        
       Following is a dictionary of computer terms and slang.
       31 pages are included here. Because of space limitations 
       on this disk only a small part of the dictionary could be 
       included. The complete dictionary in the registered version 
       is over 1 megabyte. That's 1 million bytes (300 + pages) of 
       valuable information about almost every computer topic and term. 
       In addition to definitions of terms there are also stories, 
       legends, tables, charts, guides, etc. Can be viewed from the menu 
       just as you're doing now.
                 
       Please note: The term hacker is used throughout this dictionary
       to mean a serious computer user; one who experiments and finds
       innovative solutions. This was the original meaning of the word. 
       It has unfortunately recently come to mean something negative and 
       is confused with the term 'cracker' or anyone that tries to break
       into computers. There are no tips in this dictionary for doing 
       anything unnacceptable with a computer. Only definitions, terms, 
       helpful info, anecdotes, listings, etc.   
              

  #========= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.9, =========#

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 appropropriate citation form: "Jargon File 2.9.9" or
"The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 2.9.9.)

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    eric@snark.thyrsus.com       

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:
**************

:About This File:
=================

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 35 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, 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.

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 entries.

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}.  The `outside' reader's attention is particularly directed
to {appendix B}, "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker".  {Appendix C} is a
bibliography of 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.

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

: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 the following:


:1. 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
paradigmatic example was alt.swedish.chef.bork.bork.bork (a "Sesame
Street" reference); other classics include
alt.wesley.crusher.die.die.die,
comp.unix.internals.system.calls.brk.brk.brk,
sci.physics.edward.teller.boom.boom.boom, and
alt.sadistic.dentists.drill.drill.drill.


:2. 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.


:3. 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]


:4. 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

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, note that 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 noted
that the defined plural of `caboose' is `cabeese', and includes an entry
which implies that the plural of `mouse' is {meeces}.  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.


:5. 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!"


:6. Anthromorphization: ----------------------- Semantically, one rich
source of jargon constructions is the hackish tendency to
anthropomorphize hardware and software.  This isn't done in a na"ive
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'.

Of the six listed constructions, verb doubling, peculiar noun
formations, anthromorphization, and (especially) spoken inarticulations
have become quite general; but punning jargon is still largely confined
to MIT and other large universities, and the `-P' convention is found
only where LISPers flourish.

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.

: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).

  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".

  3. Uppercase letters are pronounced as their English letter names; thus
     (for example) /H-L-L/ is equivalent to /aitch el el/.  /Z/ may
     be pronounced /zee/ or /zed/ depending on your local dialect.

  4. Vowels are represented as follows:

     a
            back, that
     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
            father, palm
     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/)

A /*/ 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/.

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

Various abbreviations used frequently in the lexicon are summarized here:

abbrev.
     abbreviation
adj.
     adjective
adv.
     adverb
alt.
     alternate
cav.
     caveat
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:

Berkeley
     University of California at Berkeley
Cambridge
     the university in England (*not* the city in Massachusetts where
     MIT happens to be located!)
BBN
     Bolt, Beranek & Newman
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
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
XEROX PARC
     XEROX's Palo Alto Research Center, site of much pioneering research in
     user interface design and networking
Yale
     Yale University

The Jargon Lexicon
******************

= A =
=====

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

:ABEND: [ABnormal END] /ah'bend/, /*-bend'/ n. 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. 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").

:ad-hockery: /ad-hok'*r-ee/ [Purdue] n. 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 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/).  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/ [UCLA] vt. To make a bonehead move with consequences
   that could have been foreseen with a slight amount of 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
   implemented on the {PDP-10} by Will Crowther as an attempt at
   computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a
   puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods.  Now better known as Adventure,
   but the {{TOPS-10}} operating system permitted only 6-letter
   filenames.  See also {vadding}.

   This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style now 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.

:AI-complete: /A-I k*m-pleet'/ [MIT, Stanford: by analogy with
   `NP-complete' (see {NP-})] adj. 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 (1991) 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 "{A Selection of AI Koans}" in {appendix
   A}).  See also {ha ha only serious}, {mu}, and {{Humor,
   Hacker}}.

