'Light-Emitting Diode'] Smoke-emitting diode. A

friode that lost the war. See also LER.

segfault
/n.,vi./ Syn. segment, segmentation fault.

seggie

/seg'ee/ /n./ [Unix] Shorthand for segmentation fault reported from Britain.

segment

/seg'ment/ /vi./ To experience a segmentation fault. Confusingly, this is

often pronounced more like the noun 'segment' than like mainstream /v./ segment;
this is because it is actually a noun shorthand that has been verbed.

segmentation fault

/n./ [Unix] 1. An error in which a running program attempts to access memory

not allocated to it and core dumps with a segmentation violation error. 2. To
lose a train of thought or a line of reasoning. Also uttered as an exclamation
at the point of befuddlement.

segv

/seg'vee/ /n.,vi./ Yet another synonym for segmentation fault (actually, in

this case, 'segmentation violation').

self-reference

/n./ See self-reference.

selvage

/sel'v*j/ /n./ [from sewing and weaving] See chad (sense 1).

semi

/se'mee/ or /se'mi:/ 1. /n./ Abbreviation for 'semicolon', when speaking.

"Commands to grind are prefixed by semi-semi-star" means that the prefix is
';;*', not 1/4 of a star. 2. A prefix used with words such as 'immediately' as
a qualifier. "When is the system coming up?" "Semi-immediately." (That is,
maybe not for an hour.) "We did consider that possibility semi-seriously." See
also infinite.

semi-infinite

/n./ See infinite.

senior bit

/n./ [IBM] Syn. meta bit.

server

/n./ A kind of daemon that performs a service for the requester and which
often runs on a computer other than the one on which the server runs. A
particularly common term on the Internet, which is rife with 'web servers',
'name servers', 'domain servers', 'news servers', 'finger servers', and the
like.
SEX

/seks/ [Sun Users' Group elsewhere] /n./ 1. Software EXchange. A

technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years ago to
speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until then. Today,
SEX parties are popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no longer
limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a Good
Thing, but unprotected SEX can propagate a virus. See also pubic directory.
2. The rather Freudian mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a machine
instruction found in the PDP-11 and many other architectures. The RCA 1802 chip
used in the early Elf and SuperElf personal computers had a 'SEt X register' SEX
instruction, but this seems to have had little folkloric impact.

DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the 'SEX' mnemonic out
the door at one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a
change. That wasn't the last time this happened, either. The author of "The
Intel 8086 Primer", who was one of the original designers of the 8086, noted
that there was originally a 'SEX' instruction on that processor, too. He says
that Intel management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the
instruction was renamed 'CBW' and 'CWD' (depending on what was being extended).
Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC keyboards) is also
missing straight 'SEX' but has logical-or and logical-and instructions 'ORL' and
'ANL'.

The Motorola 6809, used in the U.K.'s 'Dragon 32' personal computer, actually
had an official 'SEX' instruction; the 6502 in the Apple II with which it
competed did not. British hackers thought this made perfect mythic sense; after
all, it was commonly observed, you could (on some theoretical level) have sex
with a dragon, but you can't have sex with an apple.

sex changer

/n./ Syn. gender mender.

shambolic link

/sham-bol'ik link/ /n./ A Unix symbolic link, particularly when it confuses

you, points to nothing at all, or results in your ending up in some completely
unexpected part of the filesystem....

shar file

/shar' fi:l/ /n./ Syn. sharchive.

sharchive

/shar'ki:v/ /n./ [Unix and Usenet; from /bin/sh archive] A flattened

representation of a set of one or more files, with the unique property that it
can be unflattened (the original files restored) by feeding it through a
standard Unix shell; thus, a sharchive can be distributed to anyone running
Unix, and no special unpacking software is required. Sharchives are also
intriguing in that they are typically created by shell scripts; the script that
produces sharchives is thus a script which produces self-unpacking scripts,
which may themselves contain scripts. (The downsides of sharchives are that
they are an ideal venue for Trojan horse attacks and that, for recipients not
running Unix, no simple un-sharchiving program is possible; sharchives can and
do make use of arbitrarily-powerful shell features.) Sharchives are also
commonly referred to as 'shar files' after the name of the most common program
for generating them.
Share and enjoy!

/imp./ 1. Commonly found at the end of software release announcements and

README files, this phrase indicates allegiance to the hacker ethic of free
information sharing (see hacker ethic, sense 1). 2. The motto of the Sirius
Cybernetics Corporation (the ultimate gaggle of incompetent suits) in Douglas
Adams's "Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy". The irony of using this as a
cultural recognition signal appeals to freeware hackers.

shareware

/sheir'weir/ /n./ A kind of freeware (sense 1) for which the author requests
some payment, usually in the accompanying documentation files or in an
announcement made by the software itself. Such payment may or may not buy
additional support or functionality. See also careware, charityware,
crippleware, FRS, guiltware, postcardware, and -ware; compare
payware.

shelfware

/shelf'weir/ /n./ Software purchased on a whim (by an individual user) or in

accordance with policy (by a corporation or government agency), but not actually
required for any particular use. Therefore, it often ends up on some shelf.

shell

[orig. Multics /n./ techspeak, widely propagated via Unix] 1. [techspeak] The
command interpreter used to pass commands to an operating system; so called
because it is the part of the operating system that interfaces with the outside
world. 2. More generally, any interface program that mediates access to a
special resource or server for convenience, efficiency, or security reasons;
for this meaning, the usage is usually 'a shell around' whatever. This sort of
program is also called a 'wrapper'. 3. A skeleton program, created by hand or
by another program (like, say, a parser generator), which provides the necessary
incantations to set up some task and the control flow to drive it (the term
driver is sometimes used synonymously). The user is meant to fill in whatever
code is needed to get real work done. This usage is common in the AI and
Microsoft Windows worlds, and confuses Unix hackers.

Historical note: Apparently, the original Multics shell (sense 1) was so called
because it was a shell (sense 3); it ran user programs not by starting up
separate processes, but by dynamically linking the programs into its own code,
calling them as subroutines, and then dynamically de-linking them on return.
The VMS command interpreter still does something very like this.

shell out

/n./ [Unix] To spawn an interactive subshell from within a program (e.g., a

mailer or editor). "Bang foo runs foo in a subshell, while bang alone shells
out."

shift left (or right) logical

[from any of various machines' instruction sets] 1. /vi./ To move oneself to

the left (right). To move out of the way. 2. imper. "Get out of that (my)
seat! You can shift to that empty one to the left (right)." Often used without
the 'logical', or as 'left shift' instead of 'shift left'. Sometimes heard as
LSH /lish/, from the PDP-10 instruction set. See Programmer's Cheer.
shim

/n./ A small piece of data inserted in order to achieve a desired memory

alignment or other addressing property. For example, the PDP-11 Unix linker, in
split I D (instructions and data) mode, inserts a two-byte shim at location
0 in data space so that no data object will have an address of 0 (and be
confused with the C null pointer). See also loose bytes.

s***ogram

/sh**'oh-gram/ /n./ A *really* nasty piece of email. Compare nastygram,

flame.

short card

/n./ A half-length IBM XT expansion card or adapter that will fit in one of the
two short slots located towards the right rear of a standard chassis (tucked
behind the floppy disk drives). See also tall card.

shotgun debugging

/n./ The software equivalent of Easter egging; the making of relatively

undirected changes to software in the hope that a bug will be perturbed out of
existence. This almost never works, and usually introduces more bugs.

shovelware

/shuh'v*l-weir`/ /n./ Extra software dumped onto a CD-ROM or tape to fill up

the remaining space on the medium after the software distribution it's intended
to carry, but not integrated with the distribution.

showstopper

/n./ A hardware or (especially) software bug that makes an implementation

effectively unusable; one that absolutely has to be fixed before development can
go on. Opposite in connotation from its original theatrical use, which refers
to something stunningly *good*.

shriek

/n./ See excl. Occasional CMU usage, also in common use among APL fans and
mathematicians, especially category theorists.

Shub-Internet

/shuhb' in't*r-net/ /n./ [MUD: from H. P. Lovecraft's evil fictional deity

Shub-Niggurath, the Black Goat with a Thousand Young] The harsh personification
of the Internet, Beast of a Thousand Processes, Eater of Characters, Avatar of
Line Noise, and Imp of Call Waiting; the hideous multi-tendriled entity formed
of all the manifold connections of the net. A sect of MUDders worships
Shub-Internet, sacrificing objects and praying for good connections. To no
avail — its purpose is malign and evil, and is the cause of all network
slowdown. Often heard as in "Freela casts a tac nuke at Shub-Internet for
slowing her down." (A forged response often follows along the lines of:
"Shub-Internet gulps down the tac nuke and burps happily.") Also cursed by
users of the Web, FTP and TELNET when the system slows down. The dread name
of Shub-Internet is seldom spoken aloud, as it is said that repeating it three
times will cause the being to wake, deep within its lair beneath the Pentagon.
[January 1996: It develops that one of the computer administrators in the
basement of the Pentagon read this entry and fell over laughing. As a result,
you too can now poke Shub-Internet by pinging shub-internet.ims.disa.mil. See
also kremvax. — ESR]

sidecar

/n./ 1. Syn. slap on the side. Esp. used of add-ons for the late and
unlamented IBM PCjr. 2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted onto
the side of an Amiga. Designed and produced by Commodore, it broke all of the
company's own design rules. If it worked with any other peripherals, it was by
magic. 3. More generally, any of various devices designed to be connected to
the expansion slot on the left side of the Amiga 500 (and later, 600
1200), which included a hard drive controller, a hard drive, and additional
memory.

SIG

/sig/ /n./ (also common as a prefix in combining forms) A Special Interest

Group, in one of several technical areas, sponsored by the Association for
Computing Machinery; well-known ones include SIGPLAN (the Special Interest Group
on Programming Languages), SIGARCH (the Special Interest Group for Computer
Architecture) and SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics).
Hackers, not surprisingly, like to overextend this naming convention to less
formal associations like SIGBEER (at ACM conferences) and SIGFOOD (at University
of Illinois).

sig block

/sig blok/ /n./ [Unix; often written '.sig' there] Short for 'signature', used
specifically to refer to the electronic signature block that most Unix mail- and
news-posting software will automagically append to outgoing mail and news. The
composition of one's sig can be quite an art form, including an ASCII logo or
one's choice of witty sayings (see sig quote, fool file, the); but many
consider large sigs a waste of bandwidth, and it has been observed that the
size of one's sig block is usually inversely proportional to one's longevity and
level of prestige on the net. See also doubled sig.

sig quote

/sig kwoht/ /n./ [Usenet] A maxim, quote, proverb, joke, or slogan embedded in
one's sig block and intended to convey something of one's philosophical
stance, pet peeves, or sense of humor. "Calm down, it's only ones and zeroes."

sig virus

/n./ A parasitic meme embedded in a sig block. There was a meme plague
or fad for these on Usenet in late 1991. Most were equivalents of "I am a .sig
virus. Please reproduce me in your .sig block.". Of course, the .sig virus's
memetic hook is the giggle value of going along with the gag; this, however, was
a self-limiting phenomenon as more and more people picked up on the idea. There
were creative variants on it; some people stuck 'sig virus antibody' texts in
their sigs, and there was at least one instance of a sig virus eater.

signal-to-noise ratio

[from analog electronics] /n./ Used by hackers in a generalization of its

technical meaning. 'Signal' refers to useful information conveyed by some
communications medium, and 'noise' to anything else on that medium. Hence a low
ratio implies that it is not worth paying attention to the medium in question.
Figures for such metaphorical ratios are never given. The term is most often
applied to Usenet newsgroups during flame wars. Compare bandwidth. See
also coefficient of X, lost in the noise.

silicon

/n./ Hardware, esp. ICs or microprocessor-based computer systems (compare

iron). Contrasted with software. See also sandbender.

silly walk

/vi./ [from Monty Python's Flying Circus] 1. A ridiculous procedure required to

accomplish a task. Like grovel, but more random and humorous. "I had to
silly-walk through half the /usr directories to find the maps file." 2. Syn.
fandango on core.

silo

/n./ The FIFO input-character buffer in an RS-232 line card. So called from
DEC terminology used on DH and DZ line cards for the VAX and PDP-11, presumably
because it was a storage space for fungible stuff that went in at the top and
came out at the bottom.

Silver Book

/n./ Jensen and Wirth's infamous "Pascal User Manual and Report", so called
because of the silver cover of the widely distributed Springer-Verlag second
edition of 1978 (ISBN 0-387-90144-2). See book titles, Pascal.

since time T equals minus infinity

/adv./ A long time ago; for as long as anyone can remember; at the time that
some particular frob was first designed. Usually the word 'time' is omitted.
See also time T; contrast epoch.

sitename

/si:t'naym/ /n./ [Unix/Internet] The unique electronic name of a computer

system, used to identify it in UUCP mail, Usenet, or other forms of electronic
information interchange. The folklore interest of sitenames stems from the
creativity and humor they often display. Interpreting a sitename is not unlike
interpreting a vanity license plate; one has to mentally unpack it, allowing for
mono-case and length restrictions and the lack of whitespace. Hacker tradition
deprecates dull, institutional-sounding names in favor of punchy, humorous, and
clever coinages (except that it is considered appropriate for the official
public gateway machine of an organization to bear the organization's name or
acronym). Mythological references, cartoon characters, animal names, and
allusions to SF or fantasy literature are probably the most popular sources for
sitenames (in roughly descending order). The obligatory comment when discussing
these is Harris's Lament: "All the good ones are taken!" See also network
address.

skrog

/v./ Syn. scrog.

skulker
/n./ Syn. prowler.

slab

[Apple] 1. /n./ A continuous horizontal line of pixels, all with the same
color. 2. /vi./ To paint a slab on an output device. Apple's QuickDraw, like
most other professional-level graphics systems, renders polygons and lines not
with Bresenham's algorithm, but by calculating 'slab points' for each scan line
on the screen in succession, and then slabbing in the actual image pixels.

slack

/n./ 1. Space allocated to a disk file but not actually used to store useful
information. The techspeak equivalent is 'internal fragmentation'. Antonym:
hole. 2. In the theology of the Church of the SubGenius, a mystical
substance or quality that is the prerequisite of all human happiness.

Since Unix files are stored compactly, except for the unavoidable wastage in the
last block or fragment, it might be said that "Unix has no slack". See ha ha
only serious.

slap on the side

/n./ (also called a sidecar, or abbreviated 'SOTS'.) A type of external

expansion hardware marketed by computer manufacturers (e.g., Commodore for the
Amiga 500/1000 series and IBM for the hideous failure called 'PCjr'). Various
SOTS boxes provided necessities such as memory, hard drive controllers, and
conventional expansion slots.

slash

/n./ Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. See ASCII for
other synonyms.

sleep

/vi./ 1. [techspeak] To relinquish a claim (of a process on a multitasking

system) for service; to indicate to the scheduler that a process may be
deactivated until some given event occurs or a specified time delay elapses. 2.
In jargon, used very similarly to /v./ block; also in 'sleep on', syn. with
'block 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
until the release, then start hassling them again."

slim

/n./ A small, derivative change (e.g., to code).

slop

/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
large amount if necessary, rather than too 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 fencepost error. 2. The
percentage of 'extra' 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 of a compiler; slop below 5% is very good, and 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 programming is no
longer common.

slopsucker

/slop'suhk-r/ /n./ A lowest-priority task that waits 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
'hungry puppy' or 'bottom feeder'. One common variety of slopsucker hunts for
large prime numbers. Compare background.

slurp

/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 matrix and does an FFT." See also sponge.

smart

/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 programs (yet — see AI-complete). Compare robust (smart
programs can be brittle).

smart terminal

/n./ 1. 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 and the
product it describes 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's storage, using local devices as displays. 2. obs. Any terminal with
an addressable cursor; the opposite of a glass tty. Today, a terminal with
merely an addressable cursor, but with none of the more-powerful features
mentioned in sense 1, is called a dumb terminal.

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 problem: The attempt to make
peripherals (or anything 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 other hand, are *really* smart. Compare hook.

smash case

/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

/n./ [C programming] To corrupt the execution stack by writing past the end of
a local array or other data structure. Code that smashes the stack can cause a
return from the routine to jump to a random address, resulting in 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 never done intentionally. See spam; see also
aliasing bug, fandango on core, memory leak, memory smash, precedence
lossage, overrun screw.

smiley

/n./ See emoticon.

smoke

/vi./ 1. To crash or blow up, usually spectacularly. "The new version smoked,
just like the last one." Used for both hardware (where it often describes an
actual physical event), and software (where it's merely colorful). 2. [from
automotive slang] To be conspicuously fast. "That processor really smokes."
Compare magic smoke.

smoke and mirrors

/n./ Marketing deceptions. The term is mainstream in this general sense.

Among hackers it's strongly associated with bogus demos and crocked benchmarks
(see also MIPS, machoflops). "They claim their new box cranks 50 MIPS for
under $5000, but didn't specify the instruction mix — sounds like smoke and
mirrors to me." The phrase, popularized by newspaper columnist Jimmy Breslin
c.1975, has been said to derive from carnie slang for magic acts and 'freak
show' displays that depend on 'trompe l'oeil' effects, but also calls to mind
the fierce Aztec god Tezcatlipoca (lit. "Smoking Mirror") for whom the hearts of
huge numbers of human sacrificial victims were regularly cut out. Upon hearing
about a rigged demo or yet another round of fantasy-based marketing promises,
hackers often feel analogously disheartened. See also stealth manager.

smoke test

/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 magic
smoke. 2. By extension, the first run 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 hand, a 'smoke test' (hold
the letter in candle smoke, then press it onto paper) is used to check out new
dies.

smoking clover

/n./ [ITS] 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 of the
screen; the other endpoints are 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 FDA (the U.S.'s Food and Drug Administration) lest its
hallucinogenic properties cause it to be banned.

SMOP
/S-M-O-P/ /n./ [Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming] 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 worth the trouble. Also used ironically to 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 compile COBOL as well; it's just an
SMOP." 2. 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.

smurf

/smerf/ /n./ [from the soc.motss newsgroup on Usenet, after some obnoxiously
gooey cartoon characters] A newsgroup regular with a habitual style that is
irreverent, silly, and cute. Like many other hackish terms for people, this one
may be praise or insult depending on who uses it. In general, being referred to
as a smurf is probably not going to make your day unless you've previously
adopted the label yourself in a spirit of irony. Compare old fart.

SNAFU principle

/sna'foo prin'si-pl/ /n./ [from a WWII Army acronym for 'Situation Normal, All
F***ed Up'] "True communication is possible only between equals, because
inferiors are more consistently rewarded for telling their superiors pleasant
lies than for telling the truth." — a 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-makers from reality. This lightly adapted version of a fable dating
back to the early 1960s illustrates the phenomenon perfectly:

In the beginning was the plan, and then the specification;

And the plan was without form, and the specification was void.
And darkness was on the faces of the implementors thereof;
And they spake unto their leader, saying:
"It is a crock of s**t, and smells as of a sewer."
And the leader took pity on them, and spoke to the project leader:
"It is a crock of excrement, and none may abide the odor thereof."
And the project leader spake unto his section head, saying:
"It is a container of excrement, and it is very strong, such that none may
abide it."
The section head then hurried to his department manager, and informed him thus:
"It is a vessel of fertilizer, and none may abide its strength."
The department manager carried these words to his general manager,
and spoke unto him saying:
"It containeth that which aideth the growth of plants, and it is very strong."
And so it was that the general manager rejoiced and delivered the good news
unto the Vice President.
"It promoteth growth, and it is very powerful."
The Vice President rushed to the President's side, and joyously exclaimed:
"This powerful new software product will promote the growth of the company!"
And the President looked upon the product, and saw that it was very good.

After the subsequent and inevitable disaster, the suits protect themselves by
saying "I was misinformed!", and the implementors are demoted or fired.

snail

/vt./ To snail-mail something. "Snail me a copy of those graphics, will you?"

snail-mail

/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 have
even been parody posters and stamps made. Also (less commonly) called 'P-mail',
from 'paper mail' or 'physical mail'. Oppose email.

snap

/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
may tell you that person's extension before 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 middle, it snaps into a straight line
from 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 this context one also speaks of 'snapping 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 snapping the
link allows that particular path to use a direct procedure-call instruction with
no further overhead.

snarf

/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 also
blast. This term was mainstream in the late 1960s, meaning 'to eat
piggishly'. It may still have this connotation in context. "He's in the
snarfing phase of hacking — FTPing megs of stuff a day." 3. To acquire, with
little concern for legal forms or politesse (but not quite by stealing). "They
were giving away samples, so I snarfed a bunch of them." 4. Syn. for slurp.
"This program starts by snarfing the entire database into core, then...." 5.
[GEnie] To spray food or programming fluids due to laughing at the wrong
moment. "I was drinking coffee, and when I read your post I snarfed all over my
desk." "If I keep reading this topic, I think I'll have to snarf-proof my
computer with a keyboard condom." [This sense appears to be widespread among
mundane teenagers — ESR]

snarf barf

/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 was a
mainstream expression for an 'eat now, regret it later' cheap-restaurant
expedition.

snarf down

/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
recently."
snark

/n./ [Lewis Carroll, via the Michigan Terminal System] 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
on a computer (especially if it might be a 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
versions from 2.*.* on (i.e., this lexicon).

sneaker

/n./ An individual hired to break into places in order to test their security;
analogous to tiger team. Compare samurai.

sneakernet

/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 station
wagon filled with magtape, or a 747 filled with CD-ROMs." Also called
'Tennis-Net', 'Armpit-Net', 'Floppy-Net' or 'Shoenet'.

sniff

/v.,n./ Synonym for poll.

snivitz

/sniv'itz/ /n./ A hiccup in hardware or software; a small, transient problem of

unknown origin (less serious than a snark). Compare glitch.

