Citation: From Jargon 2.9.12 - WinHelp version (by GBS).


The Jargon file 2.9.12

#== THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.9.12, 10 MAY 1993 ==#

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

illuminating many aspects of hackish tradition, folklore, and humor.

See How to use the Windows version and About the Windows version.

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 2.9.12" or

"The on-line hacker Jargon File, version 2.9.12, 10 MAY 1993".)

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  esr@snark.thyrsus.com  (215)-296-5718

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.


How to use the Windows version

You will probably want to read through the introductory part of

the file first.  To do this, simply use the browse buttons up

there at the top of this window ( << and >> ) to move forward and

back.  You can click on any of the underlined (green) topics to

jump to any topic of interest. The SEARCH button will bring up a

list of the entries in the lexicon.

Be sure not to miss the assorted stuff in appendix A,

appendix B and of course appendix C!  Remember, just

use the browse buttons to move forward to the next item.


About the Windows version

With the exception of this entry and the previous one, this is the

complete text of version 2.9.12 of the Jargon file.

If you like it, please share it with your friends.  It's free!

This is my second Jargon to Windows translation effort.  I have

cleaned up the most serious problems from the previous edition

which was based on version 2.9.9 of the file, but have not had as

much time as I would have liked to add more spiffy features.

The file was compiled with COMPRESSION enabled this time so the file

is a lot smaller even though it actually contains several thousand

more lines of text.

I hope you will find it useful, entertaining, and enlightening.

New versions will generally be available on Compu$erve shortly after

a new version of the Jargon file becomes available.  Look in the

WINNEW or WINFUN forums, or use the IBM File Finder (GO IBMFF) to

search using the keyword 'jargon' or the submitter 73250,2445.

This version was uploaded to the WINFUN forum under the name JHYPE2.ZIP.

GBS - 6/6/93

Please send any comments about the windows version of this file (not

the content, as I am not one of the authors of this file) to:

Gavin Scott

Quest Software

Internet: gavin@quests.com

Compu$erve: 73250,2445


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.

Hackish 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 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.


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 hackish 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 hackish 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 File's 2.x.x versions 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 hackish 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 <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> maintains the new File with

assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. <gls@think.com>; 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 jargon@thyrsus.com

(UUCP-only sites without connections to an autorouting smart site can

use ...!uunet!snark!jargon).

(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

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 (as well as The

Untimely Demise of Mabel The Monkey).

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 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 <jn11+@andrew.cmu.edu>, Bernie Cosell

<cosell@bbn.com>, Earl Boebert <boebert@SCTC.com>, and Joe Morris

<jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org>.

We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished

linguists.  David Stampe <stampe@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu> and Charles

Hoequist <hoequist@bnr.ca> contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane

<jgk@osc.osc.com> helped us improve the pronunciation guides.

A few bits of this text quote previous works.  We are indebted to Brian

A. LaMacchia <bal@zurich.ai.mit.edu> for obtaining permission for us to

use material from the `TMRC Dictionary'; also, Don Libes

<libes@cme.nist.gov> contributed some appropriate material from his

excellent book `Life With UNIX'.  We thank Per Lindberg <per@front.se>,

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 <Marc_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com> 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 <msb@sq.com> to the final manuscript; he read and reread

many drafts, checked facts, caught typos, submitted an amazing number of

thoughtful comments, and did yeoman service in catching typos and minor

usage bobbles.  Mr. Brader's rare combination of enthusiasm,

persistence, wide-ranging technical knowledge, and precisionism in

matters of language made his help invaluable, and the sustained volume

and quality of his input over many months only allowed him to escape

co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins.

Finally, George V. Reilly <gvr@cs.brown.edu> helped with TeX arcana and

painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions; Steve Summit

<scs@adam.mit.edu> contributed a number of excellent new entries and

many small improvements to 2.9.10; and Eric Tiedemann <est@thyrsus.com>

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 the following:


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

is used 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; 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!"


Anthromorphization

 -------------------- 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'.

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.


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 quirk 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*.

Another habit is that of using angle-bracket enclosure to genericize a

term; this derives from conventions used in BNF.  Uses like the

following are common:

So this <ethnic> walks into a bar one day, and...

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

text

Be nice to this fool^H^H^H^Hgentleman, he's in from corporate HQ.

would be read as "Be nice to this fool, I mean this 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.

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 XOR in C.  Despite this, it

was favored 3:1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of USENET.  It is used

consistently in this text.

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 <jrh578689@thudpucker.com> J. R. Hacker wrote:

>I resently 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.

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 hackish 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 the notation 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.

In 1991 practice is still evolving, and disputes over the `correct'

inclusion style occasionally lead to holy wars.  One variant style

reported uses the citation character `|' in place of `>' for extended

quotations where original variations in indentation are being retained.

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 English'.  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.

A few notes on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are

parallel with English idioms and thus comprehensible to

English-speakers.


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".  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 /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/.

Note that the above table reflects only 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).  Many American and British

dialects make different distinctions.  One that's caused particular

comment is that our /o/ represents two different sounds in most other

dialects, one of which is often rendered as /ah/.

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.

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.

Prefix ** 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

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

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

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

========================

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 --- 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.

The Jargon File will be regularly maintained and re-posted from now on

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

 [ABnormal END] /o'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 grinders.  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 against 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/ [UCLA] vt. 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

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 six-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.


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 marked by

customary observances on the 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'/ [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 (1993) 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.  Also, compare

terminak, 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

 [MS-DOS] 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

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).


alt bit

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


altmode

 n. Syn. alt sense 3.


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).  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/ [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. 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.

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.) 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

 [acronym, `Automated Retroactive Minimal Moderation'] n. A

USENET robot created by Dick Depew of Munroe Falls, Ohio.  It 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 amusememt 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" (instantly 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

 [American Standard Code for Information Interchange]

/as'kee/ n. The predominant character set encoding of present-day

computers.  he 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; cross-hatch; oc-to-thorpe; flash;

<square>, pig-pen; tic-tac-toe; 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; o-pen-/-close;

par-en/the-sis; o/c paren; o/c par-en-the-sis; l/r

paren-the-sis; l/r ba-na-na.  Rare: so/al-ready;

lparen/rparen; <opening/closing parenthesis>; o/c round

bracket, l/r round bracket, [wax/wane];

par-en-this-ey/un-par-en-this-ey; 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/great-er 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

brack-et>; brack-et/un-brack-et.  Rare: square-/-un-square; [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/un-curly; 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.

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

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.


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

 [from Gk. `atomos', indivisible] adj. 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.  Esp. used to convey that an operation cannot be

screwed up by interrupts.  "This routine locks the file and

increments the file's semaphore atomically."  This usage 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'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 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.

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; the hack perpetuated itself

invisibly, leaving the 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.


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 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 (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/ [from

`backward compatibility'] n.  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/ [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 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.

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, followed 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.


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/ [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, 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

 [acronym, from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction

Code] n. A programming language, originally designed for

Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s,

which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in

proto-hackers.  This is another case (like Pascal) of 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 is (a) 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.


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/ [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/ [contraction of `bulletin board'] n.

1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of BBS systems

running on personal micros, less frequently of a USENET

newsgroup (in fact, use of 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 a 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/ [abbreviation, `Bulletin Board System'] n. An electronic

bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can

log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically)

into topic 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

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

transfer softcopy of a file electronically; most often in

combining forms such as `beam me a copy' or `beam that over to

his site'.  Compare blast, snarf, BLT.


beanie key

 [Mac users] n. See command key.


beep

 n.,v. Syn. feep.  This term seems to be preferred among micro

hobbyists.


beige toaster

 n. A Macintosh. See toaster; compare

Macintrash, maggotbox.


bells and whistles

 [by analogy with the toyboxes on theater

organs] n. Features added to a program or system to make it more

flavorful from a hacker's point of view, without necessarily

adding to its utility for its primary function.  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/ [from `berserk', via the name of a

now-deceased record label] n. Humorous distortion of `Berkeley'

used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the

BSD UNIX hackers.  See software bloat, Missed'em-five,

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 small number 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 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.


BIFF

 /bif/ [USENET] n. The most famous pseudo, and the

prototypical newbie.  Articles from BIFF are characterized by

all uppercase letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos,

`cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ HE"S 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 naivet'e.  BIFF posts articles using his

elder brother's VIC-20.  BIFF'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

BIFF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by BIFF's (unfortunately

invalid) electronic mail address: BIFF@BIT.NET.

[1993: Now It Can Be Told!  My spies inform me that BIFF was

originally created by Joe Talmadge <jat@cup.hp.com>, 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 (it had a well-known habit of

barking whenever the mailman came).  No relation to

BIFF.


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

 [IBM] n. The power switch on a computer, esp. the

`Emergency Pull' switch on an IBM mainframe or the power switch

on an IBM PC where it really is large and red.  "This !@%$%

bitty box is hung again; time to hit the Big 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

 [From Swift's `Gulliver's Travels' via the famous

paper `On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace' by Danny Cohen,

USC/ISI IEN 137, dated April 1, 1980] adj. 1. Describes a computer

architecture in which, within a given multi-byte 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 mid-1993, are big-endian.  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; e.g., me@uk.ac.wigan.cs.  Most gateway sites have

ad-hockery in their mailers to handle this, but can still be

confused.  In particular, the address above could be in the

U.K. (domain uk) or Czechoslovakia (domain cs).


bignum

 /big'nuhm/ [orig. from MIT MacLISP] n. 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

 [from the mainstream meaning and `Binary digIT'] n.

1. [techspeak] The unit of information; the amount of information

obtained by asking a yes-or-no question for which the two outcomes

are equally probable.  2. [techspeak] A 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 is now (1991) coming

back into use on some RISC architectures because it consumes such

an infinitesimal part of the processor that it actually makes sense

not to have a UART.


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:

high  low bits

bits  0000 0001 0010 0011 0100 0101 0110 0111 1000 1001

010        !    "    #    $    %    &    '    (    )

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/ [acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] n.

Everybody's least favorite piece of the network (see

network, the).  The BITNET hosts are a collection of IBM dinosaurs and

VAXen (the latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that 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 is also notorious as the apparent home

of BIFF.


bits

 n.pl. 1. Information.  Examples: "I need some bits about file

formats."  ("I need to know about file formats.")  Compare

core dump, sense 4.  2. Machine-readable representation of a document,

specifically as contrasted with paper:  "I 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).


blargh

 /blarg/ [MIT] n. 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. vt.,n. Synonym for BLT, used esp. for large data

sends over a network or comm line.  Opposite of snarf.  Usage:

uncommon.  The variant `blat' has been reported.  2. vt.

[HP/Apollo] Synonymous with nuke (sense 3).  Sometimes 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/ [from Yiddish/German `brechen', to vomit, poss.

via comic-strip exclamation `blech'] interj.  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,

bagbiter, 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.


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.


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 in 1991 the trend is away from

them (however, see cycle of reincarnation).  Syn.

raster blaster.


blivet

 /bliv'*t/ [allegedly from a World War II military term

meaning "ten pounds of manure in a five-pound bag"] n. 1. An

intractable problem.  2. A crucial piece of hardware that can't be

fixed or replaced if it breaks.  3. A tool that 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

 [acronym, Binary Large OBject] n. 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.


block

 [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

 [from the television series

"Dr. Who"] n. 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.


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

 [prob. from mining and tunneling jargon] vi. 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 Glue

 [IBM] n. IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an

incredibly losing and bletcherous communications protocol

widely favored at commercial shops that don't know any better.  The

official IBM definition is "that which binds 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.  See

nanotechnology.


blue wire

 [IBM] n. 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/ [Great Britain] n. 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 trebled. "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 6.


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. (affectionate) Obsolete but still working hardware, especially

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.


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.


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/ [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] n.

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).  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 /mi:k`roh-len'*t/

(uL); the consensus is that this is the largest unit practical

for everyday use.  2. The potential field generated by a

bogon flux; see quantum bogodynamics.  See also bogon flux,

bogon filter, bogus.

Historical note: The microLenat was invented as an attack against

noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a

tenured graduate student.  Doug had failed the student on an important exam for

giving only "AI is bogus" as his answer to the questions.  The

slur is generally 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.


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/ [from quantum physics] n. A repeatable

bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but

well-defined set of conditions.  Antonym of heisenbug; see also

mandelbug, schroedinbug.


boink

 /boynk/ [USENET: ascribed to the TV series "Cheers"

and "Moonlighting"] 1. To have sex with; compare bounce,

sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the

variant `bonk' is more common.  2. After the 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

 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,

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.


boot

 [techspeak; from `by one's bootstraps'] v.,n. To load and

initialize the operating system on a machine.  This usage is no

longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to

some derivatives that are still jargon.

The derivative `reboot' implies that the machine hasn't been

down for long, or that the boot is a bounce intended to clear

some state of wedgitude.  This is sometimes used of human

thought processes, as in the following exchange: "You've lost

me."  "OK, reboot.  Here's the theory...."

This term is 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

 [UNIX] n. Notification message returned to sender

by a site unable to relay email to the intended

Internet address recipient or the next link in a bang path (see

bounce).  Reasons might include a nonexistent or 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

 [from a Greek word for turning like an ox while

plowing] n. 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/ [by analogy with VAXen] pl.n. Fanciful

plural of box often encountered in the phrase `UNIX boxen',

used to describe commodity UNIX hardware.  The connotation is

that any two UNIX boxen are interchangeable.


boxology

 /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/ [from the name of a TV

clown even more losing than Ronald McDonald] adj. Resembling or

having the quality of a bozo; that is, clownish, ludicrously wrong,

unintentionally humorous.  Compare wonky, 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

 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

 [IBM: from the location of one of the

corporation's facilities] n. Any unexpected jump in a program that

produces catastrophic or just plain weird results.  See

jump off into never-never land, hyperspace.


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.  The above example may not, after all, be

hypothetical. -- ESR]


breath-of-life packet

 [XEROX PARC] n. 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 `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.  There is at least one documented

instance of an Internet subnet with limited addres-table slots in a

gateway machine in which kiss-of-death 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.


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

 [IBM] n. The error code displayed on line 25 of a

3270 terminal (or a PC emulating a 3270) for various kinds of

protocol violations and "unexpected" error conditions (including

connection to a down computer).  On a PC, 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....


broket

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

`broken bracket'] n. Either of the characters `<' and `>',

when used as paired enclosing delimiters.  This word

originated as a contraction of the phrase `broken bracket', that

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.


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 System Distribution'] a

family of UNIX versions for the DEC VAX and PDP-11

developed by Bill Joy and others at Berzerkeley starting

around 1980, incorporating paged virtual memory, TCP/IP 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.  See UNIX, USG UNIX.


BUAF

 // [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] n. 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

 // [abbreviation, from alt.fan.warlord] n. 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; he first suggested the idea of an EDIT

key to set the 8th bit of an otherwise 7-bit ASCII character.  This

was used in a number of editors written at Stanford or in its

environs (TV-EDIT and NLS being the best-known).  Some sources

claim that `Bucky' was Niklaus Wirth's nickname st Stanford,

but Wirth himself does not recall this.

Whatever its origins, the term spread to MIT and CMU early and is

now in general use.  See double bucky,

quadruple bucky.


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 persistent 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!

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."