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

:AIDX: n. /aydkz/ n. Derogatory term for IBM's perverted version
   of UNIX, AIX, especially for the AIX 3.? used in the IBM RS/6000
   series.  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}.

: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 (see
   also {KISS Principle}).  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.

: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 more than one pointer addresses
   (`aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the
   storage is freed 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.  Also avoidable 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. 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}.
   2. [possibly lowercased] 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.  3. n.obs.
   [PDP-10] 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 was probably 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).

:alt bit: /awlt bit/ [from alternate] adj. See {meta bit}.

:Aluminum Book: [MIT] n. `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: [Purdue] vt. 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).  The {Real World} angle brackets used by
   typographers are actually taller than a less-than or greater-than
   sign.
   See {broket}, {{ASCII}}.

:angry fruit salad: n. A bad visual-interface design that uses too
   many colors.  This derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo
   colors found in canned fruit salad.  Too often one sees similar
   affects 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-nott/ [IRC] n. See {robot}.

:AOS: 1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay-os/ (West Coast) [based on a
   PDP-10 increment instruction] vt.,obs. To increase the amount of
   something.  "AOS the campfire."  Usage: considered silly, and now
   obsolete.  Now largely supplanted by {bump}.  See {SOS}.  2. 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. Algebraic Operating System, in
   reference to those calculators which use infix instead of postfix
   (reverse Polish) notation.

   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.  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.  Oppose {tool}, {operating
   system}.

:arc: [primarily MSDOS] vt. To create a compressed {archive} from a
   group of files using SEA ARC, PKWare PKARC, or a compatible
   program.  Rapidly becoming obsolete as the ARC compression method
   is falling into disuse, having been replaced by newer compression
   techniques.  See {tar and feather}, {zip}.

:arc wars: [primarily MSDOS] n. {holy wars} over which archiving
   program one should use.  The first arc war was sparked when System
   Enhancement Associates (SEA) sued PKWare for copyright and
   trademark infringement on its ARC program.  PKWare's PKARC
   outperformed ARC on both compression and speed while largely
   retaining compatibility (it introduced a new compression type that
   could be disabled for backward-compatibility).  PKWare settled out
   of court to avoid enormous legal costs (both SEA and PKWare are
   small companies); as part of the settlement, the name of PKARC was
   changed to PKPAK.  The public backlash against SEA for bringing
   suit helped to hasten the demise of ARC as a standard when PKWare
   and others introduced new, incompatible archivers with better
   compression algorithms.

:archive: n. 1. A collection of several files bundled into one file
   by a program such as `ar(1)', `tar(1)', `cpio(1)',
   or {arc} for shipment or archiving (sense 2).  See also {tar
   and feather}.  2. A collection of files or archives (sense 1) made
   available from an `archive site' via {FTP} or an email server.

: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 semi-mythical `malloc:
   corrupt arena' message supposedly emitted when some early versions
   became terminally confused.  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}.

:armor-plated: n. Syn. for {bulletproof}.

:asbestos: adj. Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect
   one from {flame}s.  Important cases of this include {asbestos
   longjohns} and {asbestos cork award}, but it is used more
   generally.

: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'.  Persons in any 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 often 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:: [American Standard Code for Information Interchange]
   /as'kee/ n. The predominant character set encoding of present-day
   computers.  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
   and 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}.  Ordinary
   parentheticals provide some usage information.

     !
          Common: {bang}; pling; excl; shriek; <exclamation mark>.
          Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey;
          wham; [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]; octothorpe.  Rare: flash; crosshatch;
          grid; 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: left/right paren; left/right parenthesis; left/right;
          paren/thesis; open/close paren; open/close; open/close
          parenthesis; left/right banana.  Rare: so/al-ready;
          lparen/rparen; <opening/closing parenthesis>; open/close round
          bracket, parenthisey/unparenthisey; [wax/wane]; left/right
          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>; left/right angle bracket;
          bra/ket; left/right 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: left/right square bracket; <opening/closing bracket>;
          bracket/unbracket; left/right bracket.  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: open/close brace; left/right brace; left/right
          squiggly; left/right squiggly bracket/brace; left/right curly
          bracket/brace; <opening/closing brace>.  Rare: brace/unbrace;
          curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; left/right 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.