SO

/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,
MOTOS, MOTSS. 2. [techspeak] The Shift Out control character in ASCII
(Control-N, 0001110).

social engineering

/n./ Term used among crackers and samurai for cracking techniques that rely
on weaknesses in wetware rather than software; the aim is to trick people into
revealing passwords or other information that compromises a target system's
security. Classic scams include phoning up a mark who has the required
information and posing as a field service tech or a fellow employee with an
urgent access problem. See also the tiger team story in the patch entry.

social science number

/n./ [IBM] 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 much
better than nothing, and can be considerably worse. As a rule, management
loves them. See also numbers, math-out, pretty pictures.

sodium substrate
/n./ Syn salt substrate.

soft boot

/n./ See boot.

softcopy

/soft'kop-ee/ /n./ [by analogy with 'hardcopy'] A machine-readable form of

corresponding hardcopy. See bits, machinable.

software bloat

/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 hoarding

/n./ Pejorative term employed by members and adherents of the GNU project to
describe the act of holding software proprietary, keeping it under trade secret
or license terms which prohibit free redistribution and modification. Used
primarily in Free Software Foundation propaganda. For a summary of related
issues, see GNU.

software laser

/n./ An optical laser works by bouncing photons back and forth between two
mirrors, one totally reflective and one partially reflective. If the lasing
material (usually a crystal) has the right properties, photons scattering off
the atoms in the crystal will excite cascades of more photons, all in lockstep.
Eventually the beam will escape through the partially-reflective mirror. One
kind of sorcerer's apprentice mode involving bounce messages can produce
closely analogous results, with a cascade of messages escaping to flood nearby
systems. By mid-1993 there had been at least two publicized incidents of this
kind.

software rot

/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 become out of
date. If the design was 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 around
at the beginning of the year 2000. 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 applied for a driver's license renewal in 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 was
a real problem on early research computers (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-so needs an instruction to do such-and-such. 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 the hardware. Unfortunately, this broke some 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, it figured out how fast
the PDP-6 was that day, and corrected appropriately.

Compare bit rot.

softwarily

/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

/n./ [IBM] Hardware hackers' term for a software expert who is largely ignorant
of the mysteries of hardware.

some random X

/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

/n./ [from Goethe's "Der Zauberlehrling" via Paul Dukas's "L'apprenti sorcier"
the film "Fantasia"] 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 such behavior caused by bounce
message loops in email software. Compare broadcast storm, network
meltdown, software laser, ARMM.

SOS

/S-O-S/ /n. obs./ 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.
Unfortunately, the old one was never really 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 SOS have been written, notably the
early font editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate
expansion 'Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed). 2. /sos/ /vt./
To decrease; inverse of AOS, from the PDP-10 instruction set.

source of all good bits

/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 competent
secretary.

space-cadet keyboard
/n./ A now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several
still-current jargon terms and influenced the design of EMACS. It was
equipped with no fewer than *seven* shift keys: four 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 letter on the front. For example,
the 'L' key had an 'L' and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter
lambda on the front. By pressing this key with the right hand while playing an
appropriate 'chord' with the left hand on the shift keys, you could get the
following results:

L lowercase l

shift-L uppercase L

front-L lowercase lambda

front-shift-L uppercase lambda

top-L two-way arrow (front and shift are ignored)

And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the
control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard, you could type over
8000 different 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
meanings of that many characters if it reduced 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 operate. See bucky bits, cokebottle, double
bucky, meta bit, quadruple bucky.

Note: early versions of this entry incorrectly identified the space-cadet

keyboard with the 'Knight keyboard'. Though both were designed by Tom Knight,
the latter term was properly applied only to a keyboard used for ITS on the
PDP-10 and modeled on the Stanford keyboard (as described under bucky bits).
The true space-cadet keyboard evolved from the first Knight keyboard.

spaceship operator

/n./ The glyph ' = ', so-called apparently because in the low-resolution
constant-width font used on many terminals it vaguely resembles a flying saucer.
Perl uses this to denote the signum-of-difference operation.

SPACEWAR

/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 implemented on
the PDP-1 at MIT in 1960—61. SPACEWAR 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 than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was
commercialized as one of the first video games; descendants are still feeping
in video arcades everywhere.

spaghetti code

/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 code has
so many jumps in it.
spaghetti inheritance

/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
sake of reusing their code. Coined in a (successful) attempt to discourage such
practice, through guilt-by-association with spaghetti code.

spam

/vt.,vi.,n./ [from "Monty Python's Flying Circus"] 1. To crash a program by

overrunning a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also
buffer overflow, overrun screw, smash the stack. 2. To cause a newsgroup
to be flooded with irrelevant or inappropriate messages. You can spam a
newsgroup with as little as one well- (or ill-) planned message (e.g. asking
"What do you think of abortion?" on soc.women). This is often done with
cross-posting (e.g. any message which is crossposted to alt.rush-limbaugh and
alt.politics.homosexuality will almost inevitably spam both groups). 3. To send
many identical or nearly-identical messages separately to a large number of
Usenet newsgroups. This is one sure way to infuriate nearly everyone on the
Net.

The second and third definitions have become much more prevalent as the Internet
has opened up to non-techies, and to many Usenetters sense 3 is now (1995)
primary. In this sense the term has apparantly begun to go mainstream, though
without its original sense or folkloric freight — there is apparently a
widespread belief among lusers that "spamming" is what happens when you dump
cans of Spam into a revolving fan.

special-case

/vt./ To write unique code to handle input to or situations arising in a

program that are somehow distinguished from normal processing. This would be
used for processing of mode switches or interrupt characters in an interactive
interface (as opposed, say, to text entry or normal commands), or for processing
of hidden flags in the input of a batch program or filter.

speedometer

/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 operating system goes through its main loop. A swiftly moving
pattern indicates that the system is mostly idle; the 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 note: One computer, the GE 600 (later Honeywell 6000) actually had an
*analog* speedometer on the front panel, calibrated in instructions executed per
second.

spell

/n./ Syn. incantation.

spelling flame

/n./ [Usenet] A posting ostentatiously correcting a previous article's

spelling as a way of casting scorn on the point the article was trying to make,
instead of actually responding to that point (compare dictionary flame). Of
course, people who are more than usually slovenly spellers are prone to think
*any* correction is a spelling flame. It's an amusing comment on human nature
that spelling flames themselves often contain spelling errors.

spiffy

/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 than a
flashy interface going for it. Which 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.

spike

/v./ To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a (sometimes temporary)

device that forces a specific result. The word is used in several industries;
telephone engineers refer to spiking a relay by inserting a pin to hold the
relay in either the closed or open state, and railroaders refer to spiking a
track switch so that it cannot be moved. In programming environments it
normally refers to a temporary change, usually for testing purposes (as opposed
to a permanent change, which would be called hardwired).

spin

/vi./ Equivalent to buzz. More common among C and Unix programmers.

spl

/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.
Classically, spl levels run from 1 to 7; "Fred's 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.

splash screen

/n./ [Mac users] Syn. banner, sense 3.

splat

/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 people
for the '#' character (ASCII 0100011). 3. [Rochester Institute of Technology]
The feature key on a Mac (same as alt, sense 2). 4. obs. Name used by some
people for the Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This character
is also called 'blobby' and 'frob', among other names; it is sometimes used by
mathematicians as a notation for 'tensor product'. 5. obs. Name for the
semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII circle-plus character. See also ASCII.

spod

/n./ [UK] A lower form of life found on talker systems and MUDs. The spod
has few friends in RL and uses talkers instead, finding communication easier
and preferable over the net. He has all the negative traits of the computer
geek without having any interest in computers per se. Lacking any knowledge of
or interest in how networks work, and considering his access a God-given right,
he is a major irritant to sysadmins, clogging up lines in order to reach new
MUDs, following passed-on instructions on how to sneak his way onto Internet
("Wow! It's in America!") and complaining when he is not allowed to use busy
routes. A true spod will start any conversation with "Are you male or female?"
(and follow it up with "Got any good numbers/IDs/passwords?") and will not talk
to someone physically present in the same terminal room until they log onto the
same machine that he is using and enter talk mode. Compare newbie, tourist,
weenie, twink, terminal junkie, warez d00dz.

spoiler

/n./ [Usenet] 1. A remark which reveals important plot elements from books or
movies, thus denying the reader (of the article) the proper suspense when
reading the book or watching the movie. 2. Any remark which telegraphs the
solution of a problem or puzzle, thus denying the reader the pleasure of working
out the correct answer (see also interesting). Either sense readily forms
compounds like 'total spoiler', 'quasi-spoiler' and even 'pseudo-spoiler'.

By convention, articles which are spoilers in either sense should contain the
word 'spoiler' in the Subject: line, or guarantee via various tricks that the
answer appears only after several screens-full of warning, or conceal the
sensitive information via rot13, or some combination of these techniques.

sponge

/n./ [Unix] 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
stream. If a file system has versioning (as 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.

spool

/vi./ [from early IBM 'Simultaneous Peripheral Operation On-Line', but this
acronym is widely thought to have been contrived for effect] To send files to
some device or program (a 'spooler') that queues them up and does something
useful with them later. Without qualification, the spooler 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) and
occasionally even for input devices. See also demon.

spool file

/n./ Any file to which data is spooled to await the next stage of processing.
Especially used in circumstances where spooling the data copes with a mismatch
between speeds in two devices or pieces of software. For example, when you send
mail under Unix, it's typically copied to a spool file to await a transport
demon's attentions. This is borderline techspeak.

square tape

/n./ Mainframe magnetic tape cartridges for use with IBM 3480 or compatible
tape drives; or QIC tapes used on workstations and micros. The term comes from
the square (actually rectangular) shape of the cartridges; contrast round
tape.

squirrelcide

/n./ [common on Usenet's comp.risks newsgroup.] (alt. 'squirrelicide') What all

too frequently happens when a squirrel decides to exercise its species's
unfortunate penchant for shorting out power lines with their little furry
bodies. Result: one dead squirrel, one down computer installation. In this
situation, the computer system is said to have been squirrelcided.

stack

/n./ The set of things a person 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 way down on my
stack." "I haven't done it yet 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 items were pushed onto the stack than could be
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, and
when you take one off the top the rest 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 of Computer Programming", second edition,
vol. 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, nesting stores, piles,
last-in-first-out ("LIFO") lists, and even yo-yo lists!

stack puke

/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
machine, this can take a while.

stale pointer bug

/n./ Synonym for aliasing bug used esp. among microcomputer hackers.

star out

/v./ [University of York, England] To replace a user's encrypted password in

/etc/passwd with a single asterisk. Under Unix this is not a legal encryption of
any password; hence the user is not permitted to log in. In general, accounts
like adm, news, and daemon are permanently "starred out"; occasionally a real
user might have the this inflicted upon him/her as a punishment, e.g. "Graham
was starred out for playing Omega in working hours". Also occasionally known as
The Order Of The Gold Star in this context. "Don't do that, or you'll be awarded
the Order of the Gold Star..." Compare disusered.

state

/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?"
means "What are you doing?" or "What are 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 questions would be "State-p?". Another
way 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).

stealth manager

/n./ [Corporate DP] A manager that appears out of nowhere, promises

undeliverable software to unknown end users, and vanishes before the programming
staff realizes what has happened. See smoke and mirrors.

steam-powered

/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

/n./ [University of Lowell, Massachusetts.] 3.5-inch microfloppies, so called

because their jackets are more rigid than those of the 5.25-inch and the (now
totally obsolete) 8-inch floppy. Elsewhere this might be called a 'firmy'.

stir-fried random

/n./ (alt. 'stir-fried mumble') Term used for the best dish of many of those
hackers who can cook. Consists of random fresh veggies and meat wokked with
random spices. Tasty and economical. See random, great-wall, ravs,
laser chicken, oriental food; see also mumble.

stomp on

/vt./ To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually automatically.

"All the work I did this weekend got stomped on last night by the nightly server
script." Compare scribble, mangle, trash, scrog, roach.

Stone Age

/n.,adj./ 1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period from ENIAC (ca. 1943)

to the mid-1950s; the great age of electromechanical dinosaurs. Sometimes
used for the entire period up to 1960—61 (see Iron Age); however, it is
funnier and more descriptive to characterize the latter period in terms of a
'Bronze Age' era of transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-core machines with drum or
CRT mass storage (as opposed to just mercury delay lines and/or relays). See
also Iron Age. 2. More generally, a pejorative for any crufty, ancient piece
of hardware or software technology. Note that this is used even by people who
were there for the Stone Age (sense 1).

stone knives and bearskins

/n./ [from the Star Trek Classic episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"] A
term traditionally used to describe (and deprecate) computing environments that
are grotesquely primitive in light of what is known about good ways to design
things. As in "Don't get too used to the facilities here. Once you leave SAIL
it's stone knives and bearskins as far as the eye can see". Compare
steam-powered.

stoppage
/sto'p*j/ /n./ Extreme lossage that renders something (usually something
vital) completely unusable. "The recent system stoppage was caused by a fried
transformer."

store

/n./ [prob. from techspeak 'main store'] In some varieties of Commonwealth

hackish, the preferred synonym for core. Thus, 'bringing a program into
store' means not that one is returning shrink-wrapped software but that a
program is being swapped in.

strided

/stri:'d*d/ /adj./ [scientific computing] Said of a sequence of memory reads

and writes to addresses, each of which is separated from the last by a constant
interval called the 'stride length'. These can be a worst-case access pattern
for the standard memory-caching schemes when the stride length is a multiple of
the cache line size. Strided references are often generated by loops through an
array, and (if your data is large enough that access-time is significant) it can
be worthwhile to tune for better locality by inverting double loops or by
partially unrolling the outer loop of a loop nest. This usage is borderline
techspeak; the related term 'memory stride' is definitely techspeak.

stroke

/n./ Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111) character. See ASCII for
other synonyms.

strudel

/n./ Common (spoken) name for the at-sign (`@', ASCII 1000000) character. See
ASCII for other synonyms.

stubroutine

/stuhb'roo-teen/ /n./ [contraction of 'stub subroutine'] Tiny, often vacuous

placeholder for a subroutine that is to be written or fleshed out later.

studly

/adj./ Impressive; powerful. Said of code and designs which exhibit both
complexity and a virtuoso flair. Has connotations similar to hairy but is
more positive in tone. Often in the emphatic 'most studly' or as noun-form
'studliness'. "Smail 3.0's configuration parser is most studly."

studlycaps

/stuhd'lee-kaps/ /n./ A hackish form of silliness similar to BiCapitalization

for trademarks, but applied randomly and to arbitrary text rather than to
trademarks. ThE oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe.

stunning

/adj./ Mind-bogglingly stupid. Usually used in sarcasm. "You want to code

*what* in ADA? That's a ... stunning idea!"
stupid-sort

/n./ Syn. bogo-sort.

Stupids

/n./ Term used by samurai for the suits who employ them; succinctly
expresses an attitude at least as common, though usually better disguised, among
other subcultures of hackers. There may be intended reference here to an SF
story originally published in 1952 but much anthologized since, Mark Clifton's
"Star, Bright". In it, a super-genius child classifies humans into a very few
'Brights' like herself, a huge majority of 'Stupids', and a minority of
'Tweens', the merely ordinary geniuses.

Sturgeon's Law

/prov./ "Ninety percent of everything is c**p". Derived from a quote by

science fiction author Theodore Sturgeon, who once said, "Sure, 90% of science
fiction is crud. That's because 90% of everything is crud." Oddly, when
Sturgeon's Law is cited, the final word is almost invariably changed to 'c**p'.
Compare Hanlon's Razor, Ninety-Ninety Rule. Though this maxim originated in
SF fandom, most hackers recognize it and are all too aware of its truth.

sucking mud

[Applied Data Research] /adj./ (also 'pumping mud') Crashed or wedged.

Usually said of a machine that provides some service to a network, such as a
file server. This Dallas regionalism derives from the East Texas oilfield
lament, "Shut 'er down, Ma, she's a-suckin' mud". Often used as a query. "We
are going to reconfigure the network, are you ready to suck mud?"

sufficiently small

/adj./ Syn. suitably small.

suit

/n./ 1. Ugly and uncomfortable 'business clothing' often worn by non-hackers.

Invariably worn with a 'tie', a strangulation device that partially cuts off the
blood supply to the brain. It is thought that this explains much about the
behavior of suit-wearers. Compare droid. 2. A person who habitually wears
suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. See loser, burble,
management, Stupids, SNAFU principle, and brain-damaged. English, by
the way, is relatively kind; our Moscow correspondent informs us that the
corresponding idiom in Russian hacker jargon is 'sovok', lit. a tool for
grabbing garbage.

suitable win

/n./ See win.

suitably small

/adj./ [perverted from mathematical jargon] An expression used ironically to

characterize unquantifiable behavior that differs from expected or required
behavior. For example, suppose a newly created program came up with a correct
full-screen display, and one publicly exclaimed: "It works!" Then, if the
program dumped core on the first mouse click, one might add: "Well, for suitably
small values of 'works'." Compare the characterization of pi under random
numbers.

sun lounge

/n./ [UK] The room where all the Sun workstations live. The humor in this term
comes from the fact that it's also in mainstream use to describe a solarium, and
all those Sun workstations clustered together give off an amazing amount of
heat.

sun-stools

/n./ Unflattering hackerism for SunTools, a pre-X windowing environment

notorious in its day for size, slowness, and misfeatures. X, however, is
larger and slower; see second-system effect.

sunspots

/n./ 1. Notional cause of an odd error. "Why did the program suddenly turn the
screen blue?" "Sunspots, I guess." 2. Also the cause of bit rot — from the
myth that sunspots will increase cosmic rays, which can flip single bits in
memory. See also phase of the moon.

super source quench

/n./ A special packet designed to shut up an Internet host. The Internet

Protocol (IP) has a control message called Source Quench that asks a host to
transmit more slowly on a particular connection to avoid congestion. It also
has a Redirect control message intended to instruct a host to send certain
packets to a different local router. A "super source quench" is actually a
redirect control packet, forged to look like it came from a local router, that
instructs a host to send all packets to its own local loopback address. This
will effectively tie many Internet hosts up in knots. Compare Godzillagram,
breath-of-life packet.

superloser

/n./ [Unix] A superuser with no clue — someone with root privileges on a Unix
system and no idea what he/she is doing, the moral equivalent of a
three-year-old with an unsafetied Uzi. Anyone who thinks this is an uncommon
situation reckons without the territorial urges of management.

superprogrammer

/n./ A prolific programmer; one who can code exceedingly well and quickly. Not
all hackers are superprogrammers, but many are. (Productivity can vary from one
programmer to another by three orders of magnitude. For example, one programmer
might be able to write an average of 3 lines of working code in one day, while
another, with the proper tools, might be able to write 3,000. This range is
astonishing; it is matched in very few other areas of human endeavor.) The term
'superprogrammer' is more commonly used within such places as IBM than in the
hacker community. It tends to stress naive measures of productivity and to
underweight creativity, ingenuity, and getting the job *done* — and to sidestep
the question of whether the 3,000 lines of code do more or less useful work than
three lines that do the Right Thing. Hackers tend to prefer the terms
hacker and wizard.

superuser

/n./ [Unix] Syn. root, avatar. This usage has spread to non-Unix
environments; the superuser is any account with all wheel bits on. A more
specific term than wheel.

support

/n./ After-sale handholding; something many software vendors promise but few
deliver. To hackers, most support people are useless — because by the time a
hacker calls support he or she will usually know the software and the relevant
manuals better than the support people (sadly, this is *not* a joke or
exaggeration). A hacker's idea of 'support' is a t^ete-`a-t^ete with the
software's designer.

surf

/v./ [from the 'surf' idiom for rapidly flipping TV channels] To traverse the
Internet in search of interesting stuff, used esp. if one is doing so with a
World Wide Web browser. It is also common to speak of 'surfing in' to a
particular resource.

Suzie COBOL

/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 avoid
accusations of sexism) 'Sammy Cobol' or (in some non-IBM circles) 'Cobol
Charlie'. 2. [proposed] Meta-name for any code grinder, analogous to J.
Random Hacker.

swab

/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 perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also
big-endian, little-endian, middle-endian, bytesexual.

swap

/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 needed, they are swapped into core for 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 temporarily forget someone's name,
but then remember 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 idea, you might say "Wait a moment while I swap this out",
implying that a piece of paper is your extra-somatic memory and that if you
don't swap the idea out by writing it down it will get overwritten and lost as
you talk. Compare page in, page out.

swap space

/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

/n./ See swap. See also page in.

swapped out

/n./ See swap. See also page out.

swizzle

/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
for speed in chasing references or to simplify code (e.g., by turning lots of
name lookups into pointer dereferences). The converse operation is sometimes
termed 'unswizzling'. See also snap.

sync

/sink/ n., /vi./ (var. 'synch') 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 state that would be 'safe' if the system were to crash; thus, to
checkpoint (in the database-theory sense).

syntactic salt

/n./ The opposite of syntactic sugar, a feature designed to make it harder to

write bad code. Specifically, syntactic salt is a hoop the programmer must jump
through just to prove that he knows what's going on, rather than to express a
program action. Some programmers consider required type declarations to be
syntactic salt. A requirement to write 'end if', 'end while', 'end do', etc. to
terminate the last block controlled by a control construct (as opposed to just
'end') would definitely be syntactic salt. Syntactic salt is like the real
thing in that it tends to raise hackers' blood pressures in an unhealthy way.
Compare candygrammar.

syntactic sugar

/n./ [coined by Peter Landin] Features added to a language or other formalism

to make it 'sweeter' for humans, features which do not affect the expressiveness
of the formalism (compare chrome). Used esp. when there is an obvious and
trivial translation of the 'sugar' feature 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 variants 'syntactic saccharin' and 'syntactic syrup' are also recorded.
These denote something even more gratuitous, in that syntactic sugar serves a
purpose (making something more acceptable to humans), but syntactic saccharin or
syrup serve no purpose at all. Compare candygrammar, syntactic salt.

sys-frog

/sis'frog/ /n./ [the PLATO system] Playful variant of 'sysprog', which is in

turn short for 'systems programmer'.

sysadmin

/sis'ad-min/ /n./ Common contraction of 'system admin'; see admin.

sysape

/sys'ayp/ /n./ A rather derogatory term for a computer operator; a play on

sysop common at sites that use the banana hierarchy of problem complexity (see
one-banana problem).

sysop

/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
sysops around the world.

system

/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. 'System hacker': one who hacks the system (in senses 1 and 2
only; for sense 3 one mentions the particular program: e.g., 'LISP hacker')

systems jock

/n./ See jock, sense 2.

system mangler

/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 updates at
some site. Unlike admin, this term emphasizes the technical end of the skills
involved.