[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.  Thus, the

process of investigating the original-computer-bug bug fixed it in

an entirely unexpected way, by making the myth true!  --- ESR]

[1992 update: the plot thickens!  A usually reliable source reports

having seen The Bug at the Smithsonian in 1978.  I am unable to

reconcile the conflicting histories I have been offered, and merely

report this fact here. --- 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.


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 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

 [from Lewis Carroll's "Jabberwocky"] v. Like flame,

but connotes that the source is truly clueless and ineffectual

(mere flamers can be competent).  A term of deep contempt.

"There's some guy on the phone burbling about how he got 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.


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/ [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/ [techspeak] n. A unit of memory or data equal to

the amount used to represent one character; on modern architectures

this is usually 8 bits, but may be 9 on 36-bit machines.  Some

older architectures used `byte' for quantities of 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/ [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.  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.


calculator

 [Cambridge] n. Syn. for bitty box.


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 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

 [historically, `according to religious law'] adj. The

usual or standard state or manner of something.  This word has a

somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics.  Two formulas such

as 9 + x and x + 9 are said to be equivalent 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.

This word has an interesting history.  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' 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 use

of jargon.  Over his loud objections, GLS and RMS made a point of

using it as much 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. 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

 [from `cut and paste'] n. 1. The addition of a new

feature to an existing system by selecting the code from an

existing feature and pasting it in with minor changes.  Common in

telephony circles because most operations in a 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.


casters-up mode

 [IBM] n. 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 "

A Selection of AI Koans" (Appendix A).


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."


cdr

 /ku'dr/ or /kuh'dr/ [from LISP] vt. To skip past the

first item from a list of things (generalized from the LISP

operation on binary tree structures, which returns a list

consisting of all but the first element of its argument).  In the

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 7090 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 was also called `chaff', `computer

confetti', and `keypunch droppings'.

Historical note: One correspondent believes `chad' (sense 2)

derives from the Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which

cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab

folded back, 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'.


chad box

 n.  boxes inside them, 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. [orig. from BASIC's `CHAIN' statement] vi. To hand

off execution to a child or successor without going through the

OS command interpreter that invoked it.  The state of the

parent program is lost and there is no returning to it.  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. 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

 [IRC] n. The basic unit of discussion on IRC.  Once

one joins a channel, everything one types is read by others on that

channel.  Channels can either be named with numbers or 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

 [IRC, GEnie] n. 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/ [IRC] n. 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/ [IRC] n. 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.


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

 [Cambridge] n. Someone who wastes computer time on

number-crunching when you'd far rather the machine were doing

something more productive, such as working out anagrams of your

name or printing Snoopy calendars or running life 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

 [Commodore] n. The Commodore Business Machines logo,

which strongly resembles a poultry part.  Rendered in ASCII as

`C='.  With the arguable exception of the Amiga (see amoeba),

Commodore's machines are notoriously crocky 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/ [MIT] n.,obs. The LISP Machine Manual, so

called because the title was wrapped around the cover so only those

letters showed on the front.


Chinese Army technique

 n. Syn. Mongolian Hordes technique.


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/ [IRC] n. 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

 [from automotive slang via wargaming] n. Showy features

added to attract users but contributing little or nothing to

the power of a system.  "The 3D icons in Motif are just chrome,

but they certainly are *pretty* chrome!"  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".


clover key

 [Mac users] n. See feature key.


clustergeeking

 /kluh'st*r-gee`king/ [CMU] n. Spending more time

at a computer cluster doing CS homework than most people spend

breathing.


COBOL

 /koh'bol/ [COmmon Business-Oriented Language] n.

(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.  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 police

 [by analogy with George Orwell's `thought police'] n.

A mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst

into one's office and arrest one for violating programming style

rules.  May be used either seriously, to 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.


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-math-ema-tic-al 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.L. 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/ [ITS: from the feature supporting on-line

chat; the term may spelled with one or two m's] Syn. for

talk mode.


command key

 [Mac users] n. 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 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 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'; `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. 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 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.


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.


confuser

 n. Common soundalike slang for `computer'.  Usually

encountered in compounds such as `confuser room', `personal

confuser', `confuser guru'.  Usage: silly.


connector conspiracy

 [probably came into prominence with the

appearance of the KL-10 (one model of the PDP-10), none of

whose connectors matched anything else] n. The tendency of

manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors 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.  The Apple

Macintosh takes 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.  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

 [by analogy with techspeak `context-free'] adj.

Used of a message that adds nothing to the recipient's knowledge.

Though this adjective is sometimes applied to flamage, it more

usually connotes derision for communication 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".

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.


cookbook

 [from amateur electronics and radio] n. A book of small

code segments that the reader can use to do various magic

things in programs.  One current example is the

`PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook' by Adobe

Systems, Inc (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

 [UNIX, by opposition with raw mode] n. 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. Syn. cookie monster.


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

 [from the children's TV program "Sesame

Street"] n. Any of a family of early (1970s) hacks reported on

TOPS-10, ITS, Multics, and elsewhere that would lock

up either the victim's terminal (on a time-sharing machine) or the

console (on a batch mainframe), repeatedly demanding "I

WANT A COOKIE".  The required responses ranged in complexity from

"COOKIE" through "HAVE A COOKIE" and upward.  See also

wabbit.


copious free time

 [Apple; orig. fr. the intro to Tom Lehrer's

song "It Makes A Fellow Proud To Be A Soldier"] n. 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

 /ko'pee-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/ [play on `copyright'] n. 1. The

copyright notice (`General Public License') carried by GNU

EMACS and other Free Software Foundation software, granting reuse

and reproduction rights to all comers (but see also

General Public Virus).  2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to

achieve similar aims.


copywronged

 /ko'pee-rongd/ [play on `copyright'] adj. 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, 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/ [originally, the name of a cat] n. 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

 [Sun, from William Gibson's cyberpunk SF] n. Synonym

for hacker.  It is reported that at Sun this word is often

said with reverence.


CP/M

 /C-P-M/ n. [Control Program for Microcomputers] An early

microcomputer OS written by hacker Gary Kildall for 8080- and

Z80-based machines, very popular in the late 1970s but virtually

wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM 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.

Both these neologisms reflected 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.

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, the.


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

 [from automotive slang] vt. Verb used to describe the

performance of a machine, especially sustained performance.  "This

box cranks (or, cranks at) about 6 megaflops, with a burst mode

of twice that on vectorized operations."


CrApTeX

 /krap'tekh/ [University of York, England] n. 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 happened 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. 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.


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 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' (see

bagbiter), 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] 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

 [from the American scatologism crock of shit] n. 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.

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.


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/ [origin unknown; poss. from `crusty']

adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly over-complex.  The canonical

example is "This is standard old crufty DEC software".  In fact,

one fanciful theory of the origin of `crufty' 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)."


crumb

 n. Two binary digits; a quad.  Larger than a bit,

smaller than a nybble.  Considered silly.  Syn. tayste.


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

 [parallel with `tubing'] vi. 1. Hacking on an IPSC (Intel

Personal SuperComputer) hypercube.  "Louella's gone cubing

*again*!!"  2. Hacking Rubik's Cube or related puzzles,

either physically or mathematically.  3. An indescribable 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/ [WPI: from the DEC abbreviation CUSP, for `Commonly

Used System Program', i.e., a utility program used by many people]

adj. 1. (of a program) Well-written.  2. Functionally excellent.  A

program that performs well and interfaces 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/ [coined by Ted Nelson] n. Obfuscatory

tech-talk.  Verbiage with a high MEGO factor.  The computer

equivalent of bureaucratese.


cyberpunk

 /si:'ber-puhnk/ [orig. by SF writer Bruce Bethke

and/or editor Gardner Dozois] n.,adj. A subgenre of SF launched

in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel `Neuromancer'

(though its roots go back through Vernor Vinge's `True Names'

(see "True Names ... and Other Dangers" 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.


cyberspace

 /si:'ber-spays/ n. 1. Notional `information-space'

loaded with visual cues and navigable with brain-computer

interfaces called `cyberspace decks'; a characteristic prop of

cyberpunk SF.  At the time of this writing (mid-1991),

serious efforts to construct virtual reality interfaces

modeled explicitly on Gibsonian cyberspace are already under way,

using more conventional devices such as glove sensors and binocular

TV headsets.  Few hackers are prepared to deny outright the

possibility of a cyberspace someday evolving out of the network

(see network, the).  2. Occasionally, the metaphoric location

of the mind of a person in hack mode.  Some hackers report

experiencing strong eidetic imagery when in hack mode;

interestingly, independent reports 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, 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

 [coined by Ivan Sutherland ca. 1970] n.

Term used to refer to a well-known effect whereby function in a

computing system family is migrated out to special-purpose

peripheral hardware for speed, then the peripheral 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 batch jobs.  Implies that interactive tasks such as

editing are done on other machines on the network, such as

workstations.


D. C. Power Lab

 n. The former site of 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/ [from the mythological meaning,

later rationalized as the acronym `Disk And Execution MONitor'] n.

A program that is not invoked explicitly, but lies dormant waiting

for some condition(s) to occur.  The idea is 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 (1993) usage.


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.


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?'" 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 it has since

become much more exclusively suit-oriented and boring.


DAU

 /dow/ [German Fidonet] n. German acronym for D"ummster

Anzunehmender User (stupidest imaginable user).  From the

engin-eering-slang GAU for Gr"osster Anzunehmender Unfall (worst

foreseeable accident, esp. of a LNG tank farm plant or something

with similarly disastrous consequences).See cretin, fool,

loser and weasel.


day mode

 n. See phase (sense 1).  Used of people only.


dd

 /dee-dee/ [UNIX: from IBM JCL] vt. 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) 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.

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.


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.


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.  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.


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 Star

 [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/ v. Common verbal shorthand for decrement, i.e.

`decrease by one' (one doesn't tend to see the sbbreviation in

writing or email).  Especially used by assembly programmers, as many

assembly languages (including those for Intel chips) 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

 [from nuclear physics] n.,vi. 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/ [from dec- and nybble; the original

spelling seems to have been `decle'] n. 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.


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

 [poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] n. 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

 [from the traditional Czechoslovakian method of

assassinating prime ministers, via SF fandom] n. 1. Proper karmic

retribution for an incorrigible punster.  "Oh, ghod, that was

*awful*!"  "Quick! Defenestrate him!"  2. The act of

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. [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. To modify code to remove problems detected

when linting.  Confusingly, this process is also referred to

as `linting' code.


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 national reputation,

and a major role in the development of at least one design, tool,

or game used by or known to more than half of the hacker community.

To qualify as a genuine demigod, the 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) and Richard M. Stallman (inventor of

EMACS).  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

 [Sun] n. 1. The state of being heads down in order

to finish code in time for a demo, usually due yesterday.

2. A mode in which video games sit 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.


depeditate

 /dee-ped'*-tayt/ [by (faulty) analogy with

`decapitate'] vt.  Humorously, to cut off the feet of.  When one is

using some computer-aided typesetting tools, careless placement of

text blocks within a page or above a rule can 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.


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'/ [USENET] v. To automatically generate a

large amount of garbage to the net, esp. from an automated posting

program gone wild.  See ARMM.


Devil 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).


devo

 /dee'voh/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A person in a

development group.  See also doco and mango.


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

 [USENET] n. 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.


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

 [XEROX PARC] n. 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] n. 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 under 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

 [play on `Associated Press'; perhaps inspired

by a reference in the 1949 Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Up,

Doc?"] n. 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.


do protocol

 [from network protocol programming] vi. 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).


doco

 /do'koh/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A

documentation writer.  See also devo and mango.


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.


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. 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, esr@snark.thyrsus.com specifies the machine

called snark in the subdomain called thyrsus within the

top-level domain called com.  See also big-endian, sense

2.  2. Said of a site, mailer, or routing program which knows how

to handle domainist addresses.  3. Said of a person (esp. a site

admin) who prefers domain addressing, supports a domainist mailer,

or prosyletizes for domainist addressing and disdains

bang paths.  This term is now (1993) semi-obsolete, as most sites have

converted.


Don't do that, then!

 [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.  Most

dongles on the market today (1991) 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

transferrable 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 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 BIFF, pseudo.


down

 1. adj. Not operating.  "The up escalator is down" is

considered a humorous thing to say, and "The elevator is down"

always means "The elevator isn't working" and never refers to

what floor the elevator is on.  With respect to computers, this

term has passed into the mainstream; the extension to other kinds

of machine is still hackish.  2. `go down' vi. To stop

functioning; usually said of the system.  The message from the

console that every hacker hates to hear from the operator is

"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'/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt. To plop

something down in the middle.  Usage: silly.  "DPB yourself into

that couch there."  The connotation would be that the couch is

full except for one slot just big enough for 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

 [IBM] v. Syn. for flush (sense 2).  Has a connotation

of finality about it; one speaks of draining a device before taking

it offline.


dread high-bit disease

 n. A condition endemic to PRIME (a.k.a.

PR1ME) minicomputers that results in all the characters having

their high (0x80) bit ON rather than OFF.  This of course makes

transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to

mention talking to true 8-bit devices.  Folklore had 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 heroicly to cure it.

Whoever was responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the

most cretinous design tradeoffs ever made.  See meta bit.

A few other machines have exhibited similar brain damage.


DRECNET

 /drek'net/ [from Yiddish/German `dreck', meaning

filth] n. Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol

used in the VMS community.  So called because DEC helped write

the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly 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. A person (esp. a low-level bureaucrat or

service-bus-i-ness 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

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

 [prob. by analogy with drop-outs] n. Spurious

characters appearing on a terminal or console as a result of line

noise or a system malfunction of some sort.  Esp. used when these

are interspersed with one's own typed input.  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 (but see Appendix B).  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

mass-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

 (also `mouse on drugs') n. A malady

exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers.  The

typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in

random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual

mouse.  Can 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'/ [Purdue] n. Notional cause of a

novice's mistake made by the experienced, especially one made while

running as root under UNIX, e.g., typing `rm -r *' or

`mkfs' on a mounted file system.  Compare adger.


dumbed down

 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/ [FidoNet] n. Software that is

supposed to detect and delete duplicates of a message that may

have reached the FidoNet system via different routes.


dup loop

 /d[y]oop loop/ (also `dupe loop') [FidoNet] n. 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/ 32 bits, by analogy with nybble and

byte.  Usage: rare and extremely silly.  See also playte,

tayste, crumb.


earthquake

 [IBM] n. The ultimate real-world shock test for

computer hardware.  Hackish sources at IBM deny 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

 [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt observed in

the U.S. and many parts of Europe] n. 1. A message hidden in the

object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons

disassembling or browsing the code.  2. A message, graphic, or

sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in

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

 [IBM] n. 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/ [abbreviation,

Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] n. 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

 [IBM] n. The sort said to be possessed by

persons for whom the transition from punched card to tape was

traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet).  It is said

that these people, including (according to an 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, a road through the San Francisco

peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City

and many portions of which are still intact.  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 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-ol'/)

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.)


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

 [from mathematical usage] adj. 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.


ELIZA effect

 /*-li:'z* *-fekt'/ [AI community] n. The tendency of

humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience.

For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol `+' that

makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's 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 psychoanalyst by re-phrasing 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/ [from Editing MACroS] n. 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') 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 arranged in a net work".

