THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.1.1 (DRAFT) 12 JUN 1990 INTRODUCTION This `jargon file' is a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of computer hackers. The original `jargon file' was a collection of hacker slang from technical cultures including 1) the MIT AI Lab, 2) the Stanford AI lab, 3) the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, 3) Carnegie- Mellon University, 4) Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Some entries dated back to the early 1970s. This version was published as _The_ Hacker's_Dictionary_ in 1983. This new version casts a wider net than the old jargon file; its aim is to cover not just AI but all the technical computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries now derive from USENET and the C and UNIX communities. The present maintainers of the jargon file are Guy L. Steele (gls@think.com) and Eric S. Raymond (eric@snark.uu.net). Send all additions, corrections and correspondence relating to the jargon file to jargon@think.com. CREDITS The original jargon file was compiled by Guy L. Steele Jr., Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin, with assistance from the MIT and Stanford AI communities and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. Some contributions were submitted via the ARPAnet from miscellaneous sites. The `old' jargon file was last revised in 1983; its revisions are all un-numbered and may be collectively considered `Version 1'. Version 2.1: the jargon file reorganization and massive additions were by Eric S. Raymond, approved by Guy Steele. Many items of UNIX, C, USENET and microcomputer-based slang were added at that time (as well as Appendix A, The Untimely Demise of Mabel The Monkey). Some obsolescent usages (mostly PDP-10 derived) were moved to appendix B. Our thanks to all the USENETters who contributed entries and encouragement. Special thanks to our Scandinavian correspondent Per Lindberg (per@front.se), author of the remarkable Swedish language 'zine _Hackerbladet_, for bring FOO! comics to our attention and smuggling the IBM hacker underground's own baby jargon file out to us. Also special gratitude to ace hacker/linguist Joe Keane (jkg@osc.osc.com) for helping us improve the pronunciation guides. FORMAT FOR NEW ENTRIES Try to conform to the format already being used -- 70 character lines, 3-character indentations, pronunciations in parentheses, etymologies in brackets, single-space after def'n numbers and word classes, etc. Stick to the standard ASCII character set. 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 slang! 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 slang 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 slang 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! Back to Top NOTES ON JARGON CONSTRUCTION There are some standard methods of jargonification which became established quite early (i.e before 1970), spreading from such sources as the MIT Model Railroad Club, the PDP-1 SPACEWAR hackers and John McCarthy's original crew of LISPers. These include: Verb doubling: a standard construction is to double a verb and use it as a comment on what the implied subject does. Often used to terminate a conversation. Typical examples involve WIN, LOSE, HACK, FLAME, BARF, CHOMP: "The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose." "Mostly he just talked about his @#!!$% crock. Flame, flame." "Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!" Soundalike slang: similar to Cockney rhyming slang. Often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard examples: Boston Globe => Boston Glob Herald American => Horrid (Harried) American New York Times => New York Slime Prime Time => Slime Time government property - do not duplicate (seen on keys) => government duplicity - do not propagate Often the substitution will be made in such a way as to slip in a standard jargon word: Dr. Dobb's Journal => Dr. Frob's Journal Margaret Jacks Hall => Marginal Hacks Hall Data General => Dirty Genitals 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: "Foodp?" "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!" "State-of-the-world-P?" (Straight) "I'm about to go home." (Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state." [One of the best of these is a Gosperism (i.e., due to Bill Gosper). When we were at a Chinese restaurant, he 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] Peculiar nouns: MIT AI 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. Examples: porous => porosity generous => generosity Ergo: mysterious => mysteriosity ferrous => ferrocity Other examples: winnitude, disgustitude, hackification. Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. eg: "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. 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 in a com link. Another expression sometimes heard is "complain!", meaning "I have a complaint!" Hacker speech style: 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 is essential. One should use just enough jargon to communicate precisely and identify oneself as "in the culture"; overuse and a breathless, excessively gung-ho attitude are considered tacky and the mark of a loser. Hacker speech style (a variety of the precisionist English normally spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical fields) is fairly constant everywhere. Of the four other listed constructions, verb doubling and peculiar noun formations have become quite general; but rhyming slang is still largely confined to MIT and other large universities, and the P convention is found only where LISPers flourish. One final note. 