SysVile

/sis-vi:l'/ /n./ See Missed'em-five.

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 other things. Some Lisp hackers use 'T' and 'NIL' 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
absently respond 'T', meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be
brought a cup of tea instead. Fortunately, 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. [techspeak] In transaction-processing circles, an abbreviation
for the noun 'transaction'. 4. [Purdue] Alternate spelling of tee. 5. A
dialect of LISP developed at Yale. (There is an intended allusion to NIL, "New
Implementation of Lisp", another dialect of Lisp developed for the VAX)

tail recursion
/n./ If you aren't sick of it already, see tail recursion.

talk mode

/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
language entails. It is difficult to 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 orally. Some of these are identical to (and probably derived from)
Morse-code jargon used by ham-radio amateurs since the 1920s.

AFAIK as far as I know BCNU be seeing you BTW by the way BYE? are you
ready to unlink? (this is the standard way to end a talk-mode conversation;
the other person types 'BYE' to confirm, or else continues the conversation)
CUL see you later ENQ? are you busy? (expects 'ACK' or 'NAK' in return)
FOO? are you there? (often used on unexpected links, meaning also "Sorry if
I butted in ..." (linker) or "What's up?" (linkee)) FWIW for what it's worth
FYI for your information FYA for your amusement GA go ahead (used when two
people have tried to type simultaneously; this cedes the right to type to the
other) GRMBL grumble (expresses disquiet or disagreement) HELLOP hello? (an
instance of the '-P' convention) IIRC if I recall correctly JAM just a
minute (equivalent to 'SEC....') MIN same as 'JAM' NIL no (see NIL) O
over to you OO over and out / another form of "over to you" (from x/y as "x
over y") \ lambda (used in discussing LISPy things) OBTW oh, by the way OTOH
on the other hand R U THERE? are you there? SEC wait a second (sometimes
written 'SEC...') T yes (see the main entry for T) TNX thanks TNX 1.0E6
thanks a million (humorous) TNXE6 another form of "thanks a million" WRT
with regard to, or with respect to. WTF the universal interrogative particle;
WTF knows what it means? WTH what the hell? double newline When the
typing party has finished, he/she types two newlines to signal that he/she is
done; this leaves a blank line between 'speeches' in the conversation, making
it easier to reread the preceding text. name : When three or more
terminals are linked, it is conventional for each typist to prepend his/her
login name or handle and a colon (or a hyphen) to each line to indicate who is
typing (some conferencing facilities do this automatically). The login name
is often shortened to a unique prefix (possibly a single letter) during a very
long conversation. /\/\/\ A giggle or chuckle. On a MUD, this usually means
'earthquake fault'.

Most of the above sub-jargon is used at both Stanford and MIT. Several of these
expressions are also common in email, esp. FYI, FYA, BTW, BCNU, WTF, and CUL.
A few other abbreviations have been reported from commercial networks, such as
GEnie and CompuServe, where on-line 'live' chat including more than two people
is common and usually involves a more 'social' context, notably the following:

g grin
gr d grinning, running, and ducking
BBL be back later
BRB be right back
HHOJ ha ha only joking
HHOK ha ha only kidding
HHOS ha ha only serious
IMHO in my humble opinion (see IMHO)
LOL laughing out loud
NHOH Never Heard of Him/Her (often used in initgame)
ROTF rolling on the floor
ROTFL rolling on the floor laughing
AFK away from keyboard
b4 before
 CU l8tr see you later
MORF male or female?
TTFN ta-ta for now
TTYL talk to you later
OIC oh, I see
rehi hello again

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; conversely, most of the
people who know these are 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, MUD respondents report use of BBL, BRB, LOL, 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, though, MUDders
express a preference for 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 are reported:

CU l8er see you later (mutant of 'CU l8tr')

FOAD **** off and die (use of this is generally OTT)
OTT over the top (excessive, uncalled for)
ppl abbrev for "people"
THX thanks (mutant of 'TNX';
clearly this comes in batches of 1138 (the Lucasian K)).
UOK? are you OK?

Some B1FFisms (notably the 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 they are typing rather than
speaking. This 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 behind and plunge forward, unless severe 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.

talker system

/n./ British hackerism for software that enables real-time chat or talk mode.

tall card

/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 lower and
many industry-standard tall cards wouldn't fit; this was felt to be a
reincarnation of the connector conspiracy, done with less style.

tanked

/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.
TANSTAAFL

/tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic "The Moon is a Harsh

Mistress".] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when
someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight
technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of free software, or at the
signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. "What? Don't tell me
I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!"
"Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the
high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in
hackerdom (see A Portrait of J. Random Hacker in Appendix B).

tar and feather

/vi./ [from Unix 'tar(1)'] 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 dubbed
'feathering' partly for euphony and (if only for contrived effect) by analogy to
what you do with 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

[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." Although 'tasty' and 'flavorful' are 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, flavor has the additional
meaning of 'kind' or 'variety' not shared by 'taste'. The marked sense of
flavor is more popular than 'taste', though both are widely used. See also
elegant. 2. Alt. sp. of tayste.

tayste

/tayst/ /n./ Two bits; also as taste. Syn. crumb, quarter. See nybble.

TCB

/T-C-B/ /n./ [IBM] 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or

difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to neglect or shotgun
debugging. Compare heisenbug. Not to be confused with: 2. Trusted Computing
Base, an 'official' jargon term from the Orange Book.

TCP/IP

/T'C-P I'P/ /n./ 1. [Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol] The

wide-area-networking protocol that makes the Internet work, and the only one
most hackers can speak the name of without laughing or retching. Unlike such
allegedly 'standard' competitors such as X.25, DECnet, and the ISO 7-layer
stack, TCP/IP evolved primarily by actually being *used*, rather than being
handed down from on high by a vendor or a heavily-politicized standards
committee. Consequently, it (a) works, (b) actually promotes cheap
cross-platform connectivity, and (c) annoys the hell out of corporate and
governmental empire-builders everywhere. Hackers value all three of these
properties. See creationism. 2. [Amateur Packet Radio] Sometimes expanded as
"The C**p Phil Is Pushing". The reference is to Phil Karn, KA9Q, and the
context is an ongoing technical/political war between the majority of sites
still running AX.25 and a growing minority of TCP/IP relays.
tea, ISO standard cup of

/n./ [South Africa] 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 standards, this one has a faintly alien 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 feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize
an 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 don't mix very well.

TechRef

/tek'ref/ /n./ [MS-DOS] The original "IBM PC Technical Reference Manual",

including the BIOS listing and complete schematics for the PC. The only PC
documentation in the original-issue package that was considered serious by real
hackers.

TECO

/tee'koh/ /n.,v. obs./ 1. [originally an acronym for

'[paper] Tape Editor 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 may have been the most prolific editor in use before
EMACS, to which it was directly ancestral. Noted for its 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 game used to be mentally working
out what the TECO commands corresponding to human names did. 2. /vt./
Originally, to edit using the TECO editor in one of its infinite variations (see
below). 3. vt.,obs. To edit even when TECO is *not* the editor being used!
This usage is rare and now primarily historical.

As an example of TECO's 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 then puts the surname last,
removing the 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 or escape

(ASCII 0011011) character).

In 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 Wrong
Thing. It worked fine the second time. 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 dust of history, having been
replaced in the 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 MIT versions remain the focus of some antiquarian interest. See also
retrocomputing, write-only language.

tee

/n.,vt./ [Purdue] A carbon copy of an electronic transmission. "Oh, you're

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 for me', as in "Tee a slice for me!" Also spelled 'T'.

teledildonics

/tel`*-dil-do'-niks/ /n./ Sex in a computer simulated virtual reality, esp.

computer-mediated sexual interaction between the VR presences of two humans.
This practice is not yet possible except in the rather limited form of erotic
conversation on MUDs and the like. The term, however, is widely recognized in
the VR community as a ha ha only serious projection of things to come. "When
we can sustain a multi-sensory surround good enough for teledildonics, *then*
we'll know we're getting somewhere." See also hot chat.

Telerat

/tel'*-rat/ /n. obs./ Unflattering hackerism for 'Teleray', a now-extinct line

of extremely losing terminals. Compare AIDX, Macintrash Nominal
Semidestructor, Open DeathTrap, ScumOS, sun-stools, HP-SUX.

TELNET

/tel'net/ /vt./ (also commonly lowercased as 'telnet') To communicate with

another Internet host using the TELNET (RFC 854) protocol (usually using a
program of the same name). 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 to read the AP News."

ten-finger interface

/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

/adj./ Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got
that way because it was highly bummed, but sometimes it was just based on a
great idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student
hacker at CMU: "This routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes." A
tense programmer is one who produces tense code.

tentacle

/n./ A covert pseudo, sense 1. An artificial identity created in cyberspace

for nefarious and deceptive purposes. The implication is that a single person
may have multiple tentacles. This term was originally floated in some paranoid
ravings on the cypherpunks list (see cypherpunk), and adopted in a spirit of
irony by other, saner members. It has since shown up, used seriously, in the
documentation for some remailer software, and is now (1994) widely recognized on
the net.

tenured graduate student

/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 don't really get tenure,
of course, the way professors do, but a tenth-year graduate student has probably
been around the university longer than any untenured professor.

tera-

/te'r*/ /pref./ [SI] See quantifiers.

teraflop club

/te'r*-flop kluhb/ /n./ [FLOP = Floating Point Operation] 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
techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder.
Compare Knights of the Lambda Calculus.

terminak

/ter'mi-nak`/ /n./ [Caltech, ca. 1979] 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 #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease fix." Compare dread high-bit
disease, frogging; see also AIDX, Nominal Semidestructor, Open
DeathTrap, ScumOS, sun-stools, Telerat, HP-SUX.

terminal brain death

/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

/n./ 1. Syn. raster burn. 2. The 'burn-in' condition your CRT tends to get
if you don't have a screen saver.

terminal junkie

/n./ [UK] 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', 'console junkie', and
console jockey. The term '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

/ter'pree/ /vi./ [from LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP)] 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 some early
OSes and hardware, no characters would be printed until a complete line was
formed, so this operation terminated the line and emitted the output.

test

/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 over his or her shoulder, ready to pounce on mistakes. Judging by the
quality of most software, the second definition is far more prevalent. See also
demo.

TeX

: /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, the other favored formatter, even at many
Unix installations). TeX fans insist on the 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 names from the word 'TeX' — such
as TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX
programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. See also CrApTeX.

Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the
typesetting in volumes I—III of his monumental "Art of Computer Programming"
(see Knuth, also 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 about 8 years. The language was finally frozen around
1985, but volume IV of "The Art of Computer Programming" is not expected to
appear until 2002. The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such that
nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started as a bit
of toolsmithing on the way to something else; Knuth's diversion was simply on
a grander scale than most.

TeX has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but high-quality
software. Knuth used to offer monetary awards to people who found and reported
bugs in it; as the years wore on and the few remaining bugs were fixed (and new
ones even harder to find), the bribe went up. Though well-written, TeX is so
large (and so full of cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed
at least one bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with.

text

/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 EBCDIC representation (see flat-ASCII). "Those are text files;
you can review them using the editor." These two contradictory senses confuse
hackers, too.

thanks in advance

[Usenet] Conventional net.politeness ending a posted request for information or

assistance. Sometimes written 'advTHANKSance' or 'aTdHvAaNnKcSe' or abbreviated
'TIA'. See net.-, netiquette.

That's not a bug, that's a feature!

The canonical first parry in a debate about a purported bug. The

complainant, if unconvinced, is likely to retort that the bug is then at best a
misfeature. See also feature.

the X that can be Y is not the true X

Yet another instance of hackerdom's 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": "The Tao which can be spoken of is not
the 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

/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
of a design or system. Used esp. around software issues with a heavy AI or
language-design component, such as the smart-data vs. smart-programs dispute in
AI.

theory

/n./ The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently being
used to inform a behavior. This usage is a generalization and (deliberate)
abuse of the technical meaning. "What's the theory on fixing this TECO loss?"
"What's the theory on dinner tonight?" ("Chinatown, I guess.") "What's the
current theory on letting lusers on during the day?" "The theory behind this
change is to fix the following well-known screw...."

thinko

/thing'koh/ /n./ [by analogy with 'typo'] 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; see also brain
fart. Compare mouso.

This can't happen

Less clipped variant of can't happen.

This time, for sure!

/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 fruity imitation
of Bullwinkle J. Moose. Also heard: "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of
my hat!" The canonical response is, of course, "But that trick *never*
works!" See hacker humor.

thrash

/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
therefore said to thrash. Someone who keeps 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. Compare multitask.
thread

/n./ [Usenet, GEnie, CompuServe] Common abbreviation of 'topic thread', a more

or less continuous chain of postings on a single topic. To 'follow a thread' is
to read a series of Usenet postings sharing a common subject or (more correctly)
which are connected by Reference headers. The better newsreaders can present
news in thread order automatically.

Interestingly, this is far from a neologism. The OED says: "That which connects
the successive points in anything, esp. a narrative, train of thought, or the
like; the sequence of events or ideas continuing throughout the whole course of
anything;" Citations are given going back to 1642!

three-finger salute

/n./ Syn. Vulcan nerve pinch.

thud

/n./ 1. Yet another metasyntactic 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 other synonyms.

thumb

/n./ The slider on a window-system scrollbar. So called because moving it

allows you to browse through the contents of a text window in a way analogous to
thumbing through a book.

thunk

/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
called with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler
generates a thunk which computes the expression and leaves the address of the
result in some standard location. 2. Later generalized into: an expression,
frozen together with its environment, for later evaluation if and when needed
(similar to what 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. People and activities scheduled in a thunklike 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 myths circulating about the
origin of this term. 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 suggests that it is the sound of the expression being
unfrozen at argument-evaluation time. In fact, according to the 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 machinery. In other
words, it had 'already been thought of'; thus it was christened a 'thunk', which
is "the past tense of 'think' at two in the morning".

tick

/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 interest
is the ordering of events. This sort of 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 handwaved.
3. In the FORTH language, a single quote character.

tick-list features

/n./ [Acorn Computers] 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 sense of the
phrase has not been reported.

tickle a bug

/vt./ To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest itself through some known
series of inputs or operations. "You can tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA
card's highlight handling by trying to set bright yellow reverse video."

tiger team

/n./ [U.S. military jargon] 1. Originally, a team (of sneakers) 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 defense installations, hand-lettered notes saying "Your
codebooks have been stolen" (they usually haven't 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., and all
hell breaks loose. Serious successes of tiger teams sometimes lead to early
retirement for base commanders and security officers (see the patch entry for
an example). 2. Recently, and more generally, any official inspection team or
special firefighting group called in to look at a problem.

A subset of tiger teams are professional crackers, testing the security of

military computer installations by attempting remote attacks 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 more specific sense.

time bomb

/n./ A subspecies of logic bomb that is triggered by reaching some preset

time, either once or periodically. There are numerous legends about time bombs
set up by programmers in their employers' machines, to go off if the programmer
is fired or laid off and is not present to perform the appropriate suppressing
action periodically.

Interestingly, the only such incident for which we have been pointed to
documentary evidence took place in the Soviet Union in 1986! A disgruntled
programmer at the Volga Automobile Plant (where the Fiat clones called Ladas
were manufactured) planted a time bomb which, a week after he'd left on
vacation, stopped the entire main assembly line for a day. The case attracted
lots of attention in the Soviet Union because it was the first cracking case to
make it to court there. The perpetrator got a suspended sentence of 3 years in
jail and was barred from future work as a programmer.

time sink

/n./ [poss. by analogy with 'heat sink' or 'current sink'] A project that
consumes unbounded amounts of time.
time T

/ti:m T/ /n./ 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood time, often used in

conjunction with a later time T+1. "We'll meet on campus at time T or at
Louie's at time T+1" means, in the context of going out for dinner: "We can meet
on campus and go to Louie's, or we can meet at Louie's itself a bit later."
(Louie's was a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto that was 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 Louie's is 30 minutes; whatever time
T is (and that hasn't been decided on yet), you can meet half an hour later at
Louie's 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

/quant./ [by analogy with 'plus-or-minus'] Term occasionally used when

describing the uncertainty associated with a scheduling estimate, for either
humorous or brutally honest effect. For a software project, the scheduling
uncertainty factor is usually at least 2.

Tinkerbell program

/n./ [Great Britain] A monitoring program used to scan incoming network calls
and generate alerts when calls are received from particular sites, or when
logins are attempted using certain IDs. Named after 'Project Tinkerbell', an
experimental phone-tapping program developed by British Telecom in the early
1980s.

tip of the ice-cube

/n./ [IBM] 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 at all important.

tired iron

/n./ [IBM] 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
bit like a dinosaur.

tits on a keyboard

/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;
but the Mac, perverse as usual, has them on the 'D' and 'K' keys).

TLA

/T-L-A/ /n./ [Three-Letter Acronym] 1. Self-describing abbreviation 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 this looser usage argue that not all TLAs have 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 Acronym) has also
been reported. See also 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 problem in
computing in the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only 17,000
three-letter acronyms." (To be exact, there are 26^3 = 17,576.)

TMRC

/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 that became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see
esp. foo, mung, and frob).

By 1962, TMRC's legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity (and has
grown in the thirty years since; all the features described here are still
present). The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were
scram switches located at numerous places around the room that could be
thwacked if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going
full-bore at an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital clock
on the dispatch board, which was itself something of a wonder in those bygone
days before cheap LEDs and seven-segment displays. When someone hit a scram
switch the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word 'FOO'; at
TMRC the scram switches are therefore called 'foo switches'.

Steven Levy, in his book "Hackers" (see the Bibliography in Appendix C), gives
a stimulating account of those early years. TMRC's Power and Signals group
included most of the early PDP-1 hackers and the people who later became the
core of the MIT AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that connection is still very
much alive, and this lexicon accordingly includes a number of entries from a
recent revision of the TMRC dictionary.

TMRCie

/tmerk'ee/, /n./ [MIT] A denizen of TMRC.

to a first approximation

/adj./ 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 approximation
of the answer, one can write an 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" might indicate that deeper questioning would reveal that not all is
perfect (e.g., a nagging cough still remains after an illness).

to a zeroth approximation

[from 'to a first approximation'] A *really* sloppy approximation; a wild

guess. Compare social science number.

toad

/vt./ [MUD] 1. Notionally, to change a MUD player into a toad. 2. To

permanently and totally exile a player from the MUD. A very serious action,
which can only be done by a MUD wizard; often involves a lot of debate among
the other characters first. See also frog, FOD.

toast
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
manual rebooting. "Rick just toasted the firewall machine again." Compare
fried.

toaster

/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? That'd
be as silly as running Unix on your 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 by sense 2. 4. A peripheral device. "I bought my box
without toasters, but since then I've added two boards and a second disk drive."

toeprint

/n./ A footprint of especially small size.

toggle

/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 that keeps the switch in the position to 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 that there are four distinct
boolean-valued functions of one boolean argument, but saying that is much less
fun than talking about toggling bits.)

tool

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, 'transparent' (typically text-stream) interface designed specifically to
be used in programmed combination with other tools (see filter, plumbing).
3. [MIT: general to students there] /vi./ To work; to study (connotes tedium).
The TMRC Dictionary defined this as "to set one's brain to the grindstone". See
hack. 4. /n./ [MIT] A student who studies too much and hacks too little.
(MIT's student humor magazine rejoices in the name "Tool and Die".)

toolsmith

/n./ The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes

in making the tools with which other programmers create applications. Many
hackers consider this more fun than applications per se; to understand why, see
uninteresting. Jon Bentley, in the "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" chapter
of his book "More Programming Pearls", quotes Dick Sites from DEC as saying "I'd
rather write programs to write programs than write programs".

topic drift

/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
of that tendency. Often used in gentle reminders that the discussion has
strayed off any useful track. "I think we started with a question about Niven's
last book, but we've ended up discussing the sexual habits of the common
marmoset. Now *that's* topic drift!"

topic group

/n./ Syn. forum.

TOPS-10

: /tops-ten/ /n./ DEC's 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 system. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from 'bottoms-ten')
as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything.

TOPS-20

: /tops-twen'tee/ /n./ See TWENEX.

tourist

/n./ [ITS] 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, perhaps
by some sort of tenuous analogy with luser (this also expresses the ITS
culture's penchant for six-letterisms). Compare twink, read-only user.

tourist information

/n./ Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but

contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or
hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends
partly on what the user is looking 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

/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

/n./ A computer system; always used with qualifiers. 1. 'nice toy': One that
supports the speaker's hacking style adequately. 2. 'just a toy': A machine
that yields insufficient computrons for the speaker's preferred uses. This is
not condemnatory, as is bitty box; toys can at least be fun. It is also
strongly conditioned by one's 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

/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 Things can result when a toy language is promoted as a
general purpose solution for programming (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 sense. See also MFTL.

toy problem

/n./ [AI] 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

/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

/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
indirection between code sections. These 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 doesn't
bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also snap.

trap

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
trap to the monitor." Also used transitively 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 into history
among programmers as the role of 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/O interrupts).

trap door

/n./ (alt. 'trapdoor') 1. Syn. back door — a Bad Thing. 2. [techspeak] A

'trap-door function' is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to
compute the inverse of. Such functions are Good Things with important
applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key
cryptosystems.

trash

/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.

trawl

/v./ To sift through large volumes of data (e.g., Usenet postings, FTP
archives, or the Jargon File) looking for something of interest.
tree-killer

/n./ [Sun] 1. A printer. 2. A person who wastes paper. This epithet should be
interpreted in a broad sense; 'wasting paper' includes the production of
spiffy but content-free documents. Thus, most suits are tree-killers.
The negative loading of this term may reflect the epithet 'tree-killer' applied
by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings" (see
also elvish, elder days).

treeware

/tree'weir/ /n./ Printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped
dead trees. Compare tree-killer, see documentation.

trit

/trit/ /n./ [by analogy with 'bit'] One base-3 digit; the amount of information
conveyed by a selection among one of three equally likely outcomes (see also
bit). Trits arise, for example, in the context of a flag that should
actually be able to assume *three* values — such 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

/adj./ 1. Too simple to bother detailing. 2. Not worth the speaker's 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
solved (some claim that hackish 'trivial' usually evaluates to 'I've seen it
before'). Hackers' notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of
non-hackers. See nontrivial, uninteresting.