A use from 1480 is given. The word is derived from French

`emmailleure', network.


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. 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/ [abbreviation, `End Of File'] n. 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/ [End Of Line] n. Syn. for newline, derived

perhaps from the original CDC6600 Pascal.  Now rare, but widely

recognized and occasionally used for brevity.  Used in the

example entry under BNF.  See also EOF.


EOU

 /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

 [UNIX: prob. from astronomical timekeeping] n. The time

and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and

timestamp values.  Under most UNIX versions the epoch is 00:00:00

GMT, January 1, 1970; under VMS, it's 00:00:00 GMT of November 17,

1858 (base date of the U.S. Naval Observatory's ephemerides).

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

 Syn. epoch.  Webster's Unabridged makes these words

almost synonymous, but `era' usually connotes a span of time rather

than a point in time.  The epoch usage is recommended.


Eric Conspiracy

 n. A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named

Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous

talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by the

numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python 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

fourteen others by email, and the organization line `Eric

Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more

than one site.


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 this phrase

has 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

incompatiblities 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*/ [SI] pref. See quantifiers.


examining the entrails

 n. The process of grovelling through

a core dump or hex image in the 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'/ 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

 [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.


external memory

 n. A memo pad 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.


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

 [IBM] vi. 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.


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

 [UNIX/C hackers, from the Mexican dance] n.

In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds, causing a

core dump, or corrupts the `malloc(3)' arena in such a way as

to cause mysterious failures later on, is sometimes said 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/ [USENET] n. 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 FAQ lists refer readers to

this file.


FAQ list

 /F-A-Q list/ or /fak list/ [USENET] n. Syn FAQ,

sense 2.


FAQL

 /fa'kl/ n. Syn. FAQ list.


faradize

 /far'*-di:z/ [US Geological Survey] v. 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/ [DeVry Institute of Technology, Atlanta] adj.

Syn. hosed.  Poss. owes something to Yiddish `farblondjet'.


farming

 [Adelaide University, Australia] n. What the heads of a

disk drive are said to do when they plow little furrows in the

magnetic media.  Associated with a crash.  Typically used as

follows: "Oh no, the machine has just crashed; I 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

 [from Hunter S. Thompson] n. A state inspired by the

prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards

that are totally brain-damaged but ubiquitous --- Intel 8086s,

or COBOL, or EBCDIC, or any IBM 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.


feature creature

 [poss. fr. slang `creature feature' for a

horror movie] n. 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 (and so labeled omed

on the Mac II).  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.  Though this symbol technically

stands for the word `sev"ardhet' (interesting feature) many of

these are old churches; hence, the Swedish idiom for the symbol is

`kyrka', cognate to English `church' and Scots-dialect `kirk' but

pronounced /shir'k*/ in modern Swedish.  This is in fact where

Apple got the symbol; Apple gives the translation "interesting

feature"!


feature shock

 [from Alvin Toffler's book title `Future

Shock'] n. A user's (or programmer's!) confusion when confronted

with a package that has too many features and poor introductory

material.


featurectomy

 /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

 [from feeping creaturism] n. An unnecessary

feature; a bit of chrome that, in the speaker's judgment, is

the camel's nose for a whole horde of new features.


feeping creaturism

 /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'.


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.  Though it is much younger than USENET,

FidoNet is already (in early 1991) a significant fraction of

USENET's size at some 8000 systems.


field circus

 [a derogatory pun on `field service'] n. 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

 [FidoNet] n. 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/ [from SF fandom, where a typo for `folk' was

adopted as a new word] n.,v. 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

 [orig. UNIX, now also in MS-DOS] n. 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.


fine

 [WPI] adj. 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-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

 [IRC] v. 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.


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.


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/ Syn. stiffy (a 3.5-inch floppy disk).


fish

 [Adelaide University, Australia] n. 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

 [acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)]

n. `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

 // [Thinking Machines, Inc.] Fixed In the Next Release.

A written-only notation attached to bug reports.  Often 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 this is so that a

`grep' or 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.


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).

USENETter Marc Ramsey, who was at WPI from 1972 to 1976, adds: "I

am 99% certain that the use of `flame' originated at WPI.  Those

who made a nuisance of themselves insisting that they needed to use

a TTY for `real work' came to be known as `flaming asshole lusers'.

Other particularly annoying people became `flaming asshole ravers',

which shortened to `flaming ravers', and ultimately `flamers'.  I

remember someone picking up on the Human Torch pun, but I don't

think `flame on/off' was ever much used at WPI."  See also

asbestos.

The term may have been independently invented at several different

places; it is also reported that `flaming' was in use to mean

something like `interminably drawn-out semi-serious discussions'

(late-night bull sessions) at Carleton College during 1968--1971.

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.


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/ [Rutgers University] n. 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 defice, 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.


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

 [IRC] v. 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

 [techspeak] n. 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

 [Mac users] n. 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

 n. *Not* `Frequency Modulation' but rather an

abbreviation for `Fucking Manual', the back-formation from

RTFM. Used to refer to the manual itself in the RTFM.

"Have you seen the Networking FM lately?"


fnord

 [from the `Illuminatus Trilogy'] n. 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

 // [USENET] n. 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

 [XEROX PARC] n. 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 (`Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition'), 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").

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 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.


fool file, the

 [USENET] n. 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.


for free

 adj. Said of a capability of a programming language or

hardware equipment 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

 [from the Mac slogan "The computer for the

rest of us"] adj. 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: this usage probably derives from the programming

language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an Algol-like language

that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users

at MIT in the mid-60s.  It had 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

 [UNIX] vt. 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

 [UNIX] n. 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

 [UNIX; prob. influenced by a mainstream expletive] adj.

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

 [WAITS, via UNIX] n. 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

 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 finding 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.


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.lemur, where it is

said that the lemurs know what `frink' means, but they aren't

telling.  Compare gorets.


friode

 /fri:'ohd/ [TMRC] n. 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/, plural `frobnitzem' /frob'nit-zm/ or

`frob-ni' /frob'-ni:/ [TMRC] n. 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' (see bagbiter), 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.  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.


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.


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.


fuck 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! Fuck 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.


fum

 [XEROX PARC] n. 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'.


fuzzball

 [TCP/IP hackers] n. 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 are still active

on the Internet as of early 1991, doing odd jobs such as network

time service.


G

 [SI] pref.,suff. See quantifiers.


gabriel

 /gay'bree-*l/ [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and

volleyball fanatic] n. 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/ [Stanford] n. 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).


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 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*-don'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 contructing 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 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."


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 mid-1993; note that

the threshold for `real computer' rises with time, and it may well

be (for example) that machines with character-only displays will be

generally considered `unreal' in a few years (GLS points out that

they already are in some circles).  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.


gig

 /jig/ or /gig/ [SI] n. See quantifiers.


giga-

 /ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/ [SI] pref. 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

 [USENET] n. 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/ [formed from giga- by analogy

with mega/million and tera/trillion] n. 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/ [analogy with MIPS] n.

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

 [IBM] n. 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/ [by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for

`Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor'] n. Syn.

firebottle, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.


glitch

 /glich/ [from German `glitschen' to slip, via Yiddish

`glitshen', to slide or skid] 1. n. A sudden interruption in

electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function.

Sometimes recoverable.  An interruption in electric service 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/ [UNIX] vt.,n. To expand

special characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing

(the action is also called `globbing').  The UNIX conventions for

filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive 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

<rms@gnu.ai.mit.edu>.  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.  2. Noted UNIX hacker

John Gilmore <gnu@toad.com>, founder of USENET's anarchic alt.*

hierarchy.


GNUMACS

 /gnoo'maks/ [contraction of `GNU EMACS'] Often-heard

abbreviated name for the GNU project's flagship tool, EMACS.

Used esp. in contrast with GOSMACS.


go flatline

 [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG

traces upon brain-death] vi., also adjectival `flatlined'. 1. To

die, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly.  In hacker

parlance, this is used of machines only, human death being

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

 [UNIX] vi. To temporarily enter root mode in order

to perform a privileged operation.  This use is deprecated in

Australia, where v. `root' refers to animal sex.


go-faster stripes

 [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.


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.


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. 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.  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/ vt.,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/ [from the old "Hogan's Heroes" TV

series] n. A pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no

useful purpose.  Usually used to describe one's least favorite

piece of computer hardware.  See gonk.


gonzo

 /gon'zoh/ [from Hunter S. Thompson] adj. Overwhelming;

outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. used of collections of

source code, source files, or individual functions.  Has some of

the connotations of moby and hairy, but 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.


gorets

 /goh'rets/ 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/ [CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good

Old Raisins and Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like

foo and bar.


GOSMACS

 /goz'maks/ [contraction of `Gosling EMACS'] n. The first

EMACS-in-C implementation, predating but now largely eclipsed by

GNUMACS.  Originally freeware; a commercial version is now

modestly popular as `UniPress EMACS'.  The author (James Gosling)

went on to invent NeWS.


Gosperism

 /gos'p*r-izm/ 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

 [from SF fandom] vi.,n. A mass expedition to an

oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style

and shared.  There is a common heuristic about the amount of food

to order, expressed as "Get N - 1 entrees"; the 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

 [IBM] n. 1. Apparently random flashing streaks on

the face of 3278-9 terminals while a new symbol set is being

downloaded.  This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as

some genius within IBM suggested it would let 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

 [TMRC] prov. 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/ [from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p , where

re stands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the

Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it,

via UNIX `grep(1)'] vt. To rapidly scan a file or 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.  Girl-friend.  Like newsfroup and filk, a

typo incarnated as a new word.  Seems to have originated sometime

in 1992.


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

 [IBM] n. 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/ 1. n. A complaint (often caused by a glitch).

2. vi. To complain.  Often verb-doubled: "Gritch gritch".  3. A

synonym for glitch (as verb or noun).


grok

 /grok/, var. /grohk/ [from the novel `Stranger in

a Strange Land', by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word

meaning literally `to drink' and metaphorically `to be one

with'] vt. 1. To understand, usually in a global sense.  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/ [popularized by Johnny Hart's comic strip

"B.C." but the word apparently predates that] vt. 1. To

clear the state of a wedged device and restart it.  More severe

than `to frob' (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/ [a portmanteau of `garbage' and

`rubbish'; may have originated with SF author Philip K. Dick]

n. Garbage; crap; nonsense.  "What is all this gubbish?"  The

opposite portmanteau `rubbage' is also reported.


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. Shareware that works.


gumby

 /guhm'bee/ [from a class of Monty Python characters,

poss. with some influence from the 1960s claymation character] n.

An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in `gumby

maneuver' or `pull a gumby'.


gun

 [ITS: from the `:GUN' command] vt. To forcibly

terminate a program or job (computer, not career).  "Some idiot

left a background process running soaking up half the cycles, so I

gunned it."  Compare can.


gunch

 /guhnch/ [TMRC] vt. 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.

Generally 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.


gweep

 /gweep/ [WPI] 1. v. To hack, usually at night.  At

WPI, from 1977 onwards, this often indicated that the speaker could

be found at the College Computing Center punching cards or crashing

the PDP-10 or, later, the DEC-20.  The term has survived the

demise of those technologies, however, and is 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] infix. 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 prob. 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

Humor, Hacker, 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."  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

 [poss. by analogy with `Big Mac Attack' from ads

for the McDonald's fast-food chain; the variant `big hack attack'

is reported] n. 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 it

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

 [analogous to `pissed off'] adj. 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.


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

 [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n.

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 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, the.

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, the

 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 this principle at least moderates the behavior of people who

see themselves as `benign' crackers (see also samurai).  On

this view, it is 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.


hacking run

 [analogy with `bombing run' or `speed run'] n. 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

 [ITS] n. 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

 [back-formation from hairy] n. 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!")


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.  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.


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

 [pun on `hand craft'] vt. 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.


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 crackers, weenies, spods, and

other lower forms of network life; true hackers travel on their own

reputations rather than invented legendry.  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.


hand-roll

 [from obs. mainstream slang `hand-rolled' in

opposition to `ready-made', referring to cigarettes] v. 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."


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

common title Hanlon's Razor is unknown; a similar epigram has been

attributed to William James.  Quoted here because it seems to be a

particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in

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."


haque

 /hak/ [USENET] n. Variant spelling of hack, used

only for the noun form and connoting an elegant hack.


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 into which more than one

thing accessed by the same key or short code might be dropped.

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 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' may be confused with each other.

"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

 [from the technical usage] n. (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 it is not 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

 [IBM] n. 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 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

 [Cambridge] n. 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

comments similar to "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/ [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty

Principle in quantum physics] n. A bug that disappears or alters

its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it.  Antonym of

Bohr bug; see also mandelbug, schroedinbug.  In C,

nine out of ten heisenbugs result from either 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 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

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

 [scientific computation] n. 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.  Liberal use of hidden flags can make a

program very hard to debug and understand.


high bit

 [from `high-order bit'] n. 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

 [scientific computation] adv. 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

 // [IRC] n. Fortuitous typo for `hint', now in wide

intentional use among players of initgame.  Compare

newsfroup, filk.


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.


hobbit

 n. 1. The High Order Bit of a byte; same as the

meta bit or high bit.  2. The non-ITS name of vad@ai.mit.edu

(*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.


holy wars

 [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. LISP, etc., ad nauseam.  The

characteristic that distinguishes holy wars from normal

technical disputes is that in a holy wars 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.


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

 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), the important

inter-machine metric is the number of hops in the shortest path

between them, rather than their geographical separation.  See

bang path.


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.  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 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 clicks, which trigger

some action.  Hypertext help screens are an example, in which a hot

spot exists in the vicinity of any word for which additional

material is available.  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).


house wizard

 [prob. from ad-agency lingo, `house freak'] n. 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,

terminak.


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.


Humor, Hacker

 n. 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 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.


hung

 [from `hung up'] adj. 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/ [perhaps related to slang `humongous'] adj.

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, often

inaccessible because it is not even mapped in.  "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

 (also `hysterical raisins') n.  A variant on

the stock phrase "for historical reasons", it specifically

indicates 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.


ice

 [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 literally kill

the intruder).  Also, `icebreaker': a program designed for

cracking security on a system.

Neither term is in serious use yet as of mid-1993, but many hackers

find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in

the future. In the meantime, the speculative usage chould be

confused with `ICE', an acronym for "in-circuit emulator".


idempotent

 [from mathematical techspeak] adj. 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

 // [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!

 [USENET] prov.  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. Common verbal shorthand for increment, i.e.

`increase by one' (one doesn't tend to see the sbbreviation in

writing or email).  Especially used by assembly programmers, as many

assembly languages (including those for Intel chips) 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 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 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 including within a

discussion thread, a practice that tends to annoy readers.  In

a forum with high-traffic newsgroups, such as USENET, this can lead

to flames and the urge to start a kill file.


indent style

 [C programmers] n. The rules one uses to indent code

in a readable fashion; a subject of holy wars.  There are four

major C indent styles, described below; all have the aim of

making it easier for the reader to visually track the scope of

control constructs.  The significant variable is the placement of

`{' and `}' with respect to the statement(s) they

enclose and the guard or controlling statement (`if',

`else', `for', `while', or `do') on the block,

if any.

`K&R style' --- Named 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 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 is 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 is 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 power-up (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 classic SF short story

"Inflexible Logic" by Russell Maloney, 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.


initgame

 /in-it'gaym/ [IRC] n. 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.