   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; 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

                               Figure 1.

   And here are some very silly examples:


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

                               Figure 2.

   There is an important subgenre of humorous ASCII art that takes
   advantage of the names of the various characters to tell a
   pun-based joke.

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

                               Figure 3.

   Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire
   flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows.  Four of these are
   reproduced in Figure 2; here are three more:


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

                               Figure 4.

:attoparsec: n. `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'to-boh-got`*-foh'bee-*/ n. See {bogotify}.

:automagically: /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ or /aw-toh-maj'i-k*l-ee/ 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."

:avatar: [CMU, Tektronix] n. Syn. {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: 1. n. [UNIX techspeak] An interpreted language for massaging
   text data developed by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian
   Kernighan (the name is 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)'.

= B =
=====

:back door: n. A hole in the security of a system deliberately left
   in place by designers or maintainers.  The motivation for this 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.

   Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than
   anyone expected or planned, and a few have become widely known.
   The infamous {RTM} worm of late 1988, for example, used a back door
   in the {BSD} UNIX `sendmail(8)' utility.

   Ken Thompson's 1983 Turing Award lecture to the ACM revealed the
   existence of a back door in early UNIX versions that may have
   qualified as the most fiendishly clever security hack of all time.
   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, leaving his back door in place
   and active but with no trace in the sources.

   The talk that revealed this truly moby hack was published as
   "Reflections on Trusting Trust", `Communications of the
   ACM 27', 8 (August 1984), pp. 761--763.

   Syn. {trap door}; may also be called a `wormhole'.  See also
   {iron box}, {cracker}, {worm}, {logic bomb}.

: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, but the net hardly
   noticed.

: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 1991 include 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}.

:backgammon:: See {bignum}, {moby}, 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/ [from
   `backward compatibility'] n. A property of hardware or software
   revisions in which previous protocols, formats, and layouts are
   discarded in favor of `new and improved' protocols, formats, and
   layouts.  Occurs usually when making the transition between major
   releases.  When the change is so drastic that the old formats are
   not retained in the new version, it is said to be `backward
   combatable'.  See {flag day}.

:BAD: /B-A-D/ [IBM: acronym, `Broken As Designed'] adj.  Said
   of a program that is {bogus} because of bad design and misfeatures
   rather than because of bugginess.  See {working as designed}.

:Bad Thing: [from the 1930 Sellar & Yeatman parody `1066 And
   All That'] n. Something that can't possibly result in improvement
   of the subject.  This term is always capitalized, as in "Replacing
   all of the 9600-baud modems with bicycle 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. 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. adj. `bagbiting' 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}).  4. `bite
   the bag' vi. To fail in some manner.  "The computer keeps crashing
   every 5 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.

   A program called Lexiphage on the old MIT AI PDP-10 would draw on
   a selected victim's bitmapped terminal the words "THE BAG" in
   ornate letters, and then a pair of jaws biting pieces of it off.
   This is the first and to date only known example of a program
   *intended* to be a bagbiter.

:bamf: /bamf/ 1. [from old X-Men comics] interj. Notional sound
   made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's
   vicinity.  Often used in {virtual reality} (esp. {MUD})
   electronic {fora} when a character wishes to make a dramatic
   entrance or exit.  2. The sound of magical transformation, used in
   virtual reality {fora} like sense 1.  3. [from `Don
   Washington's Survival Guide'] n. Acronym used to refer to one of 
   the handful of nastiest monsters on an LPMUD or other similar MUD.

: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.  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 thing
   (because these machines have often been sufficiently slow and
   poorly designed to make it necessary; see {ill-behaved}).
   There, the term usually refers to bypassing the 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 are held in high regard.

:barf: /barf/ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit']
   1. interj.  Term of disgust.  This is the closest hackish
   equivalent of the Val\-speak "gag me with a spoon". (Like, euwww!)
   See {bletch}.  2. vi. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar
   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.  May mean to give an error message.  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 message}s 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 old Hanna-Barbera cartoons.


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