The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree
(see his essay "Los Alamos From Below" in "Surely You're Joking, Mr.
Feynman!"), defined 'trivial theorem' as "one that has already been proved".

troff

: /T'rof/ or /trof/ /n./ [Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a
formatting and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler
and then in barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after
the earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after Multics' RUNOFF by Jerome
Saltzer (*that* name came from the expression "to run off a copy"). A companion
program, nroff, formats output for terminals and line printers.

In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it could drive phototypesetters

other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper describing that work ("A
Typesetter-independent troff," AT T CSTR #97) explains troff's durability.
After discussing the program's "obvious deficiencies — a rebarbative input
syntax, mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a voracious
appetite for computer resources" and noting the ugliness and extreme hairiness
of the code and internals, Kernighan concludes:

None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating Ossanna's

accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably robust tool, taking
unbelievable abuse from a variety of preprocessors and being forced into uses
that were never conceived of in the original design, all with considerable
grace under fire.
The success of TeX and desktop publishing systems have reduced 'troff''s
relative importance, but this tribute perfectly captures the strengths that
secured 'troff' a place in hacker folklore; indeed, it could be taken more
generally as an indication of those qualities of good programs that, in the long
run, hackers most admire.

troglodyte

/n./ [Commodore] 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
around some during the Usenet and email 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

/n./ [Rice University] Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on,
and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you've been up for so many
days straight that your eyes hurt (see raster burn). Loud music blaring from
a stereo stacked in the corner is optional but recommended. See larval stage,
hack mode.

Trojan horse

/n./ [coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] A malicious,

security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such as a
directory lister, archiver, game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a
program to find and destroy viruses! See back door, virus, worm, phage,
mockingbird.

troll

/v.,n./ [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on

Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames. Derives from
the phrase "trolling for newbies" which in turn comes from mainstream
"trolling", a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot
hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of
newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already
do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact
a deliberate troll. If you don't fall for the joke, you get to be in on it.

Some people claim that the troll is properly a narrower category than flame
bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong
but not overtly controversial.

tron

/v./ [NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie "Tron"] To become inaccessible except via
email or 'talk(1)', especially when one is normally available via telephone or
in person. Frequently used in the past tense, as in: "Ran seems to have tronned
on us this week" or "Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron yourself". One may
also speak of 'tron mode'; compare spod.

true-hacker

/n./ [analogy with 'trufan' from SF fandom] 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 my
FOOBAR 4000 last week — manifestly the act of a true-hacker." Compare
demigod, oppose munchkin.

tty

/T-T-Y/, /tit'ee/ /n./ The latter pronunciation was primarily ITS, but some
Unix people say it this way as well; this pronunciation is *not* considered to
have sexual undertones. 1. A terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by
a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor print
quality. 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. 3. [Unix] Any serial port,
whether or not the device connected to it is a terminal; so called because under
Unix such devices have names of the form tty*. Ambiguity between senses 2 and 3
is common but seldom bothersome.

tube

1. /n./ A CRT terminal. Never used in the mainstream sense of TV; real hackers
don't watch TV, except for Loony Toons, Rocky Bullwinkle, Trek Classic,
the Simpsons, and the occasional cheesy old swashbuckler movie. 2. [IBM] To
send a copy of something to someone else's terminal. "Tube me that note?"

tube time

/n./ Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking time;
commonly used in discussions of what parts of one's environment one uses most
heavily. "I find I'm spending too much of my tube time reading mail since I
started this revision."

tunafish

/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 sites
started using 4.2. Tunefs relates 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
can't tunafish". Variants of this can be seen in other BSD versions, though it
has been excised from some versions by humorless management droids. 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 now until
the 'time_t''s wrap around."

[It has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish. Usually at a
canning factory... — ESR]

tune

/vt./ [from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a program or system for a

particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as
hooks for tuning, e.g., by changing '#define' lines in C. One may 'tune for
time' (fastest execution), 'tune for space' (least memory use), or 'tune for
configuration' (most efficient use of hardware). See bum, hot spot,
hand-hacking.

turbo nerd

/n./ See computer geek.

Turing tar-pit

/n./ 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is

practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by
showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very
primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of
computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ
only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers.
However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever
been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be
horribly slow and far too painful to use. A 'Turing tar-pit' is any computer
language or other tool that shares this property. That is, it's theoretically
universal — but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done,
the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare bondage-and-discipline
language. 2. The perennial holy wars over whether language A or B is the
"most powerful".

turist

/too'rist/ /n./ Var. sp. of tourist, q.v. Also in adjectival form,

'turistic'. Poss. influenced by luser and 'Turing'.

tweak

/vt./ 1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used

synonymously with twiddle. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure
out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See
frobnicate and fudge factor; also see shotgun debugging. 2. To tune or
bum a program; preferred usage in the U.K.

tweeter

/n./ [University of Waterloo] Syn. perf, chad (sense 1). This term (like
woofer) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972 but is elsewhere unknown. In
audio jargon, the word refers to the treble speaker(s) on a hi-fi.

TWENEX

: /twe'neks/ /n./ The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC — the second

proprietary OS for the PDP-10 — preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10
(that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in
1969 as Bolt, Beranek Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging
hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran
TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it
their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS
(VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the
name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any
project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly
reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that
'krans' meant 'funeral wreath' in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have
since said it means simply 'wreath'; this part of the story may be apocryphal).
Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as
TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins,
quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of 'twenty TENEX'), even though by this
point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the
differences between AT T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC people cringed when they
heard "TWENEX", but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation
'20x' was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there
was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of
partisans as Unix or ITS — but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals
to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and
put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince
TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the
TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix.

twiddle

/n./ 1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, '~'). Also called 'squiggle', 'sqiggle' (sic —
pronounced /skig'l/), and 'twaddle', but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A
small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and
generates several new ones (see also shotgun debugging). 3. /vt./ To change
something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a
switch or knob implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it;
see frobnicate. To speak of twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best
doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit; 'toggling a bit' has a more
specific meaning (see bit twiddling, toggle).

twilight zone

/n./ [IRC] Notionally, the area of cyberspace where IRC operators live. An
op is said to have a "connection to the twilight zone".

twink

/twink/ /n./ [UCSC] Equivalent to read-only user. Also reported on the

Usenet group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with
nothing upstairs (compare mainstream 'chick').

twirling baton

/n./ [PLATO] The overstrike sequence -/|\-/|\- which produces an animated

twirling baton. If you output it with a single backspace between characters,
the baton spins in place. If you output the sequence BS SP between characters,
the baton spins from left to right. If you output BS SP BS BS between
characters, the baton spins from right to left.

The twirling baton was a popular component of animated signature files on the
pioneering PLATO educational timesharing system. The 'archie' Internet service
is perhaps the best-known baton program today; it uses the twirling baton as an
idler indicating that the program is working on a query.

two pi

/quant./ The number of years it takes to finish one's thesis. Occurs in

stories in the following form: "He started on his thesis; 2 pi years later..."

two-to-the-N

/quant./ An amount much larger than N but smaller than infinity. "I have
2-to-the-N things to do before I can go out for lunch" means you probably won't
show up.

twonkie

/twon'kee/ /n./ The software equivalent of a Twinkie (a variety of sugar-loaded

junk food, or (in gay slang with a small t) the male equivalent of 'chick'); a
useless 'feature' added to look sexy and placate a marketroid (compare
Saturday-night special). The term may also be related to "The Twonky", title
menace of a classic SF short story by Lewis Padgett (Henry Kuttner and C. L.
Moore), first published in the September 1942 "Astounding Science Fiction" and
subsequently much anthologized.
U

u-

/pref./ Written shorthand for micro-; techspeak when applied to metric units,
jargon when used otherwise. Derived from the Greek letter "mu", the first
letter of "micro" (and which letter looks a lot like the English letter "u").

UBD

/U-B-D/ /n./ [abbreviation for 'User Brain Damage'] An abbreviation used to

close out trouble reports obviously due to utter cluelessness on the user's
part. Compare pilot error; oppose PBD; see also brain-damaged.

UN*X

/n./ Used to refer to the Unix operating system (a trademark of AT T) in

writing, but avoiding the need for the ugly (TM) typography. Also used to
refer to any or all varieties of Unixoid operating systems. Ironically, lawyers
now say that the requirement for the TM-postfix has no legal force, but the
asterisk usage is entrenched anyhow. It has been suggested that there may be a
psychological connection to practice in certain religions (especially Judaism)
in which the name of the deity is never written out in full, e.g., 'YHWH' or
'G—d' is used. See also glob.

undefined external reference

/excl./ [Unix] A message from Unix's linker. Used in speech to flag loose ends
or dangling references in an argument or discussion.

under the hood

/adj./ [hot-rodder talk] 1. Used to introduce the underlying implementation of

a product (hardware, software, or idea). Implies that the implementation is not
intuitively obvious from the appearance, but the speaker is about to enable the
listener to grok it. "Let's now look under the hood to see how ...." 2. Can
also imply that the implementation is much simpler than the appearance would
indicate: "Under the hood, we are just fork/execing the shell." 3. Inside a
chassis, as in "Under the hood, this baby has a 40MHz 68030!"

undocumented feature

/n./ See feature.

uninteresting

/adj./ 1. Said of a problem that, although nontrivial, can be solved simply

by throwing sufficient resources at it. 2. Also said of problems for which a
solution would neither advance the state of the art nor be fun to design and
code.

Hackers regard uninteresting problems as intolerable wastes of time, to be

solved (if at all) by lesser mortals. *Real* hackers (see toolsmith)
generalize uninteresting problems enough to make them interesting and solve them
— thus solving the original problem as a special case (and, it must be
admitted, occasionally turning a molehill into a mountain, or a mountain into a
tectonic plate). See WOMBAT, SMOP; compare toy problem, oppose
interesting.

Unix

: /yoo'niks/ /n./ [In the authors' words, "A weak pun on Multics"; very early
on it was 'UNICS'] (also 'UNIX') An interactive time-sharing system invented in
1969 by Ken Thompson after Bell Labs left the Multics project, originally so he
could play games on his scavenged PDP-7. Dennis Ritchie, the inventor of C, is
considered a co-author of the system. The turning point in Unix's history came
when it was reimplemented almost entirely in C during 1972—1974, making it the
first source-portable OS. Unix subsequently underwent mutations and expansions
at the hands of many different people, resulting in a uniquely flexible and
developer-friendly environment. By 1991, Unix had become the most widely used
multiuser general-purpose operating system in the world. Many people consider
this the most important victory yet of hackerdom over industry opposition (but
see Unix weenie and Unix conspiracy for an opposing point of view). See
Version 7, BSD, USG Unix, Linux.

Some people are confused over whether this word is appropriately 'UNIX' or
'Unix'; both forms are common, and used interchangeably. Dennis Ritchie says
that the 'UNIX' spelling originally happened in CACM's 1974 paper "The UNIX
Time-Sharing System" because "we had a new typesetter and troff had just been
invented and we were intoxicated by being able to produce small caps." Later,
dmr tried to get the spelling changed to 'Unix' in a couple of Bell Labs papers,
on the grounds that the word is not acronymic. He failed, and eventually (his
words) "wimped out" on the issue. So, while the trademark today is 'UNIX', both
capitalizations are grounded in ancient usage; the Jargon File uses 'Unix' in
deference to dmr's wishes.

Unix brain damage

/n./ Something that has to be done to break a network program (typically a

mailer) on a non-Unix system so that it will interoperate with Unix systems.
The hack may qualify as 'Unix brain damage' if the program conforms to published
standards and the Unix program in question does not. Unix brain damage happens
because it is much easier for other (minority) systems to change their ways to
match non-conforming behavior than it is to change all the hundreds of thousands
of Unix systems out there.

An example of Unix brain damage is a kluge in a mail server to recognize bare

line feed (the Unix newline) as an equivalent form to the Internet standard
newline, which is a carriage return followed by a line feed. Such things can
make even a hardened jock weep.

Unix conspiracy

/n./ [ITS] According to a conspiracy theory long popular among ITS and
TOPS-20 fans, Unix's growth is the result of a plot, hatched during the 1970s
at Bell Labs, whose intent was to hobble AT T's competitors by making them
dependent upon a system whose future evolution was to be under AT T's
control. This would be accomplished by disseminating an operating system that
is apparently inexpensive and easily portable, but also relatively unreliable
and insecure (so as to require continuing upgrades from AT T). This theory
was lent a substantial impetus in 1984 by the paper referenced in the back
door entry.

In this view, Unix was designed to be one of the first computer viruses (see
virus) — but a virus spread to computers indirectly by people and market
forces, rather than directly through disks and networks. Adherents of this
'Unix virus' theory like to cite the fact that the well-known quotation "Unix is
snake oil" was uttered by DEC president Kenneth Olsen shortly before DEC began
actively promoting its own family of Unix workstations. (Olsen now claims to
have been misquoted.)

[If there was ever such a conspiracy, it got thoroughly out of the plotters'
control after 1990. AT T sold its UNIX operation to Novell around the same
time Linux and other free-UNIX distributions were beginning to make noise.
— ESR]

Unix weenie

/n./ [ITS] 1. A derogatory play on 'Unix wizard', common among hackers who use
Unix by necessity but would prefer alternatives. The implication is that
although the person in question may consider mastery of Unix arcana to be a
wizardly skill, the only real skill involved is the ability to tolerate (and the
bad taste to wallow in) the incoherence and needless complexity that is alleged
to infest many Unix programs. "This shell script tries to parse its arguments
in 69 bletcherous ways. It must have been written by a real Unix weenie." 2. A
derogatory term for anyone who engages in uncritical praise of Unix. Often
appearing in the context "stupid Unix weenie". See Weenix, Unix conspiracy.
See also weenie.

unixism

/n./ A piece of code or a coding technique that depends on the protected

multi-tasking environment with relatively low process-spawn overhead that exists
on virtual-memory Unix systems. Common unixisms include: gratuitous use of
'fork(2)'; the assumption that certain undocumented but well-known features of
Unix libraries such as 'stdio(3)' are supported elsewhere; reliance on obscure
side-effects of system calls (use of 'sleep(2)' with a 0 argument to clue the
scheduler that you're willing to give up your time-slice, for example); the
assumption that freshly allocated memory is zeroed; and the assumption that
fragmentation problems won't arise from never 'free()'ing memory. Compare
vaxocentrism; see also New Jersey.

unswizzle

/v./ See swizzle.

unwind the stack

/vi./ 1. [techspeak] During the execution of a procedural language, one is said

to 'unwind the stack' from a called procedure up to a caller when one discards
the stack frame and any number of frames above it, popping back up to the level
of the given caller. In C this is done with

'longjmp'/`setjmp', in LISP with 'throw/catch'. See also smash the stack.

2. People can unwind the stack as well, by quickly dealing with a bunch of
problems: "Oh heck, let's do lunch. Just a second while I unwind my stack."

unwind-protect

/n./ [MIT: from the name of a LISP operator] A task you must remember to
perform before you leave a place or finish a project. "I have an unwind-protect
to call my advisor."

up

/adj./ 1. Working, in order. "The down escalator is up." Oppose down. 2.

'bring up': /vt./ To create a working version and start it. "They brought up a
down system." 3. 'come up' /vi./ To become ready for production use.
upload

/uhp'lohd/ /v./ 1. [techspeak] To transfer programs or data over a digital

communications link from a smaller or peripheral 'client' system to a larger or
central 'host' one. A transfer in the other direction is, of course, called a
download (but see the note about ground-to-space comm under that entry). 2.
[speculatively] To move the essential patterns and algorithms that make up one's
mind from one's brain into a computer. Those who are convinced that such
patterns and algorithms capture the complete essence of the self view this
prospect with pleasant anticipation.

upthread

/adv./ Earlier in the discussion (see thread), i.e., 'above'. "As Joe
pointed out upthread, ..." See also followup.

urchin

/n./ See munchkin.

URL

/U-R-L/ or /erl/ /n./ Uniform Resource Locator, an address widget that

identifies a document or resource on the World Wide Web. This entry is here
primarily to record the fact that the term is commonly pronounced both /erl/,
and /U-R-L/ (the latter predominates in more formal contexts).

Usenet

/yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ /n./ [from 'Users' Network'; the original spelling was
USENET, but the mixed-case form is now widely preferred] A distributed bboard
(bulletin board) system supported mainly by Unix machines. Originally
implemented in 1979—1980 by Steve Bellovin, Jim Ellis, Tom Truscott, and Steve
Daniel at Duke University, it has swiftly grown to become international in scope
and is now probably the largest decentralized information utility in existence.
As of early 1996, it hosts over 10,000 newsgroups and an average of over 500
megabytes (the equivalent of several thousand paper pages) of new technical
articles, news, discussion, chatter, and flamage every day.

By the year the Internet hit the mainstream (1994) the original UUCP transport
for Usenet was fading out of use (see UUCPNET) — almost all Usenet
connections were over Internet links. A lot of newbies and journalists began to
refer to "Internet newsgroups" as though Usenet was and always had been just
another Internet service. This ignorance greatly annoys experienced Usenetters.

user

/n./ 1. Someone doing 'real work' with the computer, using it as a means rather
than an end. Someone who pays to use a computer. See real user. 2. A
programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who asks silly
questions. [GLS observes: This is slightly unfair. It is true that users ask
questions (of necessity). Sometimes they are thoughtful or deep. Very often
they are annoying or downright stupid, apparently because the user failed to
think for two seconds or look in the documentation before bothering the
maintainer.] See luser. 3. Someone who uses a program from the outside,
however skillfully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who
reports bugs instead of just going ahead and fixing them.

The general theory behind this term is that there are two classes of people who
work with a program: there are implementors (hackers) and lusers. The users
are looked down on by hackers to some extent because they don't understand the
full ramifications of the system in all its glory. (The few users who do are
known as 'real winners'.) The term is a relative one: a skilled hacker may be a
user with respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might
be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a hacker).
A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not. Thus there is
some overlap between the two terms; the subtle distinctions must be resolved by
context.

user-friendly

/adj./ Programmer-hostile. Generally used by hackers in a critical tone, to

describe systems that hold the user's hand so obsessively that they make it
painful for the more experienced and knowledgeable to get any work done. See
menuitis, drool-proof paper, Macintrash, user-obsequious.

user-obsequious

/adj./ Emphatic form of user-friendly. Connotes a system so verbose,

inflexible, and determinedly simple-minded that it is nearly unusable. "Design
a system any fool can use and only a fool will want to use it." See WIMP
environment, Macintrash.

USG Unix

/U-S-G yoo'niks/ /n./ Refers to AT T Unix commercial versions after

Version 7, especially System III and System V releases 1, 2, and 3. So called
because during most of the lifespan of those versions AT T's support crew
was called the 'Unix Support Group'. See BSD, Unix.

UTSL

// /n./ [Unix] On-line acronym for 'Use the Source, Luke' (a pun on Obi-Wan
Kenobi's "Use the Force, Luke!" in "Star Wars") — analogous to RTFS (sense
1), but more polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would be
better off reading the source code that supports whatever feature is causing
confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass through the manuals, or
broadcasting questions on Usenet that haven't attracted wizards to answer
them.

Once upon a time in elder days, everyone running Unix had source. After 1978,
AT T's policy tightened up, so this objurgation was in theory appropriately
directed only at associates of some outfit with a Unix source license. In
practice, bootlegs of Unix source code (made precisely for reference purposes)
were so ubiquitous that one could utter it at almost anyone on the network
without concern.

Nowadays, free Unix clones have become widely enough distributed that anyone can
read source legally. The most widely distributed is certainly Linux, with
variants of the NET/2 and 4.4BSD distributions running second. Cheap commercial
Unixes with source such as BSD/OS are accelerating this trend.

UUCPNET

/n. obs./ The store-and-forward network consisting of all the world's connected
Unix machines (and others running some clone of the UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy)
software). Any machine reachable only via a bang path is on UUCPNET. This
term has been rendered obsolescent by the spread of cheap Internet connections
in the 1990s; the few remaining UUCP links are essentially slow channels to the
Internet rather than an autonomous network. See network address.
V

V7

/V'sev'en/ /n./ See Version 7.

vadding

/vad'ing/ /n./ [from VAD, a permutation of ADV (i.e., ADVENT), used to avoid
a particular admin's continual search-and-destroy sweeps for the game] A
leisure-time activity of certain hackers involving the covert exploration of the
'secret' parts of large buildings — basements, roofs, freight elevators,
maintenance crawlways, steam tunnels, and the like. A few go so far as to learn
locksmithing in order to synthesize vadding keys. The verb is 'to vad' (compare
phreaking; see also hack, sense 9). This term dates from the late 1970s,
before which such activity was simply called 'hacking'; the older usage is still
prevalent at MIT.

The most extreme and dangerous form of vadding is 'elevator rodeo', a.k.a.
'elevator surfing', a sport played by wrasslin' down a thousand-pound elevator
car with a 3-foot piece of string, and then exploiting this mastery in various
stimulating ways (such as elevator hopping, shaft exploration, rat-racing, and
the ever-popular drop experiments). Kids, don't try this at home! See also
hobbit (sense 2).

vanilla

/adj./ [from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] Ordinary flavor,
standard. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored
with vanilla extract! For example, 'vanilla wonton soup' means ordinary wonton
soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup. Applied to hardware and software,
as in "Vanilla Version 7 Unix can't run on a vanilla 11/34." Also used to
orthogonalize chip nomenclature; for instance, a 74V00 means what TI calls a
7400, as distinct from a 74LS00, etc. This word differs from canonical in
that the latter means 'default', whereas vanilla simply means 'ordinary'. For
example, when hackers go on a great-wall, hot-and-sour soup is the canonical
soup to get (because that is what most of them usually order) even though it
isn't the vanilla (wonton) soup.

vannevar

/van'*-var/ /n./ A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering

concept, esp. one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop
linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the
learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and
competition is the rule. The prototype was Vannevar Bush's prediction of
'electronic brains' the size of the Empire State Building with a
Niagara-Falls-equivalent cooling system for their tubes and relays, a prediction
made at a time when the semiconductor effect had already been demonstrated.
Other famous vannevars have included magnetic-bubble memory, LISP machines,
videotex, and a paper from the late 1970s that computed a purported ultimate
limit on areal density for ICs that was in fact less than the routine densities
of 5 years later.

vaporware

/vay'pr-weir/ /n./ Products announced far in advance of any release (which may
or may not actually take place). See also brochureware.
var

/veir/ or /var/ /n./ Short for 'variable'. Compare arg, param.