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/ [said by the authors to stand for

`Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym'] n. A

computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyon in 1972.

INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer

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.


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 address

 n. 1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of

the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is a

sitename, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including

periods itself.  Contrast with bang path; see also

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, the

term `interrupt' is nearly synonymous with `system call', because

the OS and BIOS routines are both called using the INT instruction

(see interrupt list, the) and because programmers so often have

to bypass the OS (going directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get

reasonable performance.


interrupt list, the

 [MS-DOS] n. The list of all known software

interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM PCs and

compatibles, maintained and made available for free redistribution

by Ralf Brown <ralf@cs.cmu.edu>.  As of 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" is also heard.  See also spl.


IRC

 /I-R-C/ [Internet Relay Chat] n. 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

big iron dinosaurs ruled the earth.  These began with the delivery

of the first PDP-1, coincided with the dominance of ferrite

core, and ended with the introduction of the first commercial

microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971.  See also Stone Age;

compare elder days.


iron box

 [UNIX/Internet] n. A special environment set up to trap

a cracker logging in over remote connections long enough to be

traced.  May include a modified shell restricting the 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

 [IBM] n. Derogatory.  A hardware specialist.  Compare

sandbender, polygon pusher.


ITS

 /I-T-S/ n. 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an

influential but highly idiosyncratic operating system written for

PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab.  Much

AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to 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).  See

Appendix A.  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] `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

 [MIT] /J rand'm hak'r/ n. A mythical figure

like the Unknown Soldier; the archetypal hacker nerd.  See

random, Suzie COBOL.  This may originally have been

inspired 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's 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.


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 jargon-1 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 the

computer (see tick).  Often one AC cycle time (1/60 second in

the U.S. and Canada, 1/50 most other places), but more recently

1/100 sec has become common.  "The swapper runs 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 of this.


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.


jolix

 n. /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 is called BSD/386.  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/ [based on the PDP-10 jump instruction] v.,obs. To

suddenly change subjects, with no intention of returning to the

previous topic.  Usage: rather rare except among PDP-10 diehards,

and considered silly.  See also AOS.


juggling eggs

 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."  That is a very hackish use of language.  See

also hack mode.


jump off into never-never land

 [from J. M. Barrie's `Peter

Pan'] v. Same as branch to Fishkill, but more common in

technical cultures associated with non-IBM computers that use the

term `jump' rather than `branch'.  Compare hyperspace.


jupiter

 [IRC] vt. 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/ [from kilo-] n. A kilobyte.  This is 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.


kahuna

 /k*-hoo'nuh/ [IBM: from the Hawaiian title for a shaman] n.

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, Bullshit 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 <kibo@world.std.com>, 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.


kick

 [IRC] v. 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

 [USENET] n. (alt. `KILL file') Per-user file(s) used

by some USENET reading programs (originally Larry Wall's

`rn(1)') to discard summarily (without presenting for reading)

articles matching some particularly uninteresting (or 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 micro

 [popularized by Eugene Brooks] n. A

microprocessor-based machine that infringes on mini, mainframe, or

supercomputer performance turf.  Often heard in "No one will

survive the attack of the killer micros!", the battle cry of the

downsizers.  Used esp. of RISC architectures.

The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is

doubtless reinforced by the movie title "Attack Of The Killer

Tomatoes" (one of the canonical examples of

so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers).  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).


killer poke

 n. A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine

via insertion of invalid values (see poke) in a memory-mapped

control register; used esp. of various fairly well-known tricks

on bitty 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-

 [SI] pref. See quantifiers.


KIPS

 /kips/ [abbreviation, by analogy with MIPS using K] n.

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

 [USENET; poss. fr. DEC slang for a full software

distribution, as opposed to a patch or upgrade] n. 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

 /klooj/ or /kluhj/ n. Common (but incorrect) variant

of kluge, q.v.


kluge

 /klooj/ [from the German `klug', clever] 1. n.  A Rube

Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or

software.  (A long-ago `Datamation' article by Jackson Granholme

said: "An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts,

forming a distressing whole.")  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.  In fact, the

TMRC Dictionary defined `kludge' as "a crock that works".  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" dating back at least to

1935, an adjunct to mechanical printing presses.  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

tempermental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly

difficult to repair --- but oh, so clever!  One traditional

folk etymology of `kluge' makes it the name of a design engineer;

in fact, `Kluge' is a surname in German, and the designer of the

Kluge feeder may well have been the man behind this myth.

TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to

have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WII

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).  Some people

who encountered the word first in print or on-line jumped to the

reasonable but incorrect conclusion that the word should be

pronounced /kluhj/ (rhyming with `sludge').  The result of this

tangled history is a mess; in 1993, many (perhaps even most)

hackers pronounce the word correctly as /klooj/ but spell it

incorrectly as `kludge' (compare the pronunciation drift of

mung).  Some observers consider this appropriate in view of

its 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

 /nooth/ [Donald E. Knuth's `The Art of Computer

Programming'] n. 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.


kremvax

 /krem-vaks/ [from the then large number of USENET

VAXen with names of the form foovax] n. 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 truth

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*/ [Swedish] n. 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.


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 and LISP.  Nearly every

hacker knows one of these, and most good ones are fluent in both.

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 that's 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

 [Harvard] n. 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/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt. 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

 [Cambridge] n. 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, to TELNET through one or more hosts in order

to confuse a trace (a standard cracker procedure).


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/ [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] n. A

light-emitting resistor (that is, one in the process of burning

up).  Ohm's law was broken.  See SED.


LERP

 /lerp/ vi.,n. Quasi-acronym for Linear Interpolation, used as a

verb or noun for the operation.  E.g., 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 the mythology behind this.


letterbomb

 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.


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.


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

 [XEROX PARC] prov. 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."


line 666

 [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notational

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

 [USENET] n. 1. A bug in some now-obsolete

versions of the netnews software that used to eat up to BUFSIZ

bytes of the article text.  The bug was triggered by having the

text of the article start with a space or tab.  This 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 is

still (in mid-1991) occasionally reported to be lurking in some

mail-to-netnews gateways.  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.


link farm

 [UNIX] n. 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

 [MUD] adj. 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

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".


lion food

 [IBM] n. Middle management or HQ staff (by extension,

administrative drones in general).  From an old joke about two

lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their

chances but agreed to meet after 2 months.  When 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 never formally published and was only

supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees.  In

spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the

early UNIX hackers.


LISP

 [from `LISt Processing language', but mythically from

`Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] n. The name of AI's

mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length

lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (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.


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] n. 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 these are bits within a byte.


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.  4. Actual real-world data, as opposed to `test data'.

For example, "I think I have the record deletion module

finished."  "Have you tried it out on live data?"  It usually

carries the connotation that live data is more fragile and must not

be corrupted, else bad things will happen.  So a possible alternate

response to the above claim might be: "Well, make sure it works

perfectly before we throw live data at it."  The implication here

is that record deletion is something pretty significant, and a

haywire record-deletion module running amok on live data would

cause great harm and probably require restoring from backups.


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.


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

 [from military slang for an M-16 rifle with

magazine inserted and prepared for firing] adj. Said of a removable

disk volume properly prepared for use --- that is, locked into the

drive and with the heads loaded.  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 in an application or

OS that causes it to perform some destructive or

security-compromising activity whenever specified conditions are

met.  Compare back door.


logical

 [from the technical term `logical device', wherein a

physical device is referred to by an arbitrary `logical' name]

adj. Having the role of.  If a person (say, Les Earnest at SAIL)

who had long held a certain post left and were 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, including

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.


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

 [primarily British, from Gilbert & Sullivan's

`lord high executioner'] n. The person in an organization who knows

the most about some aspect of a system.  See wizard.


lose

 [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."  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

 [from communication theory] adj. Used to indicate a

talk that, although not content-free, was not terribly

informative.  "That was a low-bandwidth talk, but what can you

expect for an audience of suits!"  Compare zero-content,

bandwidth, math-out.


LPT

 /L-P-T/ or /lip'it/ or /lip-it'/ [MIT, via DEC] n. Line

printer, of course.  Rare under UNIX, commoner in hackers with

MS-DOS or CP/M background.  The printer device is called

`LPT:' on those systems that, like ITS, were strongly

influenced by early DEC conventions.


Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology

 prov. "There is *always*

one more bug."


lunatic fringe

 [IBM] n. 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.


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

 [SI] pref. (on units) suff. (on numbers) See quantifiers.


macdink

 /mak'dink/ [from the Apple Macintosh, which is said to

encourage such behavior] vt. To make many incremental and

unnecessary cosmetic changes to a program or file.  Often the

subject of the macdinking would be better off without 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/ [pun on `megaflops', a coinage for

`millions of FLoating-point Operations Per Second'] n. Refers to

artificially inflated performance figures often quoted by computer

manufacturers.  Real applications are lucky to 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

 /ma'kroh-tayp/ n. An industry-standard reel of tape, as

opposed to a microtape.


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

 [UNIX] n. 1. Something passed between routines or

programs that enables the receiver to perform some operation; a

capability ticket or opaque identifier.  Especially used of small

data objects that contain data encoded in a 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

 [UNIX/C] n. 1. In source code, some non-obvious

constant whose value is significant to the operation of a program

and that is inserted inconspicuously in-line (hardcoded),

rather than expanded in by a symbol set by a 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 common sense 1.

3. Special data located at the beginning of a binary data file to

indicate its type to a utility.  Under UNIX, the system and various

applications 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; the 0407,

for example, was octal for `branch 16 bytes relative'.  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!


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.


mailbomb

 (also mail bomb) [USENET] 1. v. To send, or urge

others to send, massive amounts of email to a single system or

person, as 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.


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 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 others 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. Software tools are often written to perform some

actions repeatedly on whatever input is handed to them, terminating

when there is no more input or they are explicitly told to go away.

In such programs, the loop that gets and processes input is called

the `main loop'.  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).


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

 /mon'del-buhg/ [from the Mandelbrot set] n. A bug

whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its

behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic.  This term

implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than a

heisenbug.  See also schroedinbug.


manged

 /monjd/ [probably from the French `manger' or Italian

`mangiare', to eat; perhaps influenced by English n. `mange',

`mangy'] adj. Refers to anything that is mangled or damaged,

usually beyond repair.  "The disk was manged after the 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

 [DEC] n. A manager.  Compare mango; see also

management.  Note that system mangler is somewhat different

in connotation.


mango

 /mang'go/ [orig. in-house jargon at Symbolics] n. A manager.

Compare mangler.  See also devo and doco.


manularity

 /man`yoo-la'ri-tee/ [prob. fr. techspeak `manual'

+ `granularity'] n. 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

 [from mainstream "lost all his/her marbles"] pl.n. The

minimum needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools

or abstractions.  After a bad system crash, you need to determine

if the machine has enough marbles to come 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/ alt. `marketing slime',

`marketeer', `mar-ket-ing droid', `marketdroid'. n. A member

of a company's marketing department, esp. one who promises users

that the next version of a product will have features that are not

actually 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 at you labeled with a source address that

is clearly not of this earth.  "The domain server is getting lots

of packets from Mars.  Does that gateway have a 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

 [poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)] n. 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

 [FidoNet] n. 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

 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/ [Stanford] n. 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/ [TMRC] n. 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*/ [SI] pref. 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 this term 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/ [coined by analogy with `gene', by Richard

Dawkins] n. An idea considered as a replicator, esp. with

the connotation that memes parasitize people into propagating them

much as viruses do.  Used esp. in the phrase `meme complex'

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/ [from meme] The study of memes.  As of

mid-1993, 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

 [XEROX PARC] n. 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*/ [from

analytic philosophy] adj.,pref. 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

Humor, Hacker.


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, baz dropped out of use for

a while in the 1970s and '80s. A common recent mutation of this

sequence inserts qux before quux.

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.

toto, titi, tata, tutu:

Standard series of metasyntactic variables among francophones.

corge, grault, flarp:

Popular at Rutgers University and among GOSMACS hackers.

zxc, spqr, wombat:

Cambridge University (England).

shme

Berkeley, GeoWorks.  Pronounced /shmee/.

foo, bar, zot

Helsinki University of Technology, Finland.

blarg, wibble

New Zealand

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 prosyletic zeal) but no one else

cares about.  Applied to the language by those outside the

originating group.  "He cornered me about type resolution in his

MFTL."

The 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* be used to write

its own compiler is beneath contempt.  See break-even point.

(On a related note, Dennis Ritchie 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 compiled

under the language acceptable as input to the FORTRAN compiler?"

In other words, can you write programs thaat write programs? (See

toolsmith.)  Alarming numbers of (language, OS) pairs fail

this test, particularly when the language is FORTRAN; Ritchie is

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.


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. See bogosity.


microReid

 /mi:'kroh-reed/ n. See bogosity.


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 386.  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 drivers for today's macrotapes, microtape

drivers allow 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.


milliLampson

 /mil'*-lamp`sn/ n. A unit of talking speed,

abbreviated mL.  Most people run about 200 milliLampsons.  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/ [abbreviation] n. 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/ [MIT] n. 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 a trade-off was 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/ [from wart by analogy with misbug] n.

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 your favorite

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, moded 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

 /mo'dyu-loh/ prep. Except for.  An overgeneralization of

mathematical terminology; one can consider saying that

4 = 22 except for the 9s (4 = 22 mod 9).  "Well,

LISP seems to work okay now, modulo that GC bug."  "I feel

fine today modulo a slight headache."


molly-guard

 /mol'ee-gard/ [University of Illinois] n. A shield

to prevent tripping of some Big Red Switch by clumsy or

ignorant hands.  Originally used of some plexiglass covers

improvised for the BRS on an IBM 4341 after a programmer's 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. Development by gang bang

(poss. from the Sixties counterculture expression `Mongolian

clusterfuck' for a public orgy).  Implies that large numbers of

inexperienced programmers are being put on a job better 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, 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. The quality of being monstrous (see `Overgeneralization' in the

discussion of jargonification).  See also baroque.


monty

 /mon'tee/ [US Geological Survey] n.  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.


Moof

 /moof/ [MAC users] 1. n. A semi-legendary creature, also

called the `dogcow', that lurks in the depths of the Macintosh

Technical Notes Hypercard stack V3.1; specifically, the full story

of the dogcow is told in technical note #31 (the particular Moof

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.  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.


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 in

one square inch of silicon has roughly doubled yearly every year

since the technology was invented.  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-toz/ [USENET: Member Of The Appropriate Sex, after

MOTOS and MOTSS] n. A potential or (less often) actual sex

partner.  See also SO.


MOTOS

 /moh-tohs/ [acronym from the 1970 U.S. census forms via

USENET: Member Of The Opposite Sex] n. A potential or (less often)

actual sex partner.  See MOTAS, MOTSS, SO.  Less

common than MOTSS or MOTAS, which have largely displaced it.


MOTSS

 /mots/ or /M-O-T-S-S/ [from the 1970 U.S. census forms

via USENET, Member Of The Same Sex] n. Esp. one considered as a

possible sexual partner.  The gay-issues newsgroup on USENET is

called soc.motss.  See MOTOS and MOTAS, which derive

from it.  Also see 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

 [MS-DOS] n. Pixels (usually single) that are not

properly restored when the mouse pointer moves away from a

particular location on the screen, producing the appearance that

the mouse pointer has left droppings behind.  The 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/ [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] n. A

clone of CP/M for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by

hacker Tim Paterson, who is said to have regretted it ever since.

Numerous features, including vaguely UNIX-like but rather broken

support for subdirectories, I/O redirection, and pipelines, were

hacked into 2.0 and subsequent versions; as a result, there are two

or more incompatible versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS

programmers can never agree on basic things like what character to

use as an option switch or whether to be case-sensitive.  The

resulting mess is now the highest-unit-volume OS in history.  Often

known simply as DOS, which annoys people familiar with other

similarly abbreviated operating systems (the name goes back to the

mid-1960s, 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 (see the Bibliography in Appendix C),

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/ [acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User

Dimension] 1. n.  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 PD 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 have been 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.  In 1991, over

50% of MUD sites are of a third major variety, LPMUD, which

synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems

with the extensibility of TinyMud. 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.

There is now (early 1991) a move afoot to deprecate the term

MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of

names corresponding to the different simulation styles being

explored.  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.


multician

 /muhl-ti'shn/ [coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] n.

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.  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 crap" 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. Sometimes used as

an expression of disagreement.  "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').  3. Yet another

metasyntactic variable, like foo.  4. When used as a question

("Mumble?") means "I didn't understand you".  5. Sometimes used

in `public' contexts on-line as a placefiller for things one is

barred from giving details about.  For example, a poster with

pre-released hardware in his machine might say "Yup, my machine

now has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for

Mumbleco." 6. 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.  7. [XEROX PARC]

A colloquialism used to suggest that further discussion would be

fruitless.


munch

 [often confused with mung, q.v.] vt. To transform

information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of

computation.  To trace down a data structure.  Related to crunch

and nearly synonymous with grovel, but connotes 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/ [from the squeaky-voiced little people in

L. Frank Baum's `The Wizard of Oz'] n. A teenage-or-younger micro

enthusiast hacking BASIC or something else equally constricted.  A

term of mild derision --- munchkins are 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

 [from SF fandom] n. 1. A person who is not in science

fiction fandom.  2. A person who is not in the computer industry.

In this sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my

mundane life...." See also Real World.


mung

 /muhng/ [in 1960 at MIT, `Mash Until No Good'; sometime

after that the derivation from the recursive acronym `Mung

Until No Good' became standard] vt.  1. To make changes to a file,

esp. large-scale and 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 of

which the sprouts 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.


munge

 /muhnj/ vt. 1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform

information.  2. A comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data

structure or the whole program.

This term is often confused with mung and may derive from it,

or possibly vice-versa.


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 sometimes 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, King Sunny Ade, The Pretenders, 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.)  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/ [Great Britain] v. 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

return instruction pointer so that the processor doesn't try to

execute the text as instructions.


nagware

 /nag'weir/ [USENET] n. 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

 [like a trophy] adj. 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/ [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0010101] interj.

1. On-line joke answer to ACK?: "I'm not here."

2. On-line answer to a request for chat: "I'm not available."

3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you don't

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/ [CMU: from `nanosecond'] n. A brief period of

time.  "Be with you in a nano" means you really will be free

shortly, i.e., implies what mainstream people mean by "in a

jiffy" (whereas the hackish use of `jiffy' is quite different ---

see jiffy).


nano-

 [SI: the next quantifier below micro-; meaning *

10^(-9)] pref. Smaller than micro-, and used in the same rather

loose and connotative way.  Thus, one has nanotechnology

(coined by hacker K. Eric Drexler) by analogy with

`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

mo-lec-u-lar-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

 [Adelaide University] n. 1 fortnight * 10^-9,

or about 1.2 msec.  This unit was used largely by students doing

undergraduate practicals.  See microfortnight, attoparsec,

and micro-.


nanotechnology

 /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', 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 it 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 shitogram.  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 and successful only by accident; 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/ [onomatopoeic, from New York SF fandom]

n.  One who is fascinated by computers.  More general than

hacker, as it need not imply more skill than is required to

boot games on a PC.  The derived noun `neeping' oapplies

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 trait of 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'.


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. Used to refer to anyone who satisfies some

combination of the following conditions: has been visible on USENET

for more than 5 years, ran one of the original backbone sites,

moderated an important newsgroup, wrote news 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

 [from bollix: to bungle] n. 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

 [IRC] n. 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

 [IRC] n. 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/ [UNIX] n. A dungeon game similar to

rogue but more elaborate, distributed in C source over

USENET and very popular at UNIX sites and on PC-class machines

(nethack is probably the most widely distributed of the freeware

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 mid-1993) is

nethack-bugs@linc.cis.upenn.edu.


netiquette

 /net'ee-ket/ or /net'i-ket/ [portmanteau from "network

etiquette"] n. The conventions of politeness recognized on USENET,

such as avoidance of cross-posting to inappropriate groups or

refraining from commercial pluggery outside the biz groups.


netlag

 [IRC, MUD] n. 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/ [IBM] n. 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 is

almost always a bang path or Internet address).  Such an

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.


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, the

 n. 1. The union of all the major noncommercial,

academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the old

ARPANET, NSFnet, BITNET, and the virtual UUCP and USENET

`networks', plus the corporate in-house networks and commercial

time-sharing services (such as CompuServe) that gateway to them.  A

site is generally considered `on the network' if it can be reached

through some combination of Internet-style (@-sign) and UUCP

(bang-path) addresses.  See bang path, Internet address,

network address.  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

 [primarily Stanford/Silicon Valley] adj. Brain-dam-aged

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.


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 BIFF.


newgroup wars

 /n[y]oo'groop worz/ [USENET] n. The salvos of dueling

`newgroup' and `rmgroup' messages sometimes exchanged by

persons on opposite sides of a dispute over whether a newsgroup

should be created net-wide.  These usually 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/ [acronym; the

`Network Window System'] n. The road not taken in window systems,

an elegant PostScript-based environment that would almost certainly

have won the standards war with X if it hadn't 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

 // [USENET] n. 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

 [USENET] n. One of USENET's huge collection of

topic groups or fora.  Usenet groups can be `unmoderated'

(anyone can post) or `moderated' (submissions are automatically

directed to a moderator, who edits or filters and then 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-lovers (for science-fiction

fans), and talk.politics.misc (miscellaneous political

discussions and flamage).


nick

 [IRC] n. 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.


nickle

 /ni'kl/ [from `nickel', common name for the U.S.

5-cent coin] n. A nybble + 1; 5 bits.  Reported among

developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games

processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM.  See

also deckle.


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 fast, 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.


no-op

 /noh'op/ alt. NOP /nop/ [no operation] n. 1. (also v.)

A machine instruction that does nothing (sometimes used in

assembler-level programming as filler for data or patch areas, or

to overwrite code to be removed in binaries).  See 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/ [UK: from the children's books] adj.

1. Small and un-useful, but demonstrating a point.  Noddy programs

are often written by people learning a new language or system.  The

archetypal noddy program is hello, world.  Noddy 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.


NOMEX underwear

 /noh'meks uhn'-der-weir/ [USENET] n. Syn.

asbestos longjohns, used mostly in auto-related mailing lists

and newsgroups.  NOMEX underwear is an actual product available on

the racing equipment market, used as a fire resistance measure and

required in some racing series.


Nominal Semidestructor

 n. Sound-alike slang for `National

Semiconductor', found among other places in the 4.3BSD 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 Z80,000 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.


notwork

 /not'werk/ n. A network, when it is acting flaky or is

down.  Compare nyetwork.  Said at IBM to have orig.

referred to a particular period of flakiness on IBM's VNET

corporate network, ca. 1988; but there are independent 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' (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.)  "Coding a BitBlt implementation to

perform correctly in every case is NP-annoying."  This is

generalized from the computer-science terms `NP-hard' and

`NP-complete'.  NP is the set of Nondeterministic-Polynomial

algorithms, those that can be 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.  Note, however, that the NP- prefix is,

from a complexity theorist's point of view, the wrong part of

`NP-complete' to connote extreme difficulty; it is the completeness,

not the NP-ness, that puts any problem it describes in the

`hard' category.


nroff

 /en'rof/ [UNIX, from "new roff" (see troff)] n. 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 (1993), 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.


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

install-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

 [scientific computation] n. Output of a computation that

may not be significant results but at least indicate that the

program is running.  May be used to placate management, grant

sponsors, etc.  `Making numbers' means running a 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. This refers to the problem of

transferring data between machines with differing byte-order.  The

string `UNIX' might look like `NUXI' on a machine with a

different `byte sex' (e.g., when transferring data from a

little-endian to a big-endian, or vice-versa).  See also

middle-endian, swab, and bytesexual.


nybble

 /nib'l/ (alt. `nibble') [from v. `nibble' by analogy

with `bite' => `byte'] n. Four bits; one hex digit;

a half-byte.  Though `byte' is now techspeak, this useful relative

is still jargon.  Compare byte, crumb, tayste,

dynner; see also bit, nickle, deckle.  Apparently

this spelling is uncommon in Commonwealth Hackish, as British

orthography suggests the pronunciation /ni:'bl/.


nyetwork

 /nyet'werk/ [from Russian `nyet' = no] n. A network,

when it is acting flaky or is down.  Compare notwork.


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

your Obs are more interesting than other people's whole postings.


Obfuscated C Contest

 n. An annual contest run since 1984 over

USENET by Landon Curt Noll and friends.  The overall winner is

whoever produces the most unreadable, creative, and bizarre (but

working) C program; various other prizes are 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 uts own area.  For more

digits, write a bigger program.  See also hello, world.


obi-wan error

 /oh'bee-won` er'*r/ [RPI, from `off-by-one' and

the Obi-Wan Kenobi character in "Star Wars"] n. A loop of

some sort in which the index is off by 1.  Common when the index

should have started from 0 but instead started from 1.  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 it 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 taken off a public newsgroup to email.


ogg

 /awg/ [CMU] v. 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/ [from the Dr. Seuss title `Bartholomew

and the Oobleck'] n. A bizarre semi-liquid sludge made from

cornstarch and water.  Enjoyed among hackers who make batches

during playtime at parties for its amusing and extremely

non-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 [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.  2. 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.


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,

terminak, Macintrash Nominal Semidestructor,

ScumOS, sun-stools, HP-SUX.


open switch

 [IBM: prob. from railroading] n. An unresolved

question, issue, or problem.


operating system

 [techspeak] n. (Often abbreviated `OS') The

foundation software of a machine, of course; that which schedules

tasks, allocates storage, and presents a default interface to the

user between applications.  The facilities an 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 what is

presumably the last bug and just before actually discovering a 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 god-mothers. 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

 [UNIX] n. A process whose parent has died; one inherited by

`init(1)'.  Compare zombie.


orphaned i-node

 /or'f*nd i:'nohd/ [UNIX] n. 1. [techspeak] A

file that retains storage but no longer appears in the directories

of a filesystem.  2. By extension, a pejorative for any person no

longer serving a useful function within some organization, esp.

lion food without subordinates.


orthogonal

 [from mathematics] adj. Mutually independent; well

separated; sometimes, irrelevant to.  Used in a generalization of

its mathematical meaning to describe sets of primitives or

capabilities that, like a vector basis in geometry, 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.  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.  Often called `Half-an-OS'.  On

January 28, 1991, Microsoft announced that it was dropping its OS/2

development to concentrate on Windows, leaving the OS entirely in

the hands of IBM; on January 29 they claimed the media had got the

story wrong, but were vague about how.  It looks as though OS/2 is

moribund.  See vaporware, monstrosity, cretinous,

second-system effect.


out-of-band

 [from telecommunications and network theory] adj.

1. In software, describes values of a function which are not in its

`natural' range of return values, but are rather signals that

some kind of exception has occurred.  Many C functions, for

example, return either a nonnegative integral value, or indicate

failure with an out-of-band return value of -1.  Compare

hidden flag, green bytes.  2. Also sometimes used to

describe what communications people call `shift characters',

like the 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] On some processors, an attempt to

calculate a result too large for a register to hold causes a

particular flag called an overflow bit to be set.

2. Hackers use the term of human thought too.  "Well, the 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

 [MIT] n. 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 your 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

 [C programming] n. 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.


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 naivet'e (see

naive).  Also `padded cell environment'.


page in

 [MIT] vi. 1. To become aware of one's surroundings again

after having paged out (see page out).  Usually confined to

the sarcastic comment: "Eric pages in.  Film at 11."  See

film at 11.  2. Syn. `swap in'; see swap.


page out

 [MIT] vi. 1. To become unaware of one's surroundings

temporarily, due to daydreaming or preoccupation.  "Can you repeat

that?  I paged out for a minute."  See page in.  Compare

glitch, thinko.  2. Syn. `swap out'; see swap.


pain in the net

 n. A flamer.


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. See followup.


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.


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 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, would 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 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 that they will happen so

infrequently (if at all) that there is no justification for

going to extra trouble to handle that case (see sense 1).


payware

 /pay'weir/ n. Commercial software.  Oppose shareware

or freeware.


PBD

 /P-B-D/ [abbrev. of `Programmer Brain Damage'] n. Applied

to bug reports revealing places where the program was obviously

broken by an incompetent or short-sighted programmer.  Compare

UBD; see also brain-damaged.


PC-ism

 /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

 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.  Management

often expects it to be maintained in parallel with the code.  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/ [abbreviation for `Push Down List']

1. n. In ITS days, the preferred MITism for stack.  See

overflow pdl.  2. n. Dave Lebling, one of the co-authors of

Zork; (his network address on the ITS machines was at one

time pdl@dms). 2. Rarely, sny sense of PDL, as these are not

invariably capitalized.


PDP-10

 [Programmed Data Processor model 10] n. The machine that

made timesharing real.  It looms large in hacker folklore because

of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing

facilities and research labs, including the MIT 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) 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,

Appendix A.


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.  See

also Appendix B.


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'/ [From the code in C's `printf(3)'

library function used to insert an arbitrary string argument] n. An

unspecified person or object.  "I was just talking to some

percent-s in administration."  Compare random.


perf

 /perf/ n. See 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.


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."


Perl

 /perl/ [Practical Extraction and Report Language, a.k.a

Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister] n. An interpreted language

developed by Larry Wall <lwall@jpl.nasa.gov>, author of

`patch(1)' and `rn(1)') and distributed over USENET.

Superficially resembles `awk(1)', but is much hairier (see

awk).  UNIX sysadmins, who are almost always incorrigible

hackers, increasingly consider it one of the

languages of choice.  Perl has been described, in a parody of a famous remark

about `lex(1)', as the "Swiss-Army chainsaw" of UNIX

programming.


person of no account

 [University of California at Santa Cruz] n.

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

bill@random.com".  Compare return from the dead.


pessimal

 /pes'im-l/ [Latin-based antonym for `optimal'] adj.

Maximally bad.  "This is a pessimal situation."  Also `pessimize'

vt. To make as bad as possible.  These words are the obvious

Latin-based antonyms for `optimal' and `optimize', 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/ [antonym of

`optimizing compiler'] n. A compiler that produces object code that

is worse than the straightforward or obvious hand translation.  The

implication is that the compiler is actually 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*/ [SI] pref. See quantifiers.