VAX

/vaks/ /n./ 1. [from Virtual Address eXtension] The most successful

minicomputer design in industry history, possibly excepting its immediate
ancestor, the PDP-11. Between its release in 1978 and its eclipse by killer
micros after about 1986, the VAX was probably the hacker's favorite machine of
them all, esp. after the 1982 release of 4.2 BSD Unix (see BSD). Esp. noted
for its large, assembler-programmer-friendly instruction set — an asset that
became a liability after the RISC revolution. 2. A major brand of vacuum cleaner
in Britain. Cited here because its sales pitch, "Nothing sucks like a VAX!"
became a sort of battle-cry of RISC partisans. It is even sometimes claimed
that DEC actually entered a cross-licensing deal with the vacuum-Vax people that
allowed them to market VAX computers in the U.K. in return for not challenging
the vacuum cleaner trademark in the U.S.

A rival brand actually pioneered the slogan: its original form was "Nothing
sucks like Electrolux". It has apparently become a classic example (used in
advertising textbooks) of the perils of not knowing the local idiom. But in
1996, the press manager of Electrolux AB, while confirming that the company used
this slogan in the late 1960s, also tells us that their marketing people were
fully aware of the possible double entendre and intended it to gain attention.

And gain attention it did — the VAX-vacuum-cleaner people thought the slogan a
sufficiently good idea to copy it. Several British hackers report that VAX's
promotions used it in 1986—1987, and we have one report from a New Zealander
that the infamous slogan surfaced there in TV ads for the product in 1992.

VAXectomy

/vak-sek't*-mee/ /n./ [by analogy with 'vasectomy'] A VAX removal. DEC's

Microvaxen, especially, are much slower than newer RISC-based workstations such
as the SPARC. Thus, if one knows one has a replacement coming, VAX removal can
be cause for celebration.

VAXen

/vak'sn/ /n./ [from 'oxen', perhaps influenced by 'vixen'] (alt. 'vaxen') The
plural canonically used among hackers for the DEC VAX computers. "Our
installation has four PDP-10s and twenty vaxen." See boxen.

vaxherd

/vaks'herd/ /n. obs./ [from 'oxherd'] A VAX operator. The image is reinforced
because VAXen actually did tend to come in herds, technically known as
'clusters'.

vaxism

/vak'sizm/ /n./ A piece of code that exhibits vaxocentrism in critical areas.

Compare PC-ism, unixism.

vaxocentrism

/vak`soh-sen'trizm/ /n./ [analogy with 'ethnocentrism'] A notional disease said

to afflict C programmers who persist in coding according to certain assumptions
that are valid (esp. under Unix) on VAXen but false elsewhere. Among these
are:

1. The assumption that dereferencing a null pointer is safe because it is

all bits 0, and location 0 is readable and 0. Problem: this may instead cause
an illegal-address trap on non-VAXen, and even on VAXen under OSes other than
BSD Unix. Usually this is an implicit assumption of sloppy code (forgetting
to check the pointer before using it), rather than deliberate exploitation of
a misfeature.

2. The assumption that characters are signed.

3. The assumption that a pointer to any one type can freely be cast into a
pointer to any other type. A stronger form of this is the assumption that all
pointers are the same size and format, which means you don't have to worry
about getting the casts or types correct in calls. Problem: this fails on
word-oriented machines or others with multiple pointer formats.

4. The assumption that the parameters of a routine are stored in memory, on

a stack, contiguously, and in strictly ascending or descending order.
Problem: this fails on many RISC architectures.

5. The assumption that pointer and integer types are the same size, and that
pointers can be stuffed into integer variables (and vice-versa) and drawn back
out without being truncated or mangled. Problem: this fails on segmented
architectures or word-oriented machines with funny pointer formats.

6. The assumption that a data type of any size may begin at any byte address
in memory (for example, that you can freely construct and dereference a
pointer to a word- or greater-sized object at an odd char address). Problem:
this fails on many (esp. RISC) architectures better optimized for HLL
execution speed, and can cause an illegal address fault or bus error.

7. The (related) assumption that there is no padding at the end of types and
that in an array you can thus step right from the last byte of a previous
component to the first byte of the next one. This is not only machine- but
compiler-dependent.

8. The assumption that memory address space is globally flat and that the
array reference 'foo[-1]' is necessarily valid. Problem: this fails at 0, or
other places on segment-addressed machines like Intel chips (yes, segmentation
is universally considered a brain-damaged way to design machines (see
moby), but that is a separate issue).

9. The assumption that objects can be arbitrarily large with no special

considerations. Problem: this fails on segmented architectures and under
non-virtual-addressing environments.

10. The assumption that the stack can be as large as memory. Problem: this
fails on segmented architectures or almost anything else without virtual
addressing and a paged stack.

11. The assumption that bits and addressable units within an object are
ordered in the same way and that this order is a constant of nature. Problem:
this fails on big-endian machines.

12. The assumption that it is meaningful to compare pointers to different

objects not located within the same array, or to objects of different types.
Problem: the former fails on segmented architectures, the latter on
word-oriented machines or others with multiple pointer formats.

13. The assumption that an 'int' is 32 bits, or (nearly equivalently) the

assumption that 'sizeof(int) == sizeof(long)'. Problem: this fails on
PDP-11s, 286-based systems and even on 386 and 68000 systems under some
compilers.
 14. The assumption that 'argv[]' is writable. Problem: this fails in many
embedded-systems C environments and even under a few flavors of Unix.

Note that a programmer can validly be accused of vaxocentrism even if he or she

has never seen a VAX. Some of these assumptions (esp. 2—5) were valid on the
PDP-11, the original C machine, and became endemic years before the VAX. The
terms 'vaxocentricity' and 'all-the-world's-a-VAX syndrome' have been used
synonymously.

vdiff

/vee'dif/ /v.,n./ Visual diff. The operation of finding differences between

two files by eyeball search. The term 'optical diff' has also been reported,
and is sometimes more specifically used for the act of superimposing two nearly
identical printouts on one another and holding them up to a light to spot
differences. Though this method is poor for detecting omissions in the 'rear'
file, it can also be used with printouts of graphics, a claim few if any diff
programs can make. See diff.

veeblefester

/vee'b*l-fes`tr/ /n./ [from the "Born Loser" comix via Commodore; prob.
originally from "Mad" Magazine's 'Veeblefeetzer' parodies ca. 1960] Any
obnoxious person engaged in the (alleged) professions of marketing or
management. Antonym of hacker. Compare suit, marketroid.

ventilator card

/n./ Syn. lace card.

Venus flytrap

/n./ [after the insect-eating plant] See firewall machine.

verbage

/ver'b*j/ /n./ A deliberate misspelling and mispronunciation of verbiage that

assimilates it to the word 'garbage'. Compare content-free. More pejorative
than 'verbiage'.

verbiage

/n./ When the context involves a software or hardware system, this refers to
documentation. This term borrows the connotations of mainstream 'verbiage' to
suggest that the documentation is of marginal utility and that the motives
behind its production have little to do with the ostensible subject.

Version 7

alt. V7 /vee' se'vn/ /n./ The first widely distributed version of Unix,
released unsupported by Bell Labs in 1978. The term is used adjectivally to
describe Unix features and programs that date from that release, and are thus
guaranteed to be present and portable in all Unix versions (this was the
standard gauge of portability before the POSIX and IEEE 1003 standards). Note
that this usage does *not* derive from the release being the "seventh version of
Unix"; research Unix at Bell Labs has traditionally been numbered according
to the edition of the associated documentation. Indeed, only the
widely-distributed Sixth and Seventh Editions are widely known as V[67]; the OS
that might today be known as 'V10' is instead known in full as "Tenth Edition
Research Unix" or just "Tenth Edition" for short. For this reason, "V7" is
often read by cognoscenti as "Seventh Edition". See BSD, USG Unix, Unix.
Some old-timers impatient with commercialization and kernel bloat still maintain
that V7 was the Last True Unix.

vgrep

/vee'grep/ /v.,n./ Visual grep. The operation of finding patterns in a file

optically rather than digitally (also called an 'optical grep'). See grep;
compare vdiff.

vi

/V-I/, *not* /vi:/ and *never* /siks/ /n./ [from 'Visual Interface'] A screen
editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD release. Became the de
facto standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of
MIT until the rise of EMACS after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new users no
end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa,
and the default setup provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (one
correspondent accordingly reports that he has often heard the editor's name
pronounced /vi:l/). Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half the
respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often
resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it
starts up faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See holy wars.

videotex

/n. obs./ An electronic service offering people the privilege of paying to read
the weather on their television screens instead of having somebody read it to
them for free while they brush their teeth. The idea bombed everywhere it
wasn't government-subsidized, because by the time videotex was practical the
installed base of personal computers could hook up to timesharing services and
do the things for which videotex might have been worthwhile better and cheaper.
Videotex planners badly overestimated both the appeal of getting information
from a computer and the cost of local intelligence at the user's end. Like the
gorilla arm effect, this has been a cautionary tale to hackers ever since.
See also vannevar.

virgin

/adj./ Unused; pristine; in a known initial state. "Let's bring up a virgin

system and see if it crashes again." (Esp. useful after contracting a virus
through SEX.) Also, by extension, buffers and the like within a program that
have not yet been used.

virtual

/adj./ [via the technical term 'virtual memory', prob. from the term 'virtual
image' in optics] 1. Common alternative to logical; often used to refer to the
artificial objects (like addressable virtual memory larger than physical memory)
simulated by a computer system as a convenient way to manage access to shared
resources. 2. Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't
really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. Oppose
real.

virtual Friday

/n./ (also 'logical Friday') The last day before an extended weekend, if that
day is not a 'real' Friday. For example, the U.S. holiday Thanksgiving is always
on a Thursday. The next day is often also a holiday or taken as an extra day
off, in which case Wednesday of that week is a virtual Friday (and Thursday is a
virtual Saturday, as is Friday). There are also 'virtual Mondays' that are
actually Tuesdays, after the three-day weekends associated with many national
holidays in the U.S.

virtual reality

/n./ 1. Computer simulations that use 3-D graphics and devices such as the
Dataglove to allow the user to interact with the simulation. See cyberspace.
2. A form of network interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing games,
interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and 'true confessions' magazines.
In a virtual reality forum (such as Usenet's alt.callahans newsgroup or the
MUD experiments on Internet), interaction between the participants is written
like a shared novel complete with scenery, 'foreground characters' that may be
personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and common 'background
characters' manipulable by all parties. The one iron law is that you may not
write irreversible changes to a character without the consent of the person who
'owns' it. Otherwise anything goes. See bamf, cyberspace, teledildonics.

virtual shredder

/n./ The jargonic equivalent of the bit bucket at shops using IBM's VM/CMS
operating system. VM/CMS officially supports a whole bestiary of virtual card
readers, virtual printers, and other phantom devices; these are used to supply
some of the same capabilities Unix gets from pipes and I/O redirection.

virus

/n./ [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF] A cracker
program that searches out other programs and 'infects' them by embedding a copy
of itself in them, so that they become Trojan horses. When these programs are
executed, the embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the 'infection'.
This normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a worm, a virus cannot
infect other computers without assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as
humans trading programs with their friends (see SEX). The virus may do
nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run normally.
Usually, however, after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things
like writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with the
display (some viruses include nice display hacks). Many nasty viruses,
written by particularly perversely minded crackers, do irreversible damage,
like nuking all the user's files.

In the 1990s, viruses have become a serious problem, especially among IBM PC and
Macintosh users (the lack of security on these machines enables viruses to
spread easily, even infecting the operating system). The production of special
anti-virus software has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media
reports have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many lusers tend
to blame *everything* that doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks.
Accordingly, this sense of 'virus' has passed not only into techspeak but into
also popular usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote a worm or
even a Trojan horse). See phage; compare back door; see also Unix
conspiracy.

visionary

/n./ 1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an Artificial Intelligence

researcher working on the problem of getting computers to 'see' things using TV
cameras. (There isn't any problem in sending information from a TV camera to a
computer. The problem is, how can the computer be programmed to make use of the
camera information? See SMOP, AI-complete.) 2. [IBM] One who reads the
outside literature. At IBM, apparently, such a penchant is viewed with awe and
wonder.
VMS

/V-M-S/ /n./ DEC's proprietary operating system for its VAX minicomputer; one
of the seven or so environments that loom largest in hacker folklore. Many Unix
fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favorite
commercial OS if Unix didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious.
One major hacker gripe with VMS concerns its slowness — thus the following
limerick:

There once was a system called VMS

Of cycles by no means abstemious.
It's chock-full of hacks
And runs on a VAX
And makes my poor stomach all squeamious.

— The Great Quux

See also VAX, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, Unix, runic.

voice

/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

/n./ Hackish way of referring to the telephone system, analogizing it to a

digital network. Usenet sig blocks not uncommonly include the sender's phone
next to a "Voice:" or "Voice-Net:" header; common variants of this are
"Voicenet" and "V-Net". Compare paper-net, snail-mail.

voodoo programming

/n./ [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] 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 if it
doesn't, one will never know why. 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 dead chicken.

VR

// [MUD] /n./ On-line abbrev for virtual reality, as opposed to RL.

Vulcan nerve pinch

/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; on Suns,
L1-A; on some Macintoshes, it is Cmd - Power switch ! Also called
three-finger salute. Compare quadruple bucky.

vulture capitalist

/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.
W

wabbit

/wab'it/ /n./ [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy
wabbit!"] 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and
elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended (if only by inspiration) from a
hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of
Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every
time it was run, eventually crashing the system. 2. By extension, any hack that
includes infinite self-replication but is not a virus or worm. See fork
bomb and rabbit job, see also cookie monster.

WAITS

: /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 frequently glossed
as 'West-coast Alternative to 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, for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's '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 windowing is said to
have originated there, 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. Also invented there were bucky bits — thus, the ALT key on
every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One notable WAITS feature 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 'multimedia' computing,
allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals.

waldo

/wol'doh/ /n./ [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
described by Heinlein in the story, which he 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 instead of foobar as a metasyntactic
variable and general nonsense word. See foo, bar, foobar, quux.

walk

/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

/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
/n./ An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when
they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried
terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn
bearings and stick-slip interactions 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 jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the 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 hackers figured out how to
induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and
held disk-drive races.

wall

/interj./ [WPI] 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical

tone: "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare octal forty.
3. [Unix, from 'write all'] /v./ To send a message to everyone currently logged
in, esp. with the wall(8) utility.

It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom 'like talking to a blank wall'. It
was originally used in situations where, after 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. Later, confused questioners began
voicing "Wall?" themselves.

wall follower

/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
pejorative; it recalls 'Harvey Wallbanger', 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 mathematically guaranteed to work on
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 uncreative,
bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See also code grinder; compare droid.

wall time

/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 ticks required to execute it (on a
timesharing system these always differ, as no one program gets all the ticks,
and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more
processor time than real time).

wallpaper

/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
wallpaper, as evidenced at Stanford, where it was 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 term probably originated on ITS, where
the 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
'Windows' graphical user interface to MS-DOS). 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

/wang'goh/ /n./ Random bit-level grovelling 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
mumble-wango — and it comes out a snazzy object-oriented executable."

w***k

/wangk/ /n.,v.,adj./ [Columbia University: prob. by mutation from Commonwealth

slang /v./ 'w**k', to masturbate] Used much as hack is elsewhere, as a noun
denoting a clever technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May
describe (negatively) the act of hacking for hacking's sake ("Quit w****ng,
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 w***s involved. This excess
wankiness is signalled by an overload of the 'wankometer' (compare bogometer).
When the wankometer overloads, the conversation's subject must be changed, or
all non-w***s will leave. Compare 'neep-neeping' (under neep-neep). Usage:
U.S. only. In Britain and the Commonwealth this word is *extremely* rude and is
best avoided unless one intends to give offense.

wannabee

/won'*-bee/ /n./ (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] A would-be hacker. The connotations of
this term differ sharply depending on the age 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 any professional programmer, CS academic,
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 often
an indication of the wannabee nature. Compare newbie.

Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now
(1993) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now
hackerdom's tribal elders were in larval stage, the process of becoming a
hacker was largely 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 pure, skill-focused desire to become similarly 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-consciously set out to *be
hackers* and borrow 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; among other things, it gives them mixed feelings about the effects
of public compendia of lore like this one.

war dialer

/n./ A cracking tool, a program that calls a given list or range of phone
numbers and records those which answer with handshake tones (and so might be
entry points to computer or telecommunications systems). Some of these programs
have become quite sophisticated, and can now detect modem, fax, or PBX tones and
log each one separately. The war dialer is one of the most important tools in
the phreaker's kit. These programs evolved from early demon dialers.

warez

/weirz/ /n./ Widely used in cracker subcultures to denote cracked version of

commercial software, that is versions from which copy-protection has been
stripped. Hackers recognize this term but don't use it themselves. See warez
d00dz.

warez d00dz

/weirz doodz/ /n./ A substantial subculture of crackers refer to themselves

as 'warez d00dz'; there is evidently some connection with B1FF here. As
'Ozone Pilot', one former warez d00d, wrote:

Warez d00dz get illegal copies of copyrighted software. If it has copy

protection on it, they break the protection so the software can be copied.
Then they distribute it around the world via several gateways. Warez d00dz
form badass group names like RAZOR and the like. They put up boards that
distribute the latest ware, or pirate program. The whole point of the Warez
sub-culture is to get the pirate program released and distributed before any
other group. I know, I know. But don't ask, and it won't hurt as much. This
is how they prove their poweress [sic]. It gives them the right to say, "I
released King's Quest IVXIX before you so obviously my testicles are larger."
Again don't ask...

The studly thing to do if one is a warez d00d, it appears, is emit '0-day

warez', that is copies of commercial software copied and cracked on the same day
as its retail release. Warez d00ds also hoard software in a big way, collecting
untold megabytes of arcade-style games, pornographic GIFs, and applications
they'll never use onto their hard disks. As Ozone Pilot acutely observes:

[BELONG] is the only word you will need to know. Warez d00dz want to
belong. They have been shunned by everyone, and thus turn to cyberspace for
acceptance. That is why they always start groups like TGW, FLT, USA and the
like. Structure makes them happy. [...] Warez d00dz will never have a handle
like "Pink Daisy" because warez d00dz are insecure. Only someone who is
very secure with a good dose of self-esteem can stand up to the cries of fag
and girlie-man. More likely you will find warez d00dz with handles like:
Doctor Death, Deranged Lunatic, Hellraiser, Mad Prince, Dreamdevil, The
Unknown, Renegade Chemist, Terminator, and Twin Turbo. They like to sound
badass when they can hide behind their terminals. More likely, if you were
given a sample of 100 people, the person whose handle is Hellraiser is the
last person you'd associate with the name.

The contrast with Internet hackers is stark and instructive. See cracker,
wannabee, handle, elite; compare weenie, spod.

warlording

/v./ [from the Usenet group alt.fan.warlord] The act of excoriating a bloated,
ugly, or derivative sig block. Common grounds for warlording include the
presence of a signature rendered in a BUAF, over-used or cliched sig quotes,
ugly ASCII art, or simply excessive size. The original 'Warlord' was a
B1FF-like newbie c.1991 who featured in his sig a particularly large and
obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981
John Milius movie; the group name alt.fan.warlord was sarcasm, and the
characteristic mode of warlording is devastatingly sarcastic praise.

warm boot
/n./ See boot.

wart

/n./ A small, crocky 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
quotes literalize every character inside them except '!'. In ANSI C, the '??'
syntax used for obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign environment is a wart.
See also miswart.

washing machine

/n./ 1. 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-machine idiom transcends language barriers; it is even used in Russian
hacker jargon. See also walking drives. The thick channel cables connecting
these were called 'bit hoses' (see hose, sense 3). 2. [CMU] A machine used
exclusively for washing software. CMU has clusters of these.

washing software

/n./ The process of recompiling a software distribution (used more often when
the recompilation is occuring from scratch) to pick up and merge together all of
the various changes that have been made to the source.

water MIPS

/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

/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. "I'll wave a
dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug."
Compare voodoo programming, rain dance.

weasel

/n./ [Cambridge] A naive user, one who deliberately or accidentally does things
that are stupid or ill-advised. Roughly synonymous with loser.

web pointer

/n./ A World Wide Web URL. See also hotlink, which has slightly different
connotations.

webmaster

/n./ [WWW: from postmaster] The person at a site providing World Wide Web
information who is responsible for maintaining the public pages and keeping the
Web server running and properly configured.
wedged

/adj./ 1. To be stuck, incapable of proceeding without help. This is different

from having crashed. If the system has crashed, it has become totally
non-functioning. If the system is wedged, it is trying to do 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 deadlocks with
another (but not all instances of wedging are deadlocks). See also gronk,
locked up, hosed. 2. Often refers to humans suffering misconceptions.
"He's totally wedged — he's convinced that he can levitate through meditation."
3. [Unix] Specifically used to describe the state of a 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.

There is some dispute over the origin of this term. It is usually thought to
derive from a common description of recto-cranial inversion; however, it may
actually have originated with older 'hot-press' printing technology in which
physical type elements were locked into type frames with wedges driven in by
mallets. Once this had been done, no changes in the typesetting for that page
could be made.

wedgie

/n./ [Fairchild] A bug. Prob. related to wedged.

wedgitude

/wedj'i-t[y]ood/ /n./ The quality or state of being wedged.

weeble

/weeb'l/ /interj./ [Cambridge] Used to denote frustration, usually at amazing

stupidity. "I stuck the disk in upside down." "Weeble...." Compare gurfle.

weeds

/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
before its demise, the phrase 'go off in the weeds' was equivalent to IBM's
branch to Fishkill and mainstream hackerdom's jump off into never-never
land.

weenie

/n./ 1. [on BBSes] Any of a species of luser resembling a less amusing version
of B1FF that infests many BBS systems. The typical weenie is a teenage boy
with poor social skills travelling under a grandiose handle derived from
fantasy or heavy-metal rock lyrics. Among sysops, 'the weenie problem' refers
to the marginally literate and profanity-laden flamage weenies tend to spew
all over a newly-discovered BBS. Compare spod, computer geek, terminal
junkie, warez d00dz. 2. [Among hackers] 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 considers him or herself to be the same sort
of weenie. Implies that the weenie has put a major investment of time, effort,
and concentration into the area indicated; whether this is good or bad depends
on the hearer's judgment of how the speaker feels about that area. See also
bigot. 3. The semicolon character, ';' (ASCII 0111011).
Weenix

/wee'niks/ /n./ [ITS] 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, no file version numbers, case sensitivity 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

/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 graphics. Oppose
ill-behaved. 2. Software that 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

/adj./ Said of a computer installation, asserts 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 implies
that the site's name is familiar to many (due perhaps to an archive service or
active Usenet users).

wetware

/wet'weir/ /n./ [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] 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,
administrators) attached to a computer system, as opposed to the system's
hardware or software. See liveware, meatware.

whack

/v./ According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of NeWS, GOSMACS and

Java), to "...modify a program with no idea whatsoever how it works." (See
whacker.) It is actually possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if
the change is small and well-defined and you are very good at glarking things
from context. As a trivial example, it is relatively easy to change all
'stderr' writes to 'stdout' writes in a piece of C filter code which remains
otherwise mysterious.

whacker

/n./ [University of Maryland: from hacker] 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 only ends up whacking the system or program 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

/n./ See like kicking dead whales down the beach.

whalesong

/n./ The peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds made by a PEP modem such as the
Telebit Trailblazer as it tries to synchronize with another PEP modem for their
special high-speed mode. This sound isn't anything like the normal two-tone
handshake between conventional V-series modems and is instantly recognizable to
anyone who has heard it more than once. It sounds, in fact, very much like
whale songs. This noise is also called "the moose call" or "moose tones".

What's a spline?

[XEROX PARC] This phrase expands to: "You have just used a term that I've heard
for a year and a half, and I feel I should know, but don't. My curiosity has
finally overcome my guilt." The PARC lexicon adds "Moral: don't hesitate to ask
questions, even if they seem obvious."

wheel

/n./ [from slang 'big wheel' for a powerful person] A person who has an active
wheel bit. "We need to find a wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (See
wedged, sense 1.) The traditional name of security group zero in BSD (to
which the major system-internal users like root belong) is 'wheel'. Some
vendors have expanded on this usage, modifying Unix so that only members of
group 'wheel' can go root.

wheel bit

/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 monitor,
crash or reload the system, and kill or 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 entered the Unix culture from TWENEX in the
mid-1980s and has been gaining popularity there (esp. at university sites). See
also root.

wheel wars

/n./ [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
the lesser users.

White Book

/n./ 1. Syn. K R. 2. Adobe's fourth book in the PostScript series,

describing the previously-secret format of Type 1 fonts; "Adobe Type 1 Font
Format, version 1.1", (Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 0-201-57044-0). See also Red
Book, Green Book, Blue Book.

whizzy

/adj./ (alt. 'wizzy') [Sun] Describes a cuspy program; one that is

feature-rich and well presented.

wibble
 [UK] 1. /n.,v./ Commonly used to describe chatter, content-free remarks or
other essentially meaningless contributions to threads in newsgroups. "Oh,
rspence is wibbling again". Compare humma. 2. One of the preferred
metasyntactic variables in the UK, forming a series with 'wobble', 'wubble',
and 'flob' (attributed to the hilarious historical comedy "Blackadder").

WIBNI

// /n./ [Bell Labs: Wouldn't It Be Nice If] What most requirements documents
and specifications consist entirely of. Compare IWBNI.

widget

/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
entries...." 2. [poss. evoking 'window gadget'] A user interface object in X
graphical user interfaces.

wiggles

/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
algorithm is unstable, this is often the most 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

/n./ [acronym: 'Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing device (or Pull-down menu)'] A
graphical-user-interface environment such as X or the Macintosh interface,
esp. as described by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces for their
superior flexibility and extensibility. However, it is also used without
negative connotations; one must pay attention to voice tone and other signals to
interpret correctly. See menuitis, user-obsequious.

win

[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. "So it
turned out I could use a lexer generator instead of hand-coding my own pattern
recognizer. What a win!" Emphatic forms: 'moby win', 'super win', '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 intensification of
'win'.

win big

/vi./ To experience serendipity. "I went shopping and won big; there was a
2-for-1 sale." See big win.

win win

/excl./ Expresses pleasure at a win.

Winchester

: /n./ Informal generic term for sealed-enclosure magnetic-disk drives in

which the read-write head planes over the disk surface on an air cushion. There
is a legend that the name arose because the original 1973 engineering prototype
for what later became the IBM 3340 featured two 30-megabyte 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). Others claim, however, that
Winchester was simply the laboratory in which the technology was developed.

windoid

/n./ In the Macintosh world, a style of window with much less adornment
(smaller or missing title bar, zoom box, etc, etc) than a standard window.

window shopping

/n./ [US Geological Survey] Among users of WIMP environments like X or the
Macintosh, extended experimentation with new window colors, fonts, and icon
shapes. This activity can take up hours of what might otherwise have been
productive working time. "I spent the afternoon window shopping until I found
the coolest shade of green for my active window borders — now they perfectly
match my medium slate blue background." Serious window shoppers will spend
their days with bitmap editors, creating new and different icons and background
patterns for all to see. Also: 'window dressing', the act of applying new
fonts, colors, etc. See fritterware, compare macdink.

Windoze

/win'dohz/ /n./ See Microsloth Windows.

winged comments

/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

/n./ (alt. 'winkey face') See emoticon.

winnage

/win'*j/ /n./ The situation when a lossage is corrected, or when something is

winning.

winner

1. /n./ An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer, or person. 2.

'real winner': Often sarcastic, but also used as high praise (see also the note
under user).

"He's a real winner — never reports a bug till he can duplicate it and send
in an example."
winnitude

/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! Boy,
what winnitude!" "Yup. I'll probably get a half-hour's winnage on the next run
of my program." Perhaps curiously, the obvious antonym 'lossitude' is rare.

wired

/n./ See hardwired.

wirehead

/wi:r'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
software wizard too, but will always have the 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.

wirewater

/n./ Syn. programming fluid. This melds the mainstream slang adjective
'wired' (stimulated, up, hyperactive) with 'firewater'; however, it refers to
caffeinacious rather than alcoholic beverages.

wish list

/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
completion to the wish list for the new interface." Compare tick-list
features.

within delta of

/adj./ See delta.

within epsilon of

/adj./ See epsilon.

wizard

/n./ 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware works
(that is, who groks 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, but
is a wizard with respect to something only 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 privileges on a system. 3. A Unix
expert, 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
wizardry, incantation, magic, mutter, rain dance, voodoo programming,
wave a dead chicken.
Wizard Book

/n./ "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs" (Hal Abelson, Jerry

Sussman and Julie Sussman; MIT Press, 1984, 1996; ISBN 0-262-01153-0), an
excellent computer science text used in introductory courses at MIT. So called
because of the wizard on the jacket. One of the bibles of the LISP/Scheme
world. Also, less commonly, known as the Purple Book.

wizard mode

/n./ [from rogue] 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
instead). This term is often used with respect to games that have editable
state.

wizardly

/adj./ Pertaining to wizards. A wizardly feature is one that only a wizard

could understand or use properly.

wok-on-the-wall

/n./ A small microwave dish antenna used for cross-campus private network
circuits, from the obvious resemblance between a microwave dish and the Chinese
culinary utensil.

womb box

/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 test equipment, electronics, and musical instruments.

WOMBAT

/wom'bat/ /adj./ [acronym: Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] 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 with a wombat'. See also crawling horror, SMOP. Also
note the rather different usage as a metasyntactic variable in Commonwealth
Hackish.

Users of the PDP-11 database program DATATRIEVE adopted the wombat as their
notional mascot; the program's help file responded to "HELP WOMBAT" with factual
information about Real World wombats.

wonky

/wong'kee/ /adj./ [from Australian slang] 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
logic went wonky and everybody's listings came out in Tengwar." Also in 'wonked
out'. See funky, demented, bozotic.

woofer

/n./ [University of Waterloo] Some varieties of wide paper for printers have a
perforation 8.5 inches from the left margin that allows the excess on the
right-hand side to be torn off when the print format is 80 columns or less wide.
The right-hand excess may be called 'woofer'. This term (like tweeter) has
been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon,
the word refers to the bass speaker(s) on a hi-fi.

workaround

/n./ 1. A temporary kluge used to bypass, mask, or otherwise avoid a bug or

misfeature in some system. Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced by
fixes; in practice, customers often find themselves living with workarounds
for long periods of time. "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!"
2. A procedure to be employed by the user in order to do what some currently
non-working feature should do. Hypothetical example: "Using META-F7 crashes
the 4.43 build of Weemax, but as a workaround you can type CTRL-R, then
SHIFT-F5, and delete the remaining cruft by hand."

working as designed

/adj./ [IBM] 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 accepting a
criticism or suggestion. At IBM, this sense is used in official documents!
See BAD.

worm

/n./ [from 'tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel "The Shockwave Rider", via XEROX
PARC] A program that propagates itself over a network, reproducing itself as it
goes. Compare virus. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is
assumed that only crackers write worms. 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, and Great Worm, the.

wormhole

/werm'hohl/ /n./ [from the 'wormhole' singularities hypothesized in some

versions of General Relativity theory] 1. obs. A location in a monitor which
contains the address of a routine, with the specific intent of making it easy to
substitute a different routine. This term is now obsolescent; modern operating
systems use clusters of wormholes extensively (for modularization of I/O
handling in particular, as in the Unix device-driver organization) but the
preferred techspeak for these clusters is 'device tables', 'jump tables' or
'capability tables'. 2. [Amateur Packet Radio] A network path using a
commercial satellite link to join two or more amateur VHF networks. So called
because traffic routed through a wormhole leaves and re-enters the amateur
network over great distances with usually little clue in the message routing
header as to how it got from one relay to the other. Compare gopher hole
(sense 2).

wound around the axle

/adj./ In an infinite loop. Often used by older computer types.

wrap around

/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, either because it is programmed to do so or 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 in a week (or, equivalently,
sleeping at the rate of 10 microhertz). This sense is also called
phase-wrapping.

write-only code

/n./ [a play on 'read-only memory'] 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

/n./ A language with syntax (or semantics) sufficiently dense and bizarre that
any routine of significant size is automatically write-only code. A sobriquet
applied occasionally to C and often to APL, though INTERCAL and TECO
certainly deserve it more.

write-only memory

/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
Signetics once created a specification for 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 information. Signetics published a corrected 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. Instead of the more
conventional 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
insertions", and "AQL vs. selling price". The 25120 required a 6.3 VAC VFF
supply, a +10V VCC, and VDD of 0V, +/- 2%.

Wrong Thing

/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 Thing. In
cases where 'the good is the enemy 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 Thing."

wugga wugga

/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).

wumpus

/wuhm'p*s/ /n./ The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a
famous family of very early computer games called "Hunt The Wumpus", dating back
at least to 1972 (several years before ADVENT) on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing
System. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an
dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies,
including an icosahedron and M"obius strip). The player started somewhere at
random in the cave with five 'crooked arrows'; these could be shot through up to
three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions
introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for
players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by
the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless
pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random
location (later versions added 'anaerobic termites' that ate arrows, bat
migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations). This game
appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as
opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this
respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it
prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork
acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). Today, a port is
distributed with SunOS and as freeware for the Mac. A C emulation of the
original Basic game is available at the Retrocomputing Museum,
http://www.ccil.org/retro.

WYSIAYG

/wiz'ee-ayg/ /adj./ Describes a user interface under which "What You See Is
*All* You Get"; an unhappy variant of WYSIWYG. Visual,
'point-and-shoot'-style interfaces tend to have easy initial learning curves,
but also to lack depth; they often frustrate advanced users who would be better
served by a command-style interface. When this happens, the frustrated user has
a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most often used of editors, word processors,
and document formatting programs. WYSIWYG 'desktop publishing' programs, for
example, are a clear win for creating small documents with lots of fonts and
graphics in them, especially things like newsletters and presentation slides.
When typesetting book-length manuscripts, on the other hand, scale changes the
nature of the task; one quickly runs into WYSIAYG limitations, and the increased
power and flexibility of a command-driven formatter like TeX or Unix's troff
becomes not just desirable but a necessity. Compare YAFIYGI.

WYSIWYG

/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 that do
not result in immediate visual feedback. True WYSIWYG in environments
supporting multiple fonts or graphics is a a rarely-attained ideal; there are
variants of this term to express real-world manifestations including WYSIAWYG
(What You See Is *Almost* What You Get) and WYSIMOLWYG (What You See Is More or
Less What You Get). All these can be mildly derogatory, as they are often used
to refer to dumbed-down user-friendly interfaces targeted at non-programmers;
a hacker has no fear of obscure commands (compare WYSIAYG). On the other
hand, EMACS was one of the very first WYSIWYG editors, replacing (actually, at
first overlaying) the extremely obscure, command-based TECO. See also WIMP
environment. [Oddly enough, WYSIWYG has already made it into the OED, in lower
case yet. — 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 context'
(compare N). Thus, the abbreviation 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 the name of an earlier window system
called 'W'] An over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly
over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on Unix systems.

XEROX PARC

/zee'roks park'/ /n./ The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a
decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing
volume of groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice,
windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So was the
laser printer and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines
anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly,
the prophets at PARC were without honor in their own company, so much so that it
became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialized in
developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.

The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level suits has been
well anatomized in "Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the
First Personal Computer" by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (William
Morrow Co., 1988, ISBN 0-688-09511-9).

XOFF

/X-of/ /n./ Syn. control-S.

XON

/X-on/ /n./ Syn. control-Q.

xor

/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 its
two arguments is true.

xref

/X'ref/ /v.,n./ Hackish standard abbreviation for 'cross-reference'.

XXX

/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. Compare FIXME.

xyzzy

/X-Y-Z-Z-Y/, /X-Y-ziz'ee/, /ziz'ee/, or /ik-ziz'ee/ /adj./ [from the ADVENT

game] 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
you find there. If you type 'xyzzy' at the 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 someone else's screen if he has protected
it, but 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 respond "Nothing
happens", just as ADVENT did if the magic was invoked at the wrong spot or
before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. In more recent
32-bit versions, by the way, AOS/VS responds "Twice as much happens".

The popular 'minesweeper' game under Microsoft Windows has a cheat mode
triggered by the command 'xyzzy enter right-shift ' that turns the
top-left pixel of the screen different colors depending on whether or not the
cursor is over a bomb.

YA-

/abbrev./ [Yet Another] In hackish acronyms this almost invariably expands to

Yet Another, following the precedent set by Unix 'yacc(1)' (Yet Another
Compiler-Compiler). See YABA.

YABA

/ya'b*/ /n./ [Cambridge] 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
ironically that the proposed name would then be 'YABA-compatible'. Also used in
response to questions like "What is WYSIWYG?" See also TLA.

YAFIYGI

/yaf'ee-y*-gee/ /adj./ [coined in response to WYSIWYG] Describes the

command-oriented ed/vi/nroff/TeX style of word processing or other user
interface, the opposite of WYSIWYG. Stands for "You asked for it, you got
it", because what you actually asked for is often not apparent until long after
it is too late to do anything about it. Used to denote perversity ("Real
Programmers use YAFIYGI tools...and *like* it!") or, less often, a necessary
tradeoff ("Only a YAFIYGI tool can have full programmable flexibility in its
interface.").

This precise sense of "You asked for it, you got it" seems to have first
appeared in Ed Post's classic parody "Real Programmers don't use Pascal" (see
Real Programmers); the acronym is a more recent invention.

YAUN

/yawn/ /n./ [Acronym for 'Yet Another Unix Nerd'] Reported from the San Diego
Computer Society (predominantly a microcomputer users' group) as a good-natured
punning insult aimed at Unix zealots.

Yellow Book

/n./ The print version of this Jargon File; "The New Hacker's Dictionary" from
MIT Press; The book includes essentially all the material the File, plus a
Foreword by Guy L. Steele Jr. and a Preface by Eric S. Raymond. Most
importantly, the book version is nicely typeset and includes almost all of the
infamous Crunchly cartoons by the Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate
entry. The first edition (1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6) corresponded to the Jargon
File version 2.9.6. The second edition (1993, ISBN 0-262-68079-3) corresponded
to the Jargon File 3.0.0. The third (1996, ISBN 0-262-68092-0) will correspond
to 4.0.0.

yellow wire
/n./ [IBM] Repair wires used when connectors (especially ribbon connectors) got
broken due to some schlemiel pinching them, or to reconnect cut traces after the
FE mistakenly cut one. Compare blue wire, purple wire, red wire.

Yet Another

/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
Another AI Group' or 'Yet Another Simulated Annealing Algorithm'. 2. Of others'
work: Describes something of which there are already far too many. See also
YA-, YABA, YAUN.

YKYBHTLW

// /abbrev./ Abbreviation of 'You know you've been hacking too long when...',
which became established on the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers during
extended discussion of the indicated entry in the Jargon File.

YMMV

// /cav./ Abbreviation for Your mileage may vary common on Usenet.

You are not expected to understand this

[Unix] /cav./ 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...

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 your network address faster than your 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 octal.
* your computers have a higher street 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 never seen half of your best friends.

[An 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 was balancing one's checkbook in
octal, which I 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, most famously to Grace Hopper
while she was working with BINAC in 1949. — ESR]

Your mileage may vary

/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 portably, but
who *knows* what'll happen on your system?" 2. More generally, a qualifier
attached to advice. "I find that sending flowers works well, but your mileage
may vary."

Yow!

/yow/ /interj./ [from "Zippy the Pinhead" comix] 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

/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.

Sun Microsystems gave out logoized yoyos at 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

/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 a fish is
cooked whole (not parsed) and 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

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.) See zapped. 4. /vt./ To modify, usually to 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 or to the OS with a
program called 'superzap', whose file name is 'IMASPZAP' (possibly contrived
from 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

/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,
vanilla wonton soup is hot but not zapped. See also oriental food, laser
chicken. See zap, senses 1 and 2.

zen

/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 it." Contrast grok, which connotes a time-extended version of zenning
a system. Compare hack mode. See also guru.

zero

/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
writing zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something
being 'logically zeroed' rather than being 'physically zeroed'. See scribble.

zero-content

/adj./ Syn. content-free.

Zero-One-Infinity Rule

/prov./ "Allow none of foo, one of foo, or any number of foo." A rule of
thumb for software design, which instructs one to not place random limits on
the number of instances of a given entity (such as: windows in a window system,
letters in an OS's filenames, etc.). Specifically, one should either disallow
the entity entirely, allow exactly one instance (an "exception"), or allow as
many as the user wants — address space and memory permitting.

The logic behind this rule is that there are often situations where it makes
clear sense to allow one of something instead of none. However, if one decides
to go further and allow N (for N 1), then why not N+1? And if N+1, then
why not N+2, and so on? Once above 1, there's no excuse not to allow any N;
hence, infinity.

Many hackers recall in this connection Isaac Asimov's SF novel "The Gods
Themselves" in which a character announces that the number 2 is impossible — if
you're going to believe in more than one universe, you might as well believe in
an infinite number of them.

zeroth

/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
to the binary numbers 0, 1, ..., 255 and 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 instances was in the First Edition of K R). In 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 errors, though it cannot eliminate them entirely.

zigamorph

/zig'*-morf/ /n./ 1. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a delimiter or fence

character. Usage: primarily at IBM shops. 2. [proposed] /n./ The Unicode
non-character U+FFFF (1111111111111111), a character code which is not assigned
to any

character, and so is usable as end-of-string. (Unicode (a subset of ISO

10646) is a 16-bit character code intended to cover all of the world's writing
systems, including Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Chinese, hiragana, katakana,
Devanagari, Ethiopic, Thai, Laotian and many other languages (support for
elvish is planned for a future release).
zip

/vt./ [primarily MS-DOS] 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
follows: "I'll zip it up and send it to you." See tar and feather.

zipperhead

/n./ [IBM] A person with a closed mind.

zombie

/n./ [Unix] 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

/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 very fast; it really zorches files through 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 the week." 5. [MIT] /n./ Energy,
drive, or ability. "I think I'll punt that change for now; I've been up for
30 hours and I've run out of zorch." 6. [MIT] /v./ To flunk an exam or course.

Zork

/zork/ /n./ The second of the great early experiments in computer fantasy
gaming; see ADVENT. Originally written on MIT-DM during 1977-1979, later
distributed with BSD Unix (as a patched, sourceless RT-11 FORTRAN binary; see
retrocomputing) and commercialized as 'The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom. The
FORTRAN source was later rewritten for portability and released to Usenet under
the name "Dungeon". Both FORTRAN "Dungeon" and translated C versions are
available at many FTP sites.

zorkmid

/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]

bobbit

/n./ [Usenet: alt.folklore.urban and elsewhere] Commonly used as a placeholder

for omitted text in a followup message (not copying the whole parent message is
considered good form). Refers, of course, to the celebrated mutilation of John
Bobbitt.

4.2
/for' poynt too'/ /n./ Without a prefix, this almost invariably refers to BSD
Unix release 4.2. Note that it is an indication of cluelessness to say "version
4.2", and "release 4.2" is rare; the number stands on its own, or is used in the
more explicit forms 4.2BSD or (less commonly) BSD 4.2. Similar remarks apply to
"4.3", "4.4" and to earlier, less-widespread releases 4.1 and 2.9.

'Snooze

/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
turn tend to elicit flamage in subsequent issues.

(TM)

// [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
against the recent spate of software and algorithm patents and 'look and feel'
lawsuits. See also UN*X.

-oid

/suff./ [from 'android'] 1. 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 that wouldn't
keep company with it in 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 or up); a 'computeroid' might
be any bitty box. The word 'keyboid' could be used to describe a chiclet
keyboard, but would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener
as to the speaker's city of origin. 2. More specifically, an indicator for
'resembling an android' which in the past has been confined to science-fiction
fans and 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 sequels. (See also windoid.)

Coinages in both forms have been common 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-1970s — ESR].