PETSCII

 /pet'skee/ [abbreviation of PET ASCII] n. The variation

(many would say perversion) of the ASCII character set used by

the Commodore Business Machines PET series of personal computers

and the later Commodore C64, C16, and C128 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 phase of one's waking-sleeping schedule with

respect to the standard 24-hour cycle.  This is a useful concept

among people who often work at night and/or according to no fixed

schedule.  It is not uncommon to change one's 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's 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."

True story: Once upon a time there was a bug that really did depend

on the phase of the moon.  There is a little subroutine that had

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

 [MIT] n. Syn. wrap around, sense 2.


phreaking

 /freek'ing/ [from `phone phreak'] n. 1. The art and

science of cracking the phone network (so as, for example, to make

free long-distance calls).  2. By extension, security-cracking in

any other context (especially, but not exclusively, on

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-

 [SI: a quantifier

meaning * 10^-12]

pref. Smaller than nano-; used in the same rather loose

connotative way as nano- and micro-.  This usage is not yet

common in the way nano- and micro- are, but should be

instantly 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

 [Sun: from aviation] n. A user's misconfiguration or

misuse of a piece of software, producing apparently buglike results

(compare UBD).  "Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail that

causes it to generate bogus headers."  "That's not a bug, that's

pilot error.  His `sendmail.cf' is hosed."


ping

 [from the TCP/IP acronym `Packet INternet Groper', prob.

originally contrived to match the submariners' term for a sonar

pulse] 1. n.  Slang term for a small network message (ICMP ECHO)

sent by a computer to check for the presence and aliveness of

another.  Occasionally used as a phone greeting.  See ACK,

also ENQ.  2. vt. To verify the presence of.  3. vt. To get

the attention of.  From the UNIX command `ping(1)' that sends

an ICMP ECHO packet to another host.  4. vt. To send a message to

all members 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/ [Peripheral Interchange Program] vt.,obs. 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).


pistol

 [IBM] n. A tool that makes it all too easy for you to

shoot yourself in the foot.  "UNIX `rm *' makes such a nice

pistol!"


pizza box

 [Sun] n. The largish thin box housing the electronics

in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its

size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes.

Two meg single-platter removable disk packs 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

 [XEROX PARC] n. 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

 [UNIX] n. 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

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) 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.


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 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

 [IBM] n. 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.


plingnet

 /pling'net/ n. Syn. UUCPNET.  Also see

Commonwealth Hackish, which uses `pling' for bang (as in

bang path).


plokta

 /plok't*/ [Acronym for `Press Lots Of Keys To Abort']

v. 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 presses 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

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

 [USENET: possibly influenced by British slang `plonk' for

cheap booze, or `plonker' for someone behaving stupidly] The sound

a newbie makes as he falls to the bottom of a kill file.

Used almost exclusively in the newsgroup talk.bizarre,

this term (usually written "*plonk*") is a form of public

ridicule.


plugh

 /ploogh/ [from the ADVENT game] v. See xyzzy.


plumbing

 [UNIX] n. 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

scratch monkey.  2. n. Abbrev. for `Presentation Manager', an

elephantine OS/2 graphical user interface.  See also

provocative maintenance.


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

 [allegedly from abbreviation POD for `Prince Of Darkness'] n. A

Diablo 630 (or, latterly, any letter-quality impact printer).  From

the DEC-10 PODTYPE program used to feed formatted text to it.


point-and-drool interface

 n. Parody of the techspeak term

`point-and-shoot interface', describing a windows, icons, and

mice-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

 [from the operation that removes the top of a stack, and the

fact that procedure return addresses are saved on the stack] (also

capitalized `POP' /pop/) 1. vt. To remove something from a

stack or pdl.  If a person says he/she has 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 too deep a level of detail

so 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/ [from a PDP-10 return-from-subroutine

instruction] n.,v. To return from a digression.  By verb doubling,

"Popj, popj" means roughly "Now let's see, where were we?"

See RTI.


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. 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, and boot, and see the

AI Koan in "A Selection of 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/ [from `Project-Programmer Number'] n. A

user-ID under TOPS-10 and its various mutant progeny at SAIL,

BBN, CompuServe, and elsewhere.  Old-time hackers from the PDP-10

era sometimes use this to refer to user IDs on other systems as

well.


precedence lossage

 /pre's*-dens los'*j/ [C programmers] n.

Coding error in an expression due to unexpected grouping of

arithmetic or logical operators by the compiler.  Used esp. of

certain common coding errors in C due to the 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'/ [by analogy with `append'] vt. To

prefix.  As with `append' (but not `prefix' or `suffix' as a

verb), the direct object is always the thing being added and not

the original word (or character string, or whatever).  "If 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/ (alt. `pretty-print') v. 1. To

generate `pretty' human-readable output from a hairy internal

representation; esp. used for the process of grinding (sense 2)

LISP code.  2. To format in some particularly slick and

nontrivial way.


pretzel key

 [Mac users] n. See feature key.


prime time

 [from TV programming] n. Normal high-usage hours on a

timesharing system; the day shift.  Avoidance of prime time is a

major reason for night mode hacking.


printing discussion

 [PARC] n. A protracted, low-level,

time-consuming, generally pointless discussion of something only

peripherally interesting to all.


priority interrupt

 [from the hardware term] n. Describes any

stimulus compelling enough to yank one right out of hack mode.

Classically used to describe being dragged away by an SO for

immediate sex, but may also refer to more mundane 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.  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.


proglet

 /prog'let/ [UK] n. A short extempore program written

to meet an immediate, transient need.  Often written in BASIC,

rarely more than a dozen lines long, and contains no subroutines.

The largest amount of code that can be written off 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 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).  2. n. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a

wall, but with fewer opportunities for reward.  3. n. 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 unleaded, 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

 [Mac users] n. 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 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 (that's

assuming it wasn't too expensive in the first place).


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

 [common ironic mutation of `preventive

maintenance'] n. Actions performed upon a machine at regularly

scheduled intervals to ensure that the system remains in a usable

state.  So called because it is all too often performed by a

field servoid who doesn't know what he is doing; this results

in the machine's remaining in an *un*usable state for an

indeterminate amount of time.  See also scratch monkey.


prowler

 [UNIX] n. A daemon that is run periodically (typically

once a week) to seek out and erase core files, truncate

administrative logfiles, nuke `lost+found' directories, and

otherwise clean up the cruft that tends to pile up in the

corners of a file system.  See also GFR, reaper,

skulker.


pseudo

 /soo'doh/ [USENET: truncation of `pseudonym'] n. 1. An

electronic-mail or USENET persona adopted by a human for

amusement value or as a means of avoiding negative repercussions of

one's net.behavior; a `nom de USENET', often associated with

forged postings designed to conceal message origins.  Perhaps the

best-known and funniest hoax of this type is BIFF.

2. Notionally, a flamage-generating AI program simulating a

USENET user.  Many flamers have been accused of actually being such

entities, despite 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 is called a pseudoprime.

The hacker backgammon usage stems from the idea that a pseudoprime

is almost as good as a prime: it does the job of a prime until

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/ [UK] n. Syn.

display hack.  See also smoking clover.


psyton

 /si:'ton/ [TMRC] n. The elementary particle carrying the

sinister force.  The probability of a process losing is

proportional to the number of psytons falling on it.  Psytons are

generated by observers, which is why demos are more 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

 [NYU] (also `pube directory' /pyoob'

d*-rek't*-ree/) n. The `pub' (public) directory on a machine that

allows FTP access.  So called because it is the default

location for SEX (sense 1).  "I'll have the source in the

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.


punched card

 alt. `punch card' [techspeak] n.obs. The

signature medium of computing's Stone Age, now obsolescent

outside of some IBM shops.  The punched card actually predated

computers considerably, originating in 1801 as a control 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

 [from the punch line of an old joke referring to American

football: "Drop back 15 yards and punt!"] v. 1. To give up,

typically without any intention of retrying.  "Let's punt the

movie tonight."  "I was going to hack all night to get 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.  See also

book titles.


purple wire

 [IBM] n. 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 1000^(-1), 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

`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 the

3.5" microfloppies now ubiquitous in the PC world 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.  See also nickle, nybble, byte, dynner.


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

 [from the name of the logician Willard V. Quine, via

Douglas Hofstadter] n. 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

 [by analogy with the mainstream phrase]

v. 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."


quotient

 n. See coefficient of X.


quux

 /kwuhks/ [Mythically, from the Latin semi-deponent verb

quuxo, quuxare, quuxandum iri; noun form variously `quux' (plural

`quuces', anglicized to `quuxes') and `quuxu' (genitive

plural is `quuxuum', for four u-letters out of seven in 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, quux is 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 of the

standard series just run foo, bar, baz, quux,

....


QWERTY

 /kwer'tee/ [from the keycaps at the upper left] adj.

Pertaining to a standard English-language typewriter keyboard

(sometimes called the Sholes keyboard after its inventor), as

opposed to Dvorak or foreign-language layouts or a

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

 [Cambridge] n. 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.


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

 [UNIX] adj. CBREAK mode (character-by-character with

interrupts enabled).  Distinguished from raw mode and

cooked mode; the phrase "a sort of half-cooked (rare?) mode" is used

in the V7/BSD manuals to describe the mode.  Usage: 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'.


rave

 [WPI] vi. 1. To persist in discussing a specific subject.

2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows

very little.  3. To complain to a person who is not in a position

to correct the difficulty.  4. To purposely annoy another person

verbally.  5. To evangelize.  See flame.  6. Also used to

describe a less negative form of blather, such as friendly

bullshitting.  `Rave' differs slightly from flame in that

`rave' implies that it is the persistence or obliviousness of the

person speaking that is annoying, while flame implies somewhat

more strongly that the tone 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', which among hackers always

means the Chinese kind rather than the Italian kind.  Both consist

of a filling in a pasta shell, but the Chinese kind includes no

cheese, uses a thinner pasta, has a pork-vegetable filling (good

ones 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/ [UNIX: from the startup script

`/etc/rc', but this is commonly believed to have been named

after older scripts to `run commands'] n. Script file containing

startup instructions for an application program (or an entire

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.


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. By convention, the top-level directory of a UNIX

source distribution always contains a file named `README' (or

READ.ME, or rarely ReadMe or some other variant), which is a

hacker's-eye introduction containing a pointer to more detailed

documentation, credits, miscellaneous revision history notes, etc.

In the Mac and PC worlds, software is not usually distributed in

source form and a 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?"  See holy wars,

religious issues, proprietary, Get a real computer!


Real Programmer

 [indirectly, from the book `Real Men Don't

Eat Quiche'] n. A particular sub-variety of hacker: one possessed

of a flippant attitude toward complexity that is arrogant even when

justified by experience.  The archetypal `Real 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 crap out of other programmers ---

because someday, somebody else might have to try to understand

their code in order to change it.  Their successors generally

consider it a Good Thing that there 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.


Real Soon Now

 [orig. from SF's fanzine community, popularized by

Jerry Pournelle's column in `BYTE'] adv. 1. Supposed to be

available (or fixed, or cheap, or whatever) real soon now according

to somebody, but the speaker is quite skeptical.  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.


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.  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

 pl.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 U.S.A. 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

 [IBM] n. 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/ [UNIX] n. (alt. `regex' or `reg-ex')

1. Common written and spoken abbreviation for `regular

expression', one of the wildcard patterns used, e.g., by UNIX

utilities such as `grep(1)', `sed(1)', and `awk(1)'.

These use 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 <henry@zoo.toronto.edu>.


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

 n. /ki:/ [Case Western Reserve University] n.

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

/abz/ 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 an 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

17 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 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.


return from the dead

 v. To regain access to the net after a long

absence.  Compare person of no account.


RFC

 /R-F-C/ [Request For Comment] n. One of a long-es-tab-lished

series of numbered Internet 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.

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 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

 [by analogy with backbone site] n. 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

 [from ham radio slang] n. 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

 // [MUD community] n. Real Life.  "Firiss laughs in RL"

means that Firiss's player is laughing.  Oppose VR.


roach

 [Bell Labs] vt. To destroy, esp. of a data structure.  Hardware

gets toasted or fried, software gets roached.


robot

 [IRC, MUD] n. 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. Baroque in the extreme.  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

 [UNIX] n. 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 nethack.


room-temperature IQ

 [IBM] quant. 80 or below.  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

 [UNIX] n. 1. The superuser account that ignores

permission bits, user number 0 on a UNIX system.  This account

has the user name `root'.  The term avatar is also used.

2. The top node of the system directory structure (home directory

of the root user).  3. By extension, the privileged

system-maintenance login on any OS.  See root mode, go root.


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/ [USENET: from `rotate alphabet

13 places'] n., v. 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 answers to

puzzles.  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

 [Commodore] n. 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-imch magnetic tape (7- or

9-track) on traditional circular reels; oppose square tape.


RSN

 /R-S-N/ adj. See Real Soon Now.


RTBM

 /R-T-B-M/ [UNIX] imp. 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/ [USENET: primarily written, by analogy with

RTFM] imp. 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/ [UNIX] imp. Acronym for `Read The Fucking

Binary'.  Used when neither documentation nor the the 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."


RTFM

 /R-T-F-M/ [UNIX] imp. Acronym for `Read The Fucking

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 Fucking

Source'.  Stronger form of RTFM, used when the problem

at hand is not necessarily obvious and not available from

the manuals --- or the manuals are not yet written and maybe

never will be.  For even more tricky situations, see RTFB.

2. imp. `Read The Fucking 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 stifling language 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 Jr.,

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 name on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.


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 is

said to be `rude'.  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.  Compare

casting the runes, Great Runes.  2. Special display characters (for

example, the high-half graphics on an IBM PC).


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; lit.

"Cowlike Bad System", idiomatically "Bitchy 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.


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

 [WPI] n. 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/ [from Carl Sagan's TV series "Cosmos";

think "billions and billions"] n. 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. 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 officially 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 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

 [MIT] n. 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.  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.


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 Stupids, social engineering, cracker,

hacker ethic, the, and dark-side hacker.


sandbender

 [IBM] n. 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

 [from police slang for a cheap handgun] n.

A 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/ [MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat

thought-experiment in quantum physics] n. 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

 [from the nuclear power industry] n. 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.)


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 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.

[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

 [UNIX] n. A terminal line which is either

disconnected or connected to a powered-off terminal which, due to

misconfiguration, misimplementation, or simple bad luck, acts as a

source of an infinite number of random characters.  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 though none of the logins succeeds;

the overhead of rejecting them all can be substantial.


screw

 [MIT] n. 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/ [Bell Labs] vt. 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/ [from the pioneering Roundtable chat system in

Houston ca. 1984; prob. originated as a typo for `scroll'] n. 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

 [Small Computer System Interface] n. 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 UNIX variant supported on Sun Microsystems's UNIX

workstations (see also sun-stools), and compare AIDX,

terminak, 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 the 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' n. A

term applied by hackers to most OS vendors' favorite way of coping

with security holes --- namely, ignoring them and not documenting

them and 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 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

 [TMRC, from `Light-Emitting Diode'] /S-E-D/ n.