-ware

/suff./ [from 'software'] Commonly used to form jargon terms for classes of
software. For examples, see careware, crippleware, crudware, freeware,
fritterware, guiltware, liveware, meatware, payware,
psychedelicware, shareware, shelfware, vaporware, wetware.

/dev/null

/dev-nuhl/ /n./ [from the Unix null device, used as a data sink] A notional
'black hole' in any information space being discussed, used, or referred to. A
controversial posting, for example, might end "Kudos to [email protected],
flames to /dev/null". See bit bucket.

0
-
Numeric zero, as opposed to the letter 'O' (the 15th letter of the English
alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and various kluges
invented to make them visually distinct have compounded the confusion. If your
zero is center-dotted and letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost
rectangular but zero looks more like an American football stood on end (or the
reverse), you're probably looking at a modern character display (though the
dotted zero seems to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 controllers). If
your zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking at an
old-style ASCII graphic set descended from the default typewheel on the
venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom Slashed-O is a letter, curse
this arrangement). If letter-O has a slash across it and the zero does not,
your display is tuned for a very old convention used at IBM and a few other
early mainframe makers (Scandinavians curse *this* arrangement even more,
because it means two of their letters collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys equipment
displays a zero with a *reversed* slash. And yet another convention common on
early line printers left zero unornamented but added a tail or hook to the
letter-O so that it resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O (this
was endorsed by a draft ANSI standard for how to draw ASCII characters, but the
final standard changed the distinguisher to a tick-mark in the upper-left
corner). Are we sufficiently confused yet?

1TBS

// /n./ The "One True Brace Style"; see indent style.

120 reset

/wuhn-twen'tee ree'set/ /n./ [from 120 volts, U.S. wall voltage] To cycle power
on a machine in order to reset or unjam it. Compare Big Red Switch, power
cycle.

2-

/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

/at'par`tee/ /n./ [from the @-sign in an Internet address] (alt. '@-sign party'
/at'si:n par`tee/) A semi-closed party thrown for hackers at a science-fiction
convention (esp. the annual World Science Fiction Convention or "Worldcon"); one
must have a network address to get in, or at least be in company with 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.

The first recorded @-party was held at the Westercon (a California SF

convention) over the July 4th weekend in 1980. It is not clear exactly when the
canonical @-party venue shifted to the Worldcon but it had certainly become
established by Constellation in 1983.

@Begin

// See \begin.

\begin

// [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 would use anything else
is an idiot. Also, 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
frequently be rendered as ' FLAME ON ' and ' FLAME OFF ', or '#ifdef
FLAME' and '#endif FLAME''.

(Lexicon Entries End Here)

Hacker Folklore

This appendix contains several legends and fables that illuminate the meaning of
various entries in the lexicon.

The Meaning of 'Hack'

"The word hack doesn't really have 69 different meanings", according to MIT
hacker Phil Agre. "In fact, hack has only one meaning, an extremely subtle and
profound one which defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given
use of the word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar
remarks apply to a couple of other hacker words, most notably random."

Hacking might be characterized as 'an appropriate application of ingenuity'.

Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a carefully crafted
work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that went into it.

An important secondary meaning of hack is 'a creative practical joke'. This

kind of hack is easier to explain to non-hackers than the programming kind. Of
course, some hacks have both natures; see the lexicon entries for pseudo and
kgbvax. But here are some examples of pure practical jokes that illustrate the
hacking spirit:

In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of

Technology, in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One
student posed as a reporter and 'interviewed' the director of the
University of Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people
in the stands who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The
reporter learned exactly how the stunts were operated, and also
that the director would be out to dinner later.

While the director was eating, the students (who called

themselves the 'Fiendish Fourteen') picked a lock and stole a
blank direction sheet for the card stunts. They then had a
printer run off 2300 copies of the blank. The next day they
picked the lock again and stole the master plans for the stunts
— large sheets of graph paper colored in with the stunt
pictures. Using these as a guide, they made new instructions for
three of the stunts on the duplicated blanks. Finally, they
broke in once more, replacing the stolen master plans and
substituting the stack of diddled instruction sheets for the
original set.

The result was that three of the pictures were totally different.
Instead of 'WASHINGTON', the word '`CALTECH' was flashed. Another
stunt showed the word 'HUSKIES', the Washington nickname, but
 spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture of
a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the beaver
— nature's engineer — as a mascot.)

After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative

said: "Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant." The
Washington student body president remarked: "No hard feelings,
but at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed."

This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because revising the

direction sheets constituted a form of programming.

Here is another classic hack:

On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game.

Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first
quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the
40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The
letters 'MIT' appeared all over the ball. As the players and
officials stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in
diameter and then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.

The "Boston Globe" later reported: "If you want to know the
truth, MIT won The Game."

The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's

Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a
weather balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it
out of the ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it.
They made eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1
and 5 A.M., locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium
and running buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard
line, where they buried the balloon device. When the time came
to activate the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip
a circuit breaker and push a plug into an outlet.

This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise,

publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and
harmlessness. The use of manual control allowed the prank to be
timed so as not to disrupt the game (it was set off between
plays, so the outcome of the game would not be unduly affected).
The perpetrators had even thoughtfully attached a note to the
balloon explaining that the device was not dangerous and
contained no explosives.

Harvard president Derek Bok commented: "They have an awful lot of

clever people down there at MIT, and they did it again."
President Paul E. Gray of MIT said: "There is absolutely no truth
to the rumor that I had anything to do with it, but I wish there
were."

The hacks above are verifiable history; they can be proved to have happened.
Many other classic-hack stories from MIT and elsewhere, though retold as
history, have the characteristics of what Jan Brunvand has called 'urban
folklore' (see FOAF). Perhaps the best known of these is the legend of the
infamous trolley-car hack, an alleged incident in which engineering students are
said to have welded a trolley car to its tracks with thermite. Numerous versions
of this have been recorded from the 1940s to the present, most set at MIT but at
least one very detailed version set at CMU.

Brian Leibowitz has researched MIT hacks both real and mythical extensively; the
interested reader is referred to his delightful pictorial compendium "The
Journal of the Institute for Hacks, Tomfoolery, and Pranks" (MIT Museum, 1990;
ISBN 0-917027-03-5). The Institute has a World Wide Web page at
http://fishwrap.mit.edu/Hacks/Gallery.html.
Finally, here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks.

Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at

Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system
security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple
programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick
the system into running a portion of the program in 'master mode'
(supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply.
The program could then poke a large value into its 'privilege
level' byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to
bypass all levels of security within the file-management system,
patch the system monitor, and do numerous other interesting
things. In short, the barn door was wide open.

Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an

official 'level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of
'needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR
was entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a
number of people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they
simply reported the problem as 'Security SIDR', and attached all
of the necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.

The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't
realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the
necessary operating-system-staff resources to develop and
distribute an official patch.

Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox

field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take
direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily
the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security
safeguards could be subverted.

They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a

thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then
incorporated into a pair of programs called 'Robin Hood' and
'Friar Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as
'ghost jobs' (daemons, in Unix terminology); they would use the
existing loophole to subvert system security, install the
necessary patches, and then keep an eye on one another's statuses
in order to keep the system operator (in effect, the superuser)
from aborting them.

One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software
development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of
unusual phenomena. These included the following:

* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the

middle of a job.

* Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they
would attempt to walk across the floor (see walking
drives).

* The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of

itself and punch a lace card. These would usually jam in
the punch.

* The console would print snide and insulting messages from

Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.

* The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be

instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A
(unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card
was placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by
the ghosts added some code to the card-reader
 driver... after reading a card, it would flip over to the
opposite stacker. As a result, card decks would divide
themselves in half when they were read, leaving the operator
to recollate them manually.

Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system

developers. They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and
gunned them... and were once again surprised. When Robin Hood
was gunned, the following sequence of events took place:

!X id1

id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me!

id1: Off (aborted)

id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff

of Nottingham's men!

id1: Thank you, my good fellow!

Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been
killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program
within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was
to kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately
crash the system.

Finally, the system programmers did the latter — only to find

that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted!
It turned out that these two programs had patched the boot-time
OS image (the kernel file, in Unix terms) and had added
themselves to the list of programs that were to be started at
boot time (this is similar to the way MS-DOS viruses propagate).

The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when
the system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and
reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a
patch for this problem.

It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's

management about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees
in question. It is not recorded that any serious disciplinary
action was taken against either of them.

TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity

Here is a true story about a glass tty: One day an MIT hacker was in a
motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in the hospital quite a
while, and got restless because he couldn't hack. Two of his friends therefore
took a terminal and a modem for it to the hospital, so that he could use the
computer by telephone from his hospital bed.

Now this happened some years before the spread of home computers, and computer
terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person. When the two friends
got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying.
They explained that they wanted to take a computer terminal to their friend who
was a patient.

The guard got out his list of things that patients were permitted to have in
their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape player, ... no computer
terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the list, so the guard wouldn't let it
in. Rules are rules, you know. (This guard was clearly a droid.)

Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were frustrated, of
course, because they knew that the terminal was as harmless as a TV or anything
else on the list... which gave them an idea.
The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard stopped them
and asked what they were carrying. They said: "This is a TV typewriter!" The
guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and demonstrated it. "See? You just
type on the keyboard and what you type shows up on the TV screen." Now the
guard didn't stop to think about how utterly useless a typewriter would be that
didn't produce any paper copies of what you typed; but this was clearly a TV
typewriter, no doubt about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all right, a
typewriter is all right ... okay, take it on in!"

[Historical note: Many years ago, "Popular Electronics" published

solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the essential uselessness
of the device, it was an enormously popular project. Steve Ciarcia, the man
behind "Byte" magazine's "Circuit Cellar" feature, resurrected this ghost in one
of his books of the early 1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly)
to the feeling of power the builder could achieve by being able to decide
himself what would be shown on the TV. — ESR]

[Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the following
bit of filler:

Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home

from his first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he
had written on "a machine that looks like a computer — but
without the TV screen." She asked him if it could have been a
"typewriter." "Yeah! Yeah!" he said. "That's what it was
called."

I have since investigated this matter and determined that many of today's
teenagers have never seen a slide rule, either.... — ESR]

A Story About 'Magic'

Some years ago, I (GLS) was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the MIT
AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of one cabinet.
It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's hardware hackers (no
one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it does,
because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a most unhelpful
way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the metal switch body were
the words 'magic' and 'more magic'. The switch was in the 'more magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the switch before
either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had only one wire running to
it! The other end of the wire did disappear into the maze of wires inside the
computer, but it's a basic fact of electricity that a switch can't do anything
unless there are two wires connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on
one side and no wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke. Convinced by
our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped it. The computer
instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but nevertheless

restored the switch to the 'more magic' position before reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I recall.
He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural belief in the
power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him with a bogus saga. To
prove it to him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame
with only one wire connected to it, still in the 'more magic' position. We
scrutinized the switch and its lone connection, and found that the other end of
the wire, though connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground
pin. That clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically
nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect anything
anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was close
at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He inspected it,
concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and diked it out. We then
revived the computer and it has run fine ever since.

We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a theory that
some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and flipping the switch changed
the electrical capacitance enough to upset the circuit as millionth-of-a-second
pulses went through it. But we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is
that the switch was magic.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I usually keep it
set on 'more magic'.

1994: Another explanation of this story has since been offered. Note that the
switch body was metal. Suppose that the non-connected side of the switch was
connected to the switch body (usually the body is connected to a separate earth
lug, but there are exceptions). The body is connected to the computer case,
which is, presumably, grounded. Now the circuit ground within the machine isn't
necessarily at the same potential as the case ground, so flipping the switch
connected the circuit ground to the case ground, causing a voltage drop/jump
which reset the machine. This was probably discovered by someone who found out
the hard way that there was a potential difference between the two, and who then
wired in the switch as a joke.

AI Koans

These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the MIT AI
Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were composed by Danny
Hillis. In reading these, it is at least useful to know that Minsky, Sussman,
and Drescher are AI researchers of note, that Tom Knight was one of the Lisp
machine's principal designers, and that David Moon wrote much of Lisp Machine
Lisp.

Broken Lisp machine

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and
on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot fix a
machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

Circular garbage

One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to make a better
garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the pointers to each cons."

Moon patiently told the student the following story:

"One day a student came to Moon and said: 'I understand how to make a better
garbage collector...

[Ed. note: Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with circular
structures that point to themselves.]
 Preconceptions

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking
at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

Personality test

A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his morning
meal.

"I would like to give you this personality test", said the outsider, "because I
want you to be happy."

Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the toaster,
saying: "I wish the toaster to be happy, too."

OS and JEDGAR

This story says a lot about the ITS ethos.

On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what was being
printed on someone else's terminal. It spied on the other guy's output by
examining the insides of the monitor system. The output spy program was called
OS. Throughout the rest of the computer science (and at IBM too) OS means
'operating system', but among old-time ITS hackers it almost always meant
'output spy'.

OS could work because ITS purposely had very little in the way of `protection'
that prevented one user from trespassing on another's areas. Fair is fair,
however. There was another program that would automatically notify you if anyone
started to spy on your output. It worked in exactly the same way, by looking at
the insides of the operating system to see if anyone else was looking at the
insides that had to do with your output. This 'counterspy' program was called
JEDGAR (a six-letterism pronounced as two syllables: /jed'gr/), in honor of the
former head of the FBI.

But there's more. JEDGAR would ask the user for 'license to kill'. If the user
said yes, then JEDGAR would actually gun the job of the luser who was
spying. Unfortunately, people found that this made life too violent, especially
when tourists learned about it. One of the systems hackers solved the problem by
replacing JEDGAR with another program that only pretended to do its job. It took
a long time to do this, because every copy of JEDGAR had to be patched. To this
day no one knows how many people never figured out that JEDGAR had been
defanged.

Interestingly, there is still a security module named JEDGAR alive as of late

1994 — in the Unisys MCP for large systems. It is unknown to us whether the
name is tribute or independent invention.

The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer

This was posted to Usenet by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on May 21,
1983.

A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming

made the bald and unvarnished statement:

Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

Maybe they do now,

in this decadent era of
Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software
but back in the Good Old Days,
when the term "software" sounded funny
and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,
Real Programmers wrote in machine code.
Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.
Machine Code.
Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.
Directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers

grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,
I feel duty-bound to describe,
as best I can through the generation gap,
how a Real Programmer wrote code.
I'll call him Mel,
because that was his name.

I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,
a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.
The firm manufactured the LGP-30,
a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)
drum-memory computer,
and had just started to manufacture
the RPC-4000, a much-improved,
bigger, better, faster — drum-memory computer.
Cores cost too much,
and weren't here to stay, anyway.
(That's why you haven't heard of the company,
or the computer.)

I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler

for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.
Mel didn't approve of compilers.

"If a program can't rewrite its own code",

he asked, "what good is it?"

Mel had written,

in hexadecimal,
the most popular computer program the company owned.
It ran on the LGP-30
and played blackjack with potential customers
at computer shows.
Its effect was always dramatic.
The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,
and the IBM salesmen stood around
talking to each other.
Whether or not this actually sold computers
was a question we never discussed.
Mel's job was to re-write
the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.
(Port? What does that mean?)
The new computer had a one-plus-one
addressing scheme,
in which each machine instruction,
in addition to the operation code
and the address of the needed operand,
had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,
the next instruction was located.

In modern parlance,
every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!
Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.

Mel loved the RPC-4000

because he could optimize his code:
that is, locate instructions on the drum
so that just as one finished its job,
the next would be just arriving at the "read head"
and available for immediate execution.
There was a program to do that job,
an "optimizing assembler",
but Mel refused to use it.

"You never know where it's going to put things",

he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants".

It was a long time before I understood that remark.

Since Mel knew the numerical value
of every operation code,
and assigned his own drum addresses,
every instruction he wrote could also be considered
a numerical constant.
He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say,
and multiply by it,
if it had the right numeric value.
His code was not easy for someone else to modify.

I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs

with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,
and Mel's always ran faster.
That was because the "top-down" method of program design
hadn't been invented yet,
and Mel wouldn't have used it anyway.
He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first,
so they would get first choice
of the optimum address locations on the drum.
The optimizing assembler wasn't smart enough to do it that way.

Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either,

even when the balky Flexowriter
required a delay between output characters to work right.
He just located instructions on the drum
so each successive one was just *past* the read head
when it was needed;
the drum had to execute another complete revolution
to find the next instruction.
He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure.
Although "optimum" is an absolute term,
like "unique", it became common verbal practice
to make it relative:
"not quite optimum" or "less optimum"
or "not very optimum".
Mel called the maximum time-delay locations
the "most pessimum".

After he finished the blackjack program

and got it to run
("Even the initializer is optimized",
he said proudly),
he got a Change Request from the sales department.
The program used an elegant (optimized)
random number generator
to shuffle the "cards" and deal from the "deck",
and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair,
since sometimes the customers lost.
They wanted Mel to modify the program
so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,
they could change the odds and let the customer win.

Mel balked.
He felt this was patently dishonest,
which it was,
and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer,
which it did,
so he refused to do it.
The Head Salesman talked to Mel,
as did the Big Boss and, at the boss's urging,
a few Fellow Programmers.
Mel finally gave in and wrote the code,
but he got the test backwards,
and, when the sense switch was turned on,
the program would cheat, winning every time.
Mel was delighted with this,
claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical,
and adamantly refused to fix it.

After Mel had left the company for greener pa$ture$,

the Big Boss asked me to look at the code
and see if I could find the test and reverse it.
Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look.
Tracking Mel's code was a real adventure.

I have often felt that programming is an art form,

whose real value can only be appreciated
by another versed in the same arcane art;
there are lovely gems and brilliant coups
hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,
by the very nature of the process.
You can learn a lot about an individual
just by reading through his code,
even in hexadecimal.
Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.

Perhaps my greatest shock came

when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.
No test. *None*.
Common sense said it had to be a closed loop,
where the program would circle, forever, endlessly.
Program control passed right through it, however,
and safely out the other side.
It took me two weeks to figure it out.

The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility

called an index register.
It allowed the programmer to write a program loop
that used an indexed instruction inside;
each time through,
the number in the index register
was added to the address of that instruction,
 so it would refer
to the next datum in a series.
He had only to increment the index register
each time through.
Mel never used it.

Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register,

add one to its address,
and store it back.
He would then execute the modified instruction
right from the register.
The loop was written so this additional execution time
was taken into account —
just as this instruction finished,
the next one was right under the drum's read head,
ready to go.
But the loop had no test in it.

The vital clue came when I noticed

the index register bit,
the bit that lay between the address
and the operation code in the instruction word,
was turned on —
yet Mel never used the index register,
leaving it zero all the time.
When the light went on it nearly blinded me.

He had located the data he was working on

near the top of memory —
the largest locations the instructions could address —
so, after the last datum was handled,
incrementing the instruction address
would make it overflow.
The carry would add one to the
operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set:
a jump instruction.
Sure enough, the next program instruction was
in address location zero,
and the program went happily on its way.

I haven't kept in touch with Mel,

so I don't know if he ever gave in to the flood of
change that has washed over programming techniques
since those long-gone days.
I like to think he didn't.
In any event,
I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the
offending test,
telling the Big Boss I couldn't find it.
He didn't seem surprised.

When I left the company,

the blackjack program would still cheat
if you turned on the right sense switch,
and I think that's how it should be.
I didn't feel comfortable
hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.

This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a few spare
images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of hacking than all
the scholarly volumes on the subject put together. For an opposing point of
view, see the entry for Real Programmer.

[1992 postscript — the author writes: "The original submission to the net was
not in free verse, nor any approximation to it — it was straight prose style,
in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around the net it apparently got
modified into the 'free verse' form now popular. In other words, it got hacked
on the net. That seems appropriate, somehow." The author adds that he likes the
'free-verse' version better...]

A Portrait of J. Random Hacker

This profile reflects detailed comments on an earlier 'trial balloon' version

from about a hundred Usenet respondents. Where comparatives are used, the
implicit 'other' is a randomly selected segment of the non-hacker population of
the same size as hackerdom.

An important point: Except in some relatively minor respects such as slang

vocabulary, hackers don't get to be the way they are by imitating each other.
Rather, it seems to be the case that the combination of personality traits that
makes a hacker so conditions one's outlook on life that one tends to end up
being like other hackers whether one wants to or not (much as bizarrely detailed
similarities in behavior and preferences are found in genetic twins raised
separately).

General Appearance

Intelligent. Scruffy. Intense. Abstracted. Surprisingly for a sedentary

profession, more hackers run to skinny than fat; both extremes are more common
than elsewhere. Tans are rare.

Dress

Casual, vaguely post-hippie; T-shirts, jeans, running shoes, Birkenstocks (or

bare feet). Long hair, beards, and moustaches are common. High incidence of
tie-dye and intellectual or humorous `slogan' T-shirts (only rarely computer
related; that would be too obvious).

A substantial minority prefers 'outdoorsy' clothing — hiking boots ("in case a

mountain should suddenly spring up in the machine room", as one famous parody
put it), khakis, lumberjack or chamois shirts, and the like.

Very few actually fit the "National Lampoon" Nerd stereotype, though it lingers
on at MIT and may have been more common before 1975. At least since the late
Seventies backpacks have been more common than briefcases, and the hacker 'look'
has been more whole-earth than whole-polyester.

Hackers dress for comfort, function, and minimal maintenance hassles rather than
for appearance (some, perhaps unfortunately, take this to extremes and neglect
personal hygiene). They have a very low tolerance of suits and other 'business'
attire; in fact, it is not uncommon for hackers to quit a job rather than
conform to a dress code.

Female hackers almost never wear visible makeup, and many use none at all.

Reading Habits

Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science fiction. The
typical hacker household might subscribe to "Analog", "Scientific American",
"Whole-Earth Review", and "Smithsonian" (most hackers ignore "Wired" and other
self-consciously 'cyberpunk' magazines, considering them wannabee fodder).
Hackers often have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend
not to talk about it as much. Many hackers spend as much of their spare time
reading as the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep shelves and
shelves of well-thumbed books in their homes.

Other Interests
Some hobbies are widely shared and recognized as going with the culture: science
fiction, music, medievalism (in the active form practiced by the Society for
Creative Anachronism and similar organizations), chess, go, backgammon,
wargames, and intellectual games of all kinds. (Role-playing games such as
Dungeons and Dragons used to be extremely popular among hackers but they lost a
bit of their luster as they moved into the mainstream and became heavily
commercialized. More recently, "Magic: The Gathering" has been widely popular
among hackers.) Logic puzzles. Ham radio. Other interests that seem to
correlate less strongly but positively with hackerdom include linguistics and
theater teching.

Physical Activity and Sports

Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and are
determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do, interest in spectator sports is
low to non-existent; sports are something one *does*, not something one watches
on TV.

Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague. Volleyball was long a
notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and relatively friendly;
Ultimate Frisbee has become quite popular for similar reasons. Hacker sports are
almost always primarily self-competitive ones involving concentration, stamina,
and micromotor skills: martial arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying,
hiking, rock climbing, aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling,
skiing, skating (ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to
draw them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can tinker
with.

Education

Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or self-educated
to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often considered (at least by
other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may be more respected, than his
school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas from which people often gravitate into
hackerdom include (besides the obvious computer science and electrical
engineering) physics, mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.

Things Hackers Detest and Avoid

IBM mainframes. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of offensive cuteness.

Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening music. Television (except for
cartoons, movies, and "Star Trek" classic). Business suits. Dishonesty.
Incompetence. Boredom. COBOL. BASIC. Character-based menu interfaces.

Food

Ethnic. Spicy. Oriental, esp. Chinese and most esp. Szechuan, Hunan, and
Mandarin (hackers consider Cantonese vaguely d'eclass'e). Hackers prefer the
exotic; for example, the Japanese-food fans among them will eat with gusto such
delicacies as fugu (poisonous pufferfish) and whale. Thai food has experienced
flurries of popularity. Where available, high-quality Jewish delicatessen food
is much esteemed. A visible minority of Southwestern and Pacific Coast hackers
prefers Mexican.

For those all-night hacks, pizza and microwaved burritos are big. Interestingly,
though the mainstream culture has tended to think of hackers as incorrigible
junk-food junkies, many have at least mildly health-foodist attitudes and are
fairly discriminating about what they eat. This may be generational; anecdotal
evidence suggests that the stereotype was more on the mark before the early
1980s.
Politics

Vaguely liberal-moderate, except for the strong libertarian contingent which

rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe generalization
is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian; thus, both conventional
conservatism and 'hard' leftism are rare. Hackers are far more likely than most
non-hackers to either (a) be aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar
or idiosyncratic political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.

Gender and Ethnicity

Hackerdom is still predominantly male. However, the percentage of women is

clearly higher than the low-single-digit range typical for technical
professions, and female hackers are generally respected and dealt with as
equals.

In the U.S., hackerdom is predominantly Caucasian with strong minorities of Jews

(East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The Jewish contingent has exerted a
particularly pervasive cultural influence (see Food, above, and note that
several common jargon terms are obviously mutated Yiddish).

The ethnic distribution of hackers is understood by them to be a function of

which ethnic groups tend to seek and value education. Racial and ethnic
prejudice is notably uncommon and tends to be met with freezing contempt.

When asked, hackers often ascribe their culture's gender- and color-blindness to
a positive effect of text-only network channels, and this is doubtless a
powerful influence. Also, the ties many hackers have to AI research and SF
literature may have helped them to develop an idea of personhood that is
inclusive rather than exclusive — after all, if one's imagination readily
grants full human rights to future AI programs, robots, dolphins, and
extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and gender can't seem very important any
more.

Religion

Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly, three or more

of these are combined in the same person. Conventional faith-holding
Christianity is rare though not unknown.

Even hackers who identify with a religious affiliation tend to be relaxed about
it, hostile to organized religion in general and all forms of religious bigotry
in particular. Many enjoy 'parody' religions such as Discordianism and the
Church of the SubGenius.

Also, many hackers are influenced to varying degrees by Zen Buddhism or (less
commonly) Taoism, and blend them easily with their 'native' religions.

There is a definite strain of mystical, almost Gnostic sensibility that shows up

even among those hackers not actively involved with neo-paganism, Discordianism,
or Zen. Hacker folklore that pays homage to 'wizards' and speaks of incantations
and demons has too much psychological truthfulness about it to be entirely a
joke.

Ceremonial Chemicals

Most hackers don't smoke tobacco, and use alcohol in moderation if at all
(though there is a visible contingent of exotic-beer fanciers, and a few hackers
are serious oenophiles). Limited use of non-addictive psychedelic drugs, such as
cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, and nitrous oxide, etc., used to be relatively common
and is still regarded with more tolerance than in the mainstream culture. Use of
'downers' and opiates, on the other hand, appears to be particularly rare;
hackers seem in general to dislike drugs that make them stupid. On the third
hand, many hackers regularly wire up on caffeine and/or sugar for all-night
hacking runs.

Communication Style

See the discussions of speech and writing styles near the beginning of this
File. Though hackers often have poor person-to-person communication skills, they
are as a rule quite sensitive to nuances of language and very precise in their
use of it. They are often better at writing than at speaking.

Geographical Distribution

In the United States, hackerdom revolves on a Bay Area-to-Boston axis; about

half of the hard core seems to live within a hundred miles of Cambridge
(Massachusetts) or Berkeley (California), although there are significant
contingents in Los Angeles, in the Pacific Northwest, and around Washington DC.
Hackers tend to cluster around large cities, especially 'university towns' such
as the Raleigh-Durham area in North Carolina or Princeton, New Jersey (this may
simply reflect the fact that many are students or ex-students living near their
alma maters).

Sexual Habits

Hackerdom easily tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle variation
than the mainstream culture. It includes a relatively large gay and bisexual
contingent. Hackers are somewhat more likely to live in polygynous or
polyandrous relationships, practice open marriage, or live in communes or group
houses. In this, as in general appearance, hackerdom semi-consciously maintains
'counterculture' values.

Personality Characteristics

The most obvious common 'personality' characteristics of hackers are high

intelligence, consuming curiosity, and facility with intellectual abstractions.
Also, most hackers are 'neophiles', stimulated by and appreciative of novelty
(especially intellectual novelty). Most are also relatively individualistic and
anti-conformist.

Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not the sine
qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more important: the
ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large amounts of 'meaningless'
detail, trusting to later experience to give it context and meaning. A person of
merely average analytical intelligence who has this trait can become an
effective hacker, but a creative genius who lacks it will swiftly find himself
outdistanced by people who routinely upload the contents of thick reference
manuals into their brains. [During the production of the first book version of
this document, for example, I learned most of the rather complex typesetting
language TeX over about four working days, mainly by inhaling Knuth's 477-page
manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction to this genuinely surprised me,
because years of associating with hackers have conditioned me to consider such
performances routine and to be expected. — ESR]

Contrary to stereotype, hackers are *not* usually intellectually narrow; they

tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental stimulation, and
can often discourse knowledgeably and even interestingly on any number of
obscure subjects — if you can get them to talk at all, as opposed to, say,
going back to their hacking.

It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the better

a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have outside interests
at which he or she is more than merely competent.
Hackers are 'control freaks' in a way that has nothing to do with the usual
coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term. In the same way that
children delight in making model trains go forward and back by moving a switch,
hackers love making complicated things like computers do nifty stuff for them.
But it has to be *their* nifty stuff. They don't like tedium, nondeterminism, or
most of the fussy, boring, ill-defined little tasks that go with maintaining a
normal existence. Accordingly, they tend to be careful and orderly in their
intellectual lives and chaotic elsewhere. Their code will be beautiful, even if
their desks are buried in 3 feet of c**p.

Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by conventional rewards such as
social approval or money. They tend to be attracted by challenges and excited by
interesting toys, and to judge the interest of work or other activities in terms
of the challenges offered and the toys they get to play with.

In terms of Myers-Briggs and equivalent psychometric systems, hackerdom appears

to concentrate the relatively rare INTJ and INTP types; that is, introverted,
intuitive, and thinker types (as opposed to the extroverted-sensate
personalities that predominate in the mainstream culture). ENT[JP] types are
also concentrated among hackers but are in a minority.

Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality

Hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with other

people. This may be because hackers generally aren't much like `other people'.
Unsurprisingly, hackers also tend towards self-absorption, intellectual
arrogance, and impatience with people and tasks perceived to be wasting their
time.

As cynical as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy in the world,
they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as rational, `cool', and
imaginative as they consider themselves. This bias often contributes to weakness
in communication skills. Hackers tend to be especially poor at confrontation and
negotiation.

Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to be) the Right
Thing, hackers can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on technical issues,
in marked contrast to their general spirit of camaraderie and tolerance of
alternative viewpoints otherwise. Old-time ITS partisans look down on the
ever-growing hordes of Unix hackers; Unix aficionados despise VMS and
MS-DOS; and hackers who are used to conventional command-line user interfaces
loudly loathe mouse-and-menu based systems such as the Macintosh. Hackers who
don't indulge in Usenet consider it a huge waste of time and bandwidth; fans
of old adventure games such as ADVENT and Zork consider MUDs to be
glorified chat systems devoid of atmosphere or interesting puzzles; hackers who
are willing to devote endless hours to Usenet or MUDs consider IRC to be a
*real* waste of time; IRCies think MUDs might be okay if there weren't all those
silly puzzles in the way. And, of course, there are the perennial holy wars —
EMACS vs. vi, big-endian vs. little-endian, RISC vs. CISC, etc., etc.,
etc. As in society at large, the intensity and duration of these debates is
usually inversely proportional to the number of objective, factual arguments
available to buttress any position.

As a result of all the above traits, many hackers have difficulty maintaining
stable relationships. At worst, they can produce the classic computer geek:
withdrawn, relationally incompetent, sexually frustrated, and desperately
unhappy when not submerged in his or her craft. Fortunately, this extreme is far
less common than mainstream folklore paints it — but almost all hackers will
recognize something of themselves in the unflattering paragraphs above.

Hackers are often monumentally disorganized and sloppy about dealing with the
physical world. Bills don't get paid on time, clutter piles up to incredible
heights in homes and offices, and minor maintenance tasks get deferred
indefinitely.
1994-95's fad behavioral disease was a syndrome called Attention Deficit
Disorder, supposedly characterized by (among other things) a combination of
short attention span with an ability to 'hyperfocus' imaginatively on
interesting tasks. There are grounds for questioning whether ADD actually
exists, and if it does whether it is really a `disease' rather than an extreme
of a normal genetic variation like having freckles or being able to taste DPT;
but it is certainly true that many hacker traits coincide with major indicators
for ADD, and probably true that ADD boosters would find a far higher rate of
clinical ADD among hackers than the supposedly mainstream-normal 10%.

The sort of person who routinely uses phrases like 'incompletely socialized'
usually thinks hackers are. Hackers regard such people with contempt when they
notice them at all.

Miscellaneous

Hackers are more likely to have cats than dogs (in fact, it is widely grokked
that cats have the hacker nature). Many drive incredibly decrepit heaps and
forget to wash them; richer ones drive spiffy Porsches and RX-7s and then forget
to have them washed. Almost all hackers have terribly bad handwriting, and often
fall into the habit of block-printing everything like junior draftsmen.

Helping Hacker Culture Grow

If you enjoyed the Jargon File, please help the culture that created it grow and
flourish. Here are several ways you can help:

* If you are a writer or journalist, don't say or write hacker when you mean
cracker. If you work with writers or journalists, educate them on this issue
and push them to do the right thing. If you catch a newspaper or magazine
abusing the work 'hacker', write them and straigten them out (this appendix
includes a model letter).

* If you're a techie or computer hobbyist, get involved with one of the free
Unixes. Toss out that lame Microsoft OS, or confine it to one disk partition and
put Linux or FreeBSD or NetBSD on the other one. And the next time your friend
or boss is thinking about some commercial software 'solution' that costs more
than it's worth, be ready to blow the competition away with free software
running over a free Unix.

* Contribute to organizations like the Free Software Foundation that promote the
production of high-quality free software. You can reach the Free Software
Foundation at [email protected], by phone at +1-617-542-5942, or by snail-mail
at 59 Temple Place, Suite 330, Boston, MA 02111-1307 USA.

* Support the League for Programming Freedom, which opposes over-broad software
patents that constantly threaten to blow up in hackers' faces, preventing them
from developing innovative software for tomorrow's needs. You can reach the
League for Programming Freedom at [email protected]. by phone at +1 617 621 7084,
or by snail-mail at 1 Kendall Square #143, P.O.Box 9171, Cambridge,
Massachusetts 02139 USA.

* If you do nothing else, please help fight government attempts to seize

political control of Internet content and restrict strong cryptography. As TNHD
III went to press, the so-called `Communications Decency Act' had just been
declared "unconstitutional on its face" by a Federal court, but the government
is expected to appeal. If it's still law when you read this, please join the
effort by the Citizens' Internet Empowerment Coalition lawsuit to have the CDA
quashed or repealed. Surf to the Center for Democracy and technology's home page
at http://www.cdt.org to see what you can do to help fight censorship of the
net.

Here's the text of a letter RMS wrote to the Wall Street Journal to complain
about their policy of using "hacker" only in a pejorative sense. We hear that
most major newspapers have the same policy. If you'd like to help change this
situation, send your favorite newspaper the same letter — or, better yet, write
your own letter.

Dear Editor:

This letter is not meant for publication, although you can

publish it if you wish. It is meant specifically for you, the
editor, not the public.

I am a hacker. That is to say, I enjoy playing with computers —

working with, learning about, and writing clever computer
programs. I am not a cracker; I don't make a practice of
breaking computer security.

There's nothing shameful about the hacking I do. But when I tell
people I am a hacker, people think I'm admitting something
naughty — because newspapers such as yours misuse the word
"hacker", giving the impression that it means "security breaker"
and nothing else. You are giving hackers a bad name.

The saddest thing is that this problem is perpetuated

deliberately. Your reporters know the difference between
"hacker" and "security breaker". They know how to make the
distinction, but you don't let them! You insist on using
"hacker" pejoratively. When reporters try to use another word,
you change it. When reporters try to explain the other meanings,
you cut it.

Of course, you have a reason. You say that readers have become
used to your insulting usage of "hacker", so that you cannot
change it now. Well, you can't undo past mistakes today; but
that is no excuse to repeat them tomorrow.

If I were what you call a "hacker", at this point I would

threaten to crack your computer and crash it. But I am a hacker,
not a cracker. I don't do that kind of thing! I have enough
computers to play with at home and at work; I don't need yours.
Besides, it's not my way to respond to insults with violence. My
response is this letter.

You owe hackers an apology; but more than that, you owe us
ordinary respect.

Sincerely, etc.

Bibliography

Here are some other books you can read to help you understand the hacker
mindset.

Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid

Douglas Hofstadter
Basic Books, 1979
ISBN 0-394-74502-7

This book reads like an intellectual Grand Tour of hacker preoccupations. Music,
mathematical logic, programming, speculations on the nature of intelligence,
biology, and Zen are woven into a brilliant tapestry themed on the concept of
encoded self-reference. The perfect left-brain companion to "Illuminatus".

Illuminatus!
I. "The Eye in the Pyramid"
II. "The Golden Apple"
 III. "Leviathan".
Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson
Dell, 1988
ISBN 0-440-53981-1

This work of alleged fiction is an incredible berserko-surrealist rollercoaster

of world-girdling conspiracies, intelligent dolphins, the fall of Atlantis, who
really killed JFK, sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and the Cosmic Giggle Factor. First
published in three volumes, but there is now a one-volume trade paperback,
carried by most chain bookstores under SF. The perfect right-brain companion to
Hofstadter's "G"odel, Escher, Bach". See Eris, Discordianism, random
numbers, Church of the SubGenius.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Douglas Adams
Pocket Books, 1981
ISBN 0-671-46149-4

This 'Monty Python in Space' spoof of SF genre traditions has been popular among
hackers ever since the original British radio show. Read it if only to learn
about Vogons (see bogon) and the significance of the number 42 (see random
numbers) — and why the winningest chess program of 1990 was called 'Deep
Thought'.

The Tao of Programming

James Geoffrey
Infobooks, 1987
ISBN 0-931137-07-1

This gentle, funny spoof of the "Tao Te Ching" contains much that is
illuminating about the hacker way of thought. "When you have learned to snatch
the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."

Hackers
Steven Levy
Anchor/Doubleday 1984
ISBN 0-385-19195-2

Levy's book is at its best in describing the early MIT hackers at the Model
Railroad Club and the early days of the microcomputer revolution. He never
understood Unix or the networks, though, and his enshrinement of Richard
Stallman as "the last true hacker" turns out (thankfully) to have been quite
misleading. Numerous minor factual errors also mar the text; for example, Levy's
claim that the original Jargon File derived from the TMRC Dictionary (the File
originated at Stanford and was brought to MIT in 1976; the co-authors of the
first edition had never seen the dictionary in question). There are also
numerous misspellings in the book that inflame the passions of old-timers; as
Dan Murphy, the author of TECO, once said: "You would have thought he'd take the
trouble to spell the name of a winning editor right." Nevertheless, this
remains a useful and stimulating book that captures the feel of several
important hackish subcultures.

The Computer Contradictionary

Stan Kelly-Bootle
MIT Press, 1995
ISBN 0-262-61112-0

This pastiche of Ambrose Bierce's famous work is similar in format to the Jargon
File (and quotes several entries from TNHD-2) but somewhat different in tone and
intent. It is more satirical and less anthropological, and is largely a product
of the author's literate and quirky imagination. For example, it defines
'computer science' as "a study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the
precision of the former and the success of the latter" and 'implementation' as
"The fruitless struggle by the talented and underpaid to fulfill promises made
by the rich and ignorant"; 'flowchart' becomes "to obfuscate a problem with
esoteric cartoons". Revised and expanded from "The Devil's DP Dictionary",
McGraw-Hill 1981, ISBN 0-07-034022-6.

The Devouring Fungus: Tales from the Computer Age

Karla Jennings
Norton, 1990
ISBN 0-393-30732-8

The author of this pioneering compendium knits together a great deal of

computer- and hacker-related folklore with good writing and a few well-chosen
cartoons. She has a keen eye for the human aspects of the lore and is very good
at illuminating the psychology and evolution of hackerdom. Unfortunately, a
number of small errors and awkwardnesses suggest that she didn't have the final
manuscript checked over by a native speaker; the glossary in the back is
particularly embarrassing, and at least one classic tale (the Magic Switch
story, retold here under A Story About 'Magic' in Appendix A is given in
incomplete and badly mangled form. Nevertheless, this book is a win overall and
can be enjoyed by hacker and non-hacker alike.

The Soul of a New Machine

Tracy Kidder
Little, Brown, 1981
(paperback: Avon, 1982
ISBN 0-380-59931-7)

This book (a 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner) documents the adventure of the design
of a new Data General computer, the MV-8000 Eagle. It is an amazingly well-done
portrait of the hacker mindset — although largely the hardware hacker — done
by a complete outsider. It is a bit thin in spots, but with enough technical
information to be entertaining to the serious hacker while providing
non-technical people a view of what day-to-day life can be like — the fun, the
excitement, the disasters. During one period, when the microcode and logic were
glitching at the nanosecond level, one of the overworked engineers departed the
company, leaving behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation: "I
am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time shorter than
a season."

Life with UNIX: a Guide for Everyone

Don Libes and Sandy Ressler
Prentice-Hall, 1989
ISBN 0-13-536657-7

The authors of this book set out to tell you all the things about Unix that
tutorials and technical books won't. The result is gossipy, funny, opinionated,
downright weird in spots, and invaluable. Along the way they expose you to
enough of Unix's history, folklore and humor to qualify as a first-class source
for these things. Because so much of today's hackerdom is involved with Unix,
this in turn illuminates many of its in-jokes and preoccupations.

True Names ... and Other Dangers

Vernor Vinge
Baen Books, 1987
ISBN 0-671-65363-6

Hacker demigod Richard Stallman used to say that the title story of this book
"expresses the spirit of hacking best". Until the subject of the next entry came
out, it was hard to even nominate another contender. The other stories in this
collection are also fine work by an author who has since won multiple Hugos and
is one of today's very best practitioners of hard SF.

Snow Crash
Neal Stephenson
Bantam, 1992
ISBN 0-553-56261-4

Stephenson's epic, comic cyberpunk novel is deeply knowing about the hacker
psychology and its foibles in a way no other author of fiction has ever even
approached. His imagination, his grasp of the relevant technical details, and
his ability to communicate the excitement of hacking and its results are
astonishing, delightful, and (so far) unsurpassed.

Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier

Katie Hafner John Markoff
Simon Schuster 1991
ISBN 0-671-68322-5

This book gathers narratives about the careers of three notorious crackers into
a clear-eyed but sympathetic portrait of hackerdom's dark side. The principals
are Kevin Mitnick, "Pengo" and "Hagbard" of the Chaos Computer Club, and Robert
T. Morris (see RTM, sense 2) . Markoff and Hafner focus as much on their
psychologies and motivations as on the details of their exploits, but don't
slight the latter. The result is a balanced and fascinating account,
particularly useful when read immediately before or after Cliff Stoll's The
Cuckoo's Egg. It is especially instructive to compare RTM, a true hacker who
blundered, with the sociopathic phone-freak Mitnick and the alienated,
drug-addled crackers who made the Chaos Club notorious. The gulf between
wizard and wannabee has seldom been made more obvious.

Technobabble
John Barry
MIT Press 1991
ISBN 0-262-02333-4

Barry's book takes a critical and humorous look at the 'technobabble' of

acronyms, neologisms, hyperbole, and metaphor spawned by the computer industry.
Though he discusses some of the same mechanisms of jargon formation that occur
in hackish, most of what he chronicles is actually suit-speak — the obfuscatory
language of press releases, marketroids, and Silicon Valley CEOs rather than the
playful jargon of hackers (most of whom wouldn't be caught dead uttering the
kind of pompous, passive-voiced word salad he deplores).

The Cuckoo's Egg

Clifford Stoll
Doubleday 1989
ISBN 0-385-24946-2

Clifford Stoll's absorbing tale of how he tracked Markus Hess and the Chaos Club
cracking ring nicely illustrates the difference between `hacker' and 'cracker'.
Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha, and his friends at Berkeley and on
the Internet paints a marvelously vivid picture of how hackers and the people
around them like to live and how they think.

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