Smoke-emitting diode.  A friode that lost the war. See

LER.


segfault

 n.,vi. Syn. segment, seggie.


seggie

 /seg'ee/ [UNIX] n. 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/ [from sewing] n. 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

 [IBM] n. 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 `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 it competed with 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 you ending up in some completely unexpected part of the

filesystem....


sharchive

 [UNIX and USENET; from /bin/sh archive] n. 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.)


Share and enjoy!

 imp. 1. Commonly found at the end of software

release announcements and README files, this phrase indicates

allegience to the hacker ethic of free information sharing (see

hacker ethic, the, 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. 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, guiltware, postcardware, and

-ware; compare payware.


shelfware

 /shelfweir/ 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 techspeak, widely propagated via UNIX] n.

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'.


shell out

 [UNIX] n. 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.


shitogram

 /shit'oh-gram/ n. A *really* nasty piece of email.

Compare nastygram, flame.


short card

 n. A half-length IBM PC 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

 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/ [MUD: from H. P. Lovecraft's

evil fictional deity `Shub-Niggurath', the Black Goat with a

Thousand Young] n. 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 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.


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.


SIG

 /sig/ n. (also common as a prefix in combining forms) The

Association for Computing Machinery traditionally sponsors Special

Interest Groups in various technical areas; 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/ [UNIX; often written `.sig' there] n.

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.


sig quote

 /sig kwoht/ [USENET] n. 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

 [from Monty Python's Flying Circus] vi. 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 you put in the top and took out 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.


sitename

 /si:t'naym/ [UNIX/Internet] n. 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.


slack

 n. 1. Space allocated to a disk file but not actually used

to store useful information.  The techspeak equivalent is `internal

fragmentation'.  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] On a timesharing system, a process that

relinquishes its claim on the scheduler until some given event

occurs or a specified time delay elapses is said to `go to

sleep'.  2. In jargon, used very similarly to v. 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 must

wait around until everything else has `had its fill' of machine

resources.  Only when the machine would otherwise be idle is the

task allowed to `suck up the slop'.  Also called a `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 said devices

as displays.  Compare glass tty.  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

 [C programming] n. On many C implementations it

is possible to corrupt the execution stack by writing past the end

of an array declared `auto' in a routine.  Code that does this

is said to `smash the stack', and can cause return from the

routine to jump to a random address.  This can produce some of the

most insidious data-dependent bugs known to mankind.  Variants

include `trash' the stack, scribble the stack, mangle

the stack; the term **mung the stack is not used, as this is

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

 1. vi. To crash, 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. vi. [from automotive slang] To be

conspicuously fast.  "That processor really smokes."


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 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.


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

 [ITS] n. A display hack originally due to

Bill Gosper.  Many convergent lines are drawn on a color monitor in

AOS mode (so that every pixel struck has its color

incremented).  The lines all have one endpoint in the middle 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/ [Simple (or Small) Matter of Programming] n.

1. A piece of code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is

significantly greater than its complexity.  Used to refer to a

program that could obviously be written, but is not 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/ [from the soc.motss newsgroup on USENET,

after some obnoxiously gooey cartoon characters] n. 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/ [from a WWII Army

ac-ro-nym for `Situation Normal, All Fucked Up'] n. "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 shit,

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 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 been

parody posters and stamps made.  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

 [Lewis Carroll, via the Michigan Terminal System] n. 1. A

system failure.  When a user's process bombed, the operator would

get the message "Help, Help, Snark in MTS!"  2. More generally,

any kind of unexplained or threatening event 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 2.*.* versions

(i.e., this lexicon).


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. 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

 [IBM] n. A statistic that is

content-free, or nearly so.  A measure derived via methods of

questionable validity from data of a dubious and vague nature.

Predictively, having a social science number in hand is seldom much

better than nothing, and can be considerably worse.  Management

loves them.  See also numbers, math-out,

pretty pictures.


soft boot

 n. See boot.


softcopy

 /soft'ko-pee/ 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 laser

 n. A 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

 [IBM] n. 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

 [from Friedrich Schiller's `Der

Zauberlehrling' via the film "Fantasia"] n. A bug in a

protocol where, under some circumstances, the receipt of a message

causes multiple messages to be sent, each of which, when received,

triggers the same bug.  Used esp. of such behavior caused by

bounce message loops in email software.  Compare

broadcast storm, network meltdown,

software laser, ARMM..


SOS

 n.,obs. /S-O-S/ 1. An infamously losing text editor.

Once, back in the 1960s, when a text editor was needed for the

PDP-6, a hacker crufted together a quick-and-dirty `stopgap

editor' to be used until a better one was written.  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/

n. 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

can 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 Knight keyboard.


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 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

 [from the MUD community] vt. To crash a program by overrunning

a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data.  See also

buffer overflow, overrun screw, smash the stack.


special-case

 vt. To write unique code to handle input to or

situations arising in program that are somehow distinguished from

normal processing.  This would be used for processing of mode

switches or interrupt characters in an interactive 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 software 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

 [USENET] n.  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.


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

 [Mac] n. 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. [Stanford] 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. [Stanford] Name for the

semi-mythical extended ASCII

circle-plus

character.  6. Canonical name for an output routine that outputs

whatever the local interpretation of `splat' is.

With ITS and WAITS gone, senses 4--6 are now nearly obsolete.  See

also ASCII.


spod

 [Great Britain] n. 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.


spoiler

 [USENET: sci.math and rec.puzzles] n. 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).  Readily forms compounds like `total spoiler',

`quasi-spoiler' and even `pseudo-spoiler'.


sponge

 [UNIX] n. A special case of a filter that reads its

entire input before writing any output; the canonical example is a

sort utility.  Unlike most filters, a sponge can conveniently

overwrite the input file with the output data 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.


spoo

 n. Variant of spooge, sense 1.


spooge

 /spooj/ 1. n. Inexplicable or arcane code, or random

and probably incorrect output from a computer program.  2. vi. To

generate spooge (sense 1).


spool

 [from early IBM `Simultaneous Peripheral Operation

On-Line', but this acronym is widely thought to have been contrived

for effect] vt. To send files to some device or program (a

`spooler') that queues them up and does something 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.


stack

 n. A person's stack is the set of things he or she has to do

in the future.  One speaks of the next project to be attacked as

having risen to the top of the stack.  "I'm afraid I've got real

work to do, so this'll have to be pushed 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.


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).


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

 [University of Lowell, Massachusetts.] n. 3.5-inch

microfloppies, so called because their jackets are more firm

than those of the 5.25-inch and the 8-inch floppy.  Elsewhere this

might be called a `firmy'.


stir-fried random

 alt. `stir-fried mumble' n. 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

 [ITS, prob. from the Star Trek Classic

episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"] n. A term

traditionally used by ITS fans to describe (and deprecate)

computing environments they regard as less advanced, with the

(often correct) implication that said environments were 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 MIT 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

 [prob. from techspeak `main store'] n. In some

varieties of Commonwealth hackish, the referred 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.


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/ [contraction of `stub

subroutine'] n. Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine

that is to be written or fleshed out later.


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 crap".  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 `crap'.  Compare

Hanlon's Razor.  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

 [perverted from mathematical jargon] adj. 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 dumps 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

 [Great Britain] n. 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 cosmic rays, phase of the moon.


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

 [UNIX] n. 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 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.


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 the piece of paper is your extra-somatic

memory and if you don't swap the info out by writing it down it

will get overwritten and lost as you talk.  Compare page in,

page out.


swap space

 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/ (var. `synch') n., vi. 1. To synchronize, to

bring into synchronization.  2. [techspeak] To force all pending

I/O to the disk; see flush, sense 2.  3. More generally, to

force a number of competing processes or agents to a 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..


syntactic sugar

 [coined by Peter Landin] n. Features added to a

language or other formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans,

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 denotes something even more gratuitous, in

that syntactic sugar serves a purpose (making something more

acceptable to humans), but syntactic saccharin or syrup serves no

purpose at all.  Compare candygrammar, syntactic salt.


sys-frog

 /sis'frog/ [the PLATO system] n. 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

 /sysape/ 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 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 well respond `T', meaning that he wants coffee; but of course

he will be brought a cup of tea instead.  As it happens, most

hackers (particularly those who frequent Chinese restaurants) like

tea at least as well as coffee --- so it is not that big a problem.

2. See time T (also since time T equals minus infinity).

3. [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.


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.

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)

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

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

fuck 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 BIFFisms (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, bonk/oif.


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'sto-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 an ugly design requirement or the prospect of using an

unpleasantly heavyweight technique.  "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 Appendix

B).


tar and feather

 [from UNIX `tar(1)'] vt. To create a

transportable archive from a group of files by first sticking them

together with `tar(1)' (the Tape ARchiver) and then

compressing the result (see compress).  The latter action is

dubbed `feathering' 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 `tasteful' 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'.  Flavor is a more popular word than `taste',

though both are used.  See also elegant.  2. Alt. sp. of

tayste.


tayste

 /tayst/ n. Two bits; also as taste.  Syn. crumb,

quarter.  Compare byte, dynner, playte,

nybble, quad.


TCB

 /T-C-B/ [IBM] n. 1. Trouble Came Back.  An intermittent or

difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to

neglect.  Compare heisenbug.  Not to be confused with:

2. Trusted Computing Base, an `official' jargon term from the

Orange Book.


tea, ISO standard cup of

 [South Africa] n. A cup of tea with milk

and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup

before the tea.  Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with

two spoons of sugar; and so on.

Like many ISO 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/ [MS-DOS] n. The original `IBM PC

Technical Reference Manual', including the BIOS listing and

complete schematics for the PC.  The only PC documentation in the

issue package that's considered serious by real hackers.


TECO

 /tee'koh/ obs. 1. vt. Originally, to edit using the TECO

editor in one of its infinite variations (see below).  2. vt.,obs.

To edit even when TECO is *not* the editor being used!  This

usage is rare and now primarily historical.  2. [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 might 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 hacker game used to be mentally working out what

the TECO commands corresponding to human names did.  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."


Telerat

 /tel'*-rat/ n. Unflattering hackerism for `Teleray', a

line of extremely losing terminals.  Compare AIDX, terminak,

Macintrash Nominal Semidestructor, Open DeathTrap,

ScumOS, sun-stools, HP-SUX.


TELNET

 /tel'net/ vt. To communicate with another Internet host

using the TELNET 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.


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*/ [SI] pref. See quantifiers.


teraflop club

 /te'r*-flop kluhb/ [FLOP = Floating Point

Operation] n. A mythical association of people who consume

outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few

simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing

techniques.  Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been

the founder.


terminak

 /ter'mi-nak`/ [Caltech, ca. 1979] n. Any

malfunctioning computer terminal.  A common failure mode of

Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the `L' key to produce the

`K' code instead; complaints about this tended to look like

"Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard.  Pkease fix."  See 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

 [UK] n. A wannabee or early

larval stage hacker who spends most of his or her time wandering the

directory tree and writing noddy programs just to get a fix of

computer time.  Variants include `terminal jockey', `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/ [from LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP)] vi. To

output a newline.  Now rare as jargon, though still used as

techspeak in Common LISP.  It is a contraction of `TERminate PRInt

line', named for the fact that, on 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(1)', 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.

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' has yet to appear as of mid-1993.  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 tool-building 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 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 is a

generalization and 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/ [by analogy with `typo'] n. A momentary,

correctable glitch in mental processing, especially one involving

recall of information learned by rote; a bubble in the stream of

consciousness.  Syn. braino; 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 Humor, Hacker.


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 present

news in thread order.


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 to compute the expression and leave the

address of the result in some standard location.  2. Later

generalized into: an expression, frozen together with its

environment, for later 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

holds 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

 [Acorn Computers] n. Features in software or

hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in

desktop TSRs and that sort of thing).  The American equivalent

would be `checklist features', but this jargon sense of the

phrase has not been reported.


tickle a bug

 vt. To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest

through some known series of inputs or operations.  "You can

tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA card's highlight handling by

trying to set bright yellow reverse video."


tiger team

 [U.S. military jargon] n. 1. Originally, a team whose

purpose is to penetrate security, and thus test security measures.

These people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks,

e.g., leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical 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 3 years in

jail.


time sink

 [poss. by analogy with `heat sink' or `current sink'] n.

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

 [by analogy with `plus-or-minus'] quant.

Term occasionally used when describing the uncertainty associated

with a scheduling estimate, for either humorous or brutally honest

effect.  For a software project, the scheduling uncertainty factor

is usually at least 2.


tip of the ice-cube

 [IBM] n. The visible part of something small and

insignificant.  Used as an ironic comment in situations where `tip

of the iceberg' might be appropriate if the subject were at all

important.


tired iron

 [IBM] n. Hardware that is perfectly functional but

far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new

products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that

the old stuff is starting to look a 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/ [Three-Letter Acronym] n. 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 (no model railroad can begin to approximate the scale

distances between towns and stations, so model railroad timetables

assume a fast clock so that it seems to take about the right amount

of time for a train to complete its journey).  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 bacame 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/, [MIT] n. A denizen of TMRC.


to a first approximation

 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.


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."


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).

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. [MIT] n. 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.


toto

 /toh'toh/ n. This is reported to be the default scratch

file name among French-speaking programmers --- in other words, a

francophone foo.  It is reported that the phonetic mutations

"titi", "tata", and "tutu" canonically follow `toto',

analogously to bar, baz and quux in English.


tourist

 [ITS] n. A guest on the system, especially one who

generally logs in over a network from a remote location for

comm mode, email, games, and other trivial purposes.  One step below

luser.  Hackers often spell this turist, 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

 [AI] n. A deliberately oversimplified case of a

challenging problem used to investigate, prototype, or test

algorithms for a real problem.  Sometimes used pejoratively.  See

also gedanken, toy program.


toy program

 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

 alt. `trapdoor' n. 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

 [Sun] n. 1. A printer.  2. A person who wastes paper.

This should be interpreted in a broad sense; `wasting paper'

includes the production of spiffy but content-free

documents.  Thus, most 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

 n. Printouts, books, and other information media made

from pulped dead trees.  Compare tree-killer, see

documentation.


trit

 /trit/ [by analogy with `bit'] n. One base-3 digit; the

amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three

equally likely outcomes (see also bit).  These arise, for

example, in the context of a flag that should 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.


troff

 /tee'rof/ or /trof/ [UNIX] n. 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

 [Commodore] n. 1. A hacker who never leaves his

cubicle.  The term `Gnoll' (from Dungeons & Dragons) is also

reported.  2. A curmudgeon attached to an obsolescent computing

environment.  The combination `ITS troglodyte' was flung 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

 [Rice University] n. 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

 [coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards]

n. A program designed to break security or damage a system that is

disguised as something else benign, such as a directory lister,

archiver, a game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a

program to find and destroy viruses!  See back door, virus,

worm, phage, mockingbird.


tron

 [NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie `Tron'] v. 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

 [analogy with `trufan' from SF fandom] n. One who

exemplifies the primary values of hacker culture, esp. competence

and helpfulness to other hackers.  A high compliment.  "He spent

6 hours helping me bring up UUCP and netnews on my FOOBAR 4000

last week --- manifestly the act of a true-hacker."  Compare

demigod, oppose munchkin.


tty

 /T-T-Y/ [UNIX], /tit'ee/ [ITS, but some UNIX people say it

this way as well; this pronunciation is not considered to have

sexual undertones] n. 1. A terminal of the teletype variety,

characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very 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 (see Appendix B).  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."


tune

 [from automotive or musical usage] vt. 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

 [University of Waterloo] n. 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 hackers 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.  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

 [IRC] n. Notionally, the area of cyberspace where IRC

operators live.  An op is said to have a "connection to the

twilight zone".


twink

 /twink/ [UCSC] n. 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').


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) the male

equivalent of `chick'); a useless `feature' added to look sexy

and placate a marketroid (compare

Saturday-night special).  This 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.


UBD

 /U-B-D/ [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

 prep. [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/ [In the authors' words, "A weak pun on

Multics"] n. (also `Unix') An interactive time-sharing system

originally 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 was 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.


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

 [ITS] n. 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.)


UNIX weenie

 [ITS] n. 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.


unleaded

 adj. Said of decaffeinated coffee, Diet Coke, and other

imitation programming fluids.  "Do you want regular or

unleaded?"  Appears to be widespread among programmers associated

with the oil industry in Texas (and probably elsewhere).  Usage:

silly, and probably unintelligible to the next generation of

hackers.


unroll

 v. To repeat the body of a loop several times in succession.

This optimization technique reduces the number of times the

loop-termination test has to be executed.  But it only works if

the number of iterations desired is a multiple of the number of

repetitions of the body.  Something has to be done to take care

of any leftover iterations --- such as Duff's device.


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

 [MIT: from the name of a LISP operator] n. 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 approbation.


upthread

 adv. Earlier in the discussion (see thread), i.e.,

`above'. "As Joe pointed out upthread, ..."  See also

followup.


urchin

 n. See munchkin.


USENET

 /yoos'net/ or /yooz'net/ [from `Users' Network'] n.

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 1993, it hosts well over 1200

newsgroups and an average of 40 megabytes (the equivalent of

several thousand paper pages) of new technical articles, news,

discussion, chatter, and flamage every day.


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 life-span of those versions AT&T's support crew was called the

`UNIX Support Group'.  See BSD, UNIX.


UTSL

 // [UNIX] n. On-line acronym for `Use the Source, Luke' (a

pun on Obi-Wan Kenobi's "Use the Force, Luke!" in `Star

Wars') --- analogous to RTFM but more polite.  This is a

common way of suggesting that someone would be best 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 that haven't attracted wizards to

answer them.

Until recently, 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

at almost anyone on the network without concern.

Nowadays, free UNIX clones are becomming common enough that almost

anyone can read source legally.  The most widely distributed is

probably Linux, with 386BSD (aka jolix) running second.  Cheap

commercial UNIXes with source such as BSD/386 and Mach386 are

accelerating this trend.


UUCPNET

 n. 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.  See network address.


vadding

 /vad'ing/ [from VAD, a permutation of ADV (i.e.,

ADVENT), used to avoid a particular admin's continual

search-and-destroy sweeps for the game] n. 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

 [from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] adj.

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

wonton soup is the canonical wonton 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,

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 alleged 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.

It is sometimes claimed that this slogan was *not* actually

used by the Vax vacuum-cleaner people, but was actually that of a

rival brand called Electrolux (as in "Nothing sucks like...").

It's been reliably confirmed that Electrolux actually did use this

slogan in the late 1960s; they're a Belgian company, and it apparently

has become a classic example (used in textbooks) of the perils of

not knowing the local idiom.

It appears, however, that the Vax people thought the slogan a

sufficiently good idea to copy it.  Several British hackers report

that their promotions used it in 1986--1987, and we have one

report from a New Zealander that it surfaced there in TV ads for

the product as recently as 1992!


VAXectomy

 /vak-sek't*-mee/ [by analogy with `vasectomy'] n. 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/ [from `oxen', perhaps influenced by `vixen'] n.

(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

 n. /vaks'herd/ [from `oxherd'] A VAX operator.


vaxism

 /vak'sizm/ n. A piece of code that exhibits

vaxocentrism in critical areas.  Compare PC-ism,

unixism.


vaxocentrism

 /vak`soh-sen'trizm/ [analogy with

`ethnocentrism'] n. 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 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, 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/ [from the "Born Loser"

comix via Commodore; prob. originally from `Mad' Magazine's

`Veeblefeetzer' parodies ca. 1960] n. 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

 [after the insect-eating plant] n. 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 1978 unsupported release of

UNIX ancestral to all current commercial versions.  Before

the release of the POSIX/SVID standards, V7's features were often

treated as a UNIX portability baseline.  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/ [from

`Visual Interface'] n. 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 one 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

 [via the technical term `virtual memory', prob. from

the term `virtual image' in optics] adj. 1. Common alternative

to logical; often used to refer to the artificial objects

created by a computer system to help the system control 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.


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

 [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF]

n. 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 your 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

 [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n.

The use by guess or cookbook of an obscure or hairy system,

feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand.  The

implication is that the technique may not work, and 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.


wabbit

 /wab'it/ [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal

line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 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 hack called RABBITS

reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 55000 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.  Bucky bits were also invented there ---

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/ [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

 [WPI] interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken

with a quizzical tone:  "Wall??"  2. A request for further

explication.  Compare octal forty.  3. [UNIX] 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, 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 clocks required to execute it (on a timesharing

system these will differ, as no one program gets all the

clocks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support

one may get more processor clocks than real-time clocks).


wallpaper

 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."


wank

 /wangk/ [Columbia University: prob. by mutation from

Commonwealth slang v. `wank', to masturbate] n.,v. Used much as

hack is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever technique or

person or the result of such cleverness.  May describe (negatively)

the act of hacking for hacking's sake ("Quit wanking, let's go get

supper!")  or (more positively) a wizard.  Adj.  `wanky'

describes something particularly clever (a person, program, or

algorithm).  Conversations can also get wanky when there are too

many wanks 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-wanks 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/ (also, more plausibly, spelled

`wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans

who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from

biker slang] n. A would-be hacker.  The connotations of 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.


warlording

 [from the USENET group alt.fan.warlord] v. 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 BIFF-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. 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).


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.


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.  Describes a

deadlocked condition.  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

 [Fairchild] n. A bug.  Prob. related to wedged.


wedgitude

 /wedj'i-t[y]ood/ n. The quality or state of being

wedged.


weeble

 /weeb'l/ [Cambridge] interj. 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 BIFF 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.

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 positive or negative 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/ [ITS] n. A derogatory term for UNIX,

derived from UNIX weenie.  According to one noted ex-ITSer, it

is "the operating system preferred by Unix Weenies: typified by

poor modularity, poor reliability, hard file deletion, 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, this means

that it has reliable email links with the network and/or that

it relays a large fraction of available USENET newsgroups.

`Well-known' can be almost synonymous, but also implies that the

site's name is familiar to many (due perhaps to an archive service

or active USENET users).


wetware

 /wet'weir/ [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] n.

1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or

software.  "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers."

2. Human beings (programmers, operators, 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, 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

 [University of Maryland: from hacker] n. 1. A person,

similar to a hacker, who enjoys exploring the details of

programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.

Whereas a hacker tends to produce great hacks, a whacker 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 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

 [from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] n. A

person who has an active wheel bit.  "We need to find a

wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (see wedged, sense

1.)


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

 [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

 [Sun] adj. (alt. `wizzy') Describes a cuspy program;

one that is feature-rich and well presented.


WIBNI

 // [Bell Labs: Wouldn't It Be Nice If] n. 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. [acronymic from `Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing

device (or Pull-down menu)'] A graphical-user-interface-based

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 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.  A feature.  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

 interj. Expresses pleasure at a win.


Winchester

 n. Informal generic term for `floating-head'

magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the

disk surface on an air cushion.  The name arose because the

original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became 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).


window shopping

 [US Geological Survey] n. 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.


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.  "So it turned out I could use a lexer generator

instead of hand-coding my own pattern recognizer.  What a win!"

2. `real winner': Often sarcastic, but also used 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'.


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. Hal Abelson's, Jerry Sussman's and Julie Sussman's

`Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs' (MIT

Press, 1984; ISBN 0-262-01077-1), an excellent computer science text

used in introductory courses at MIT.  So called because of the

wizard on the jacket.  One of the bibles of the LISP/Scheme

world.  Also, less commonly, known as the Purple Book.


wizard mode

 [from rogue] n. A special access mode of a program or

system, usually passworded, that permits some users godlike

privileges.  Generally not used for operating systems themselves

(`root mode' or `wheel mode' would be used instead).


wizardly

 adj. Pertaining to wizards.  A wizardly feature is one

that only a wizard could understand or use properly.


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

 [Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] adj. Applied to problems

which are both profoundly uninteresting in themselves and

unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved.  Often used

in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'.  See

also crawling horror, SMOP.  Also note the rather different

usage as a metasyntactic variable in Commonwealth Hackish.


wonky

 /wong'kee/ [from Australian slang] adj. Yet another

approximate synonym for broken.  Specifically connotes a

malfunction that produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or

amusingly perverse.  "That was the day the printer's font logic

went wonky and everybody's listings came out in Tengwar."  Also in

`wonked out'.  See funky, demented, bozotic.


woofer

 [University of Waterloo] n. 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, which see)

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 inserted in a system

under development or test in order to avoid the effects of a

bug or misfeature so that work can continue.

Theoretically, workarounds are always replaced by fixes; in

practice, customers often find themselves living with workarounds

in the first couple of releases.  "The code died on NUL characters

in the input, so I fixed it to interpret them as spaces."

"That's not a fix, that's a workaround!"  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

 [IBM] adj. 1. In conformance to a wrong or

inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned.

2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility.

3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accepting a

criticism or suggestion.  At IBM, this sense is used in

official documents!  See BAD.


worm

 [from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel `The

Shockwave Rider', via XEROX PARC] n. A program that propagates

itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes.  Compare

virus.  Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is

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.


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

 [a play on `read-only memory'] n. Code so

arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or

even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even

by him/her.  A Bad Thing.


write-only language

 n. A language with syntax (or semantics)

sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size

is write-only code.  A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and

often to APL, though INTERCAL and TECO 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 both (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 in circulation

as freeware on the net.


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(1)'

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

 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/ vt., 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.  Compre FIXME.


xyzzy

 /X-Y-Z-Z-Y/, /X-Y-ziz'ee/, /ziz'ee/, or /ik-ziz'ee/

[from the ADVENT game] adj. The canonical `magic word'.

This comes from ADVENT, in which the idea is to explore an

underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures 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".  See also plugh.


YA-

 [Yet Another] abbrev. 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*/ [Cambridge] n. Yet Another Bloody Acronym.

Whenever some program is being named, someone invariably suggests

that it be given a name that is acronymic.  The response from those

with a trace of originality is to remark 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.").


YAUN

 /yawn/ [Acronym for `Yet Another UNIX Nerd'] n. Reported

from the San Diego Computer Society (predominantly a microcomputer

users' group) as a good-natured punning insult aimed at UNIX

zealots.


Yellow Book

 [proposed] n. The print version of this Jargon File;

`The New Hacker's Dictionary', MIT Press, 1991 (ISBN

0-262-68069-6).  Includes all the material in the 2.9.6 version of

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.


yellow wire

 [IBM] n. 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.


YKYBHTL

 An abbreviation of `You Know You've Been Hacking Too Long'

established on the USENET group alt.folklore.computers during

extended discussion of the indicated entry in the Jargon File.


You are not expected to understand this

 cav. [UNIX] The canonical

comment describing something magic or too complicated to

bother explaining properly.  From an infamous comment in the

context-switching code of the V6 UNIX kernel.


You know you've been hacking too long when...

 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, including a report

that Grace Hopper used to tell such a story about herself. --- 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. A qualifier more

generally attached to advice.  "I find that sending flowers works

well, but your mileage may vary."


Yow!

 /yow/ [from "Zippy the Pinhead" comix] interj. A favored hacker

expression of humorous surprise or emphasis.  "Yow!  Check out what

happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display hack!"

Compare gurfle.


yoyo mode

 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.


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. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a

delimiter or fence character.  Usage: primarily at IBM

shops.


zip

 [primarily MS-DOS] vt. To create a compressed archive from a

group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver.  Its

use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm

have been written.  Commonly used as follows: "I'll zip it up and

send it to you."  See tar and feather.


zipperhead

 [IBM] n. A person with a closed mind.


zombie

 [UNIX] n. A process that has died but has not yet

relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process

hasn't executed a `wait(2)' for it yet).  These can be seen in

`ps(1)' listings occasionally.  Compare orphan.


zorch

 /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] 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 the late 1970s, 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.


'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

 [from `android'] suff. 1. This suffix is used as in

mainstream English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or

some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance.  Hackers will happily

use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words 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. There is a

more specific sense of `-oid' as 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.

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

 [from `software'] suff. Commonly used to form jargon terms

for classes of software.  For examples, see careware,

crippleware, crudware, freeware, fritterware,

guiltware, liveware, meatware, payware,

psychedelicware, shareware, shelfware, vaporware,

wetware.


/dev/null

 /dev-nuhl/ [from the UNIX null device, used as a data

sink] n. A notional `black hole' in any information space being

discussed, used, or referred to.  A controversial posting, for

example, might end "Kudos to rasputin@kremlin.org, 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.  Are we sufficiently confused yet?


1TBS

 // n. The "One True Brace Style"; see indent style.


120 reset

 /wuhn-twen'tee ree'set/ [from 120 volts, U.S. wall

voltage] n. To cycle power on a machine in order to reset or unjam

it.  Compare Big Red Switch, power cycle.


2

 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/ [from the @-sign in an Internet address]

n. (alt. `@-sign party' /at'si:n par`tee/) A semi-closed

party thrown for hackers at a science-fiction convention (esp.

the annual Worldcon); one must have a network address to

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.


@Begin

 See <<backslash>>begin.


<<backslash>>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>'.


Appendix A

 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).

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 X'ed them... and were

once again surprised.  When Robin Hood was X'ed, 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.

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'

 (by GLS)

================================

Some years ago, I 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'.


A Selection of 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.

* * *

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.

* * *

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.]

* * *

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.

* * *

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 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.


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."]


Appendix B

 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,

Birk-enstocks (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.  These

days, backpacks are more common than briefcases, and the hacker `look'

is 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', `Co-Evolution Quarterly', and `Smithsonian'.  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.)  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 is a

notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and relatively

friendly).  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, the old "Star Trek", and the new

"Simpsons").  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 10--15 years ago.


Politics

==========

Vaguely left of center, 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 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 `dumb them down'.  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 extremely 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 tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle variation

than the mainstream culture.  It includes a relatively large gay and bi

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 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 crap.

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 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.

The sort of person who 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.


Appendix C

 Bibliography

*************************

Here are some other books you can read to help you understand the hacker

mindset.


G"odel, 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 Devil's DP Dictionary

Stan Kelly-Bootle

McGraw-Hill, 1981

ISBN 0-07-034022-6

This pastiche of Ambrose Bierce's famous work is similar in format to

the Jargon File (and quotes several entries from jargon-1) 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 "the boring art of coping with

a large number of trivialities."


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 Eclipse.  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 believes the title story of this book

"expresses the spirit of hacking best".  This may well be true; it's

certainly difficult to recall a better job.  The other stories in this

collection are also fine work by an author who is perhaps one of today's

very best practitioners of hard SF.


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

what they think.

#============== THE JARGON FILE ENDS HERE ==============#