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 BUG SCREW LOSE MISFEATURE CROCK KLUGE HACK WIN FEATURE ELEGANCE PERFECTION The last is never actually attained. PRONUNCIATION GUIDE The pronunciation keys in the jargon listing use the following simple system: 1) Syllables are hyphen-separated, except that an apostrophe or back-apostrophe follows each accented syllable (the back apostrophe 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 (but it is sometimes doubled at the end of syllables to emphasize this). The digraph `dh' is the th of `these clothes', not of `thick'. 3) Vowels are represented as follows: a back, that ah father, palm ar far, mark aw flaw, caught ay bake, rain e less, men ee easy, ski eir their, software i trip, hit ie life, sky o cot, top oh flow, sew oo loot, through or more, door ow out, how oy boy, coin uh but, some u put, foot y yet yoo few [y]oo oo with optional `fronting' as in `news' (noos or nyoos). An at-sign 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 "kul'r". Back to Top THE JARGON ITSELF = = @BEGIN [primarily CMU] with @End, used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. From the SCRIBE command of the same name. For example: @Begin(Flame) Predicate logic is the only good programming language. Anyone who would use anything else is an idiot. Also, computers should be tredecimal instead of binary. @End(Flame) On USENET, this construct would more frequently be rendered as (FLAME ON) and (FLAME OFF). Back to Top = A = ABEND (ab'end) n. Abnormal termination (of software); crash; lossage. Derives from an error message on the IBM 360, but has passed into more general use. ACK (ak) interj. 1. [from the ASCII mnemonic for 000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream "Yo!"). An appropriate response to PING. 2. [prob. from _Bloom_County_] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in "Oop ack!". Semi-humorous. ADGER (adj'r) [UCLA] v. To make a bonehead move that could have been forseen with a slight amount of mental effort, i.e., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project". AD-HOCKERY (ad-hok'@r-ee) [Purdue] n. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behavior, but are in fact entirely arbitrary. ADVENT (ad'vent) n. The prototypical computer adventure game, first implemented on the PDP-10 by MIT hackers Dave Lebling, Mark Blank and Don R. Woods as a demo for a natural-language parser they were hacking on at the time. Now better known as Adventure, but the TOPS-10 operating system only permitted 6-letter filenames. "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" ALIASING SCREW (ayl'ee-@-sing) [C programmers] n. A class of subtle programming errors which can arise in code that does dynamic allocation via malloc(3). If more than one pointer addresses ('aliases for') a given hunk of storage, it may happen that the storage is freed through one alias and then referenced through another, leading 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. See also PRECEDENCE SCREW, SMASH THE STACK, FANDANGO ON CORE, MEMORY LEAK, OVERRUN SCREW. ALT BIT (ahlt bit) [from alternate?] adj. See META BIT. ANGLE BRACKETS (ang'@l brak'@ts) [primarily MIT] n. Either of the characters "<" and ">". See BROKET. APP (ap) n. Short for `application program', as opposed to a systems program. What systems vendors are forever chasing developers to do 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 apps. Oppose TOOL, OPERATING SYSTEM. ARENA (a-ree'nuh) [UNIX] n. The area of memory attached to a process by brk(2) and sbrk(2) and used by malloc(3) as dynamic storage. So named from a semi-mythical "malloc: corrupt arena" message supposedly emitted when some early versions became terminally confused. See OVERRUN SCREW, ALIASING SCREW, MEMORY LEAK, SMASH THE STACK. ARG (arg) n. Abbreviation for "argument" (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word. Compare PARAM, VAR. ASBESTOS LONGJOHNS (as-bes't@s long'jons), UNDIES (uhn'dees), or OVERCOAT (o'vr-koht) n. Metaphoric garments often donned by USENET posters just before emitting a remark they expect will elicit FLAMAGE. ASCII (as'kee) Common slang names for ASCII characters are collected here. See individual entries for BANG, CLOSE, EXCL, OPEN, QUES, SEMI, SHRIEK, SPLAT, TWIDDLE, WHAT, WOW, and YIU-SHANG WHOLE FISH. This list is snarfed from USENET circa 1983. Single characters are listed in ASCII order, followed by multiples. For each character, "official" names appear first, then others in order of popularity (more or less). ! exclamation point, exclamation, bang, factorial, excl, ball-bat, smash, shriek, cuss, wow, hey " double quote, quote, dirk, literal mark, rabbit ears # pound sign, number sign, sharp, crunch, mesh, hex, hash, flash, grid, pig-pen, tictactoe, scratchmark, octothorp (from Bell System) $ dollar sign, currency symbol, buck, cash, string (from BASIC), escape (from TOPS-10), ding, big-money % percent sign, percent, mod, double-oh-seven & ampersand, amper, and, address (from C), andpersand ' apostrophe, single quote, quote, prime, tick, irk, pop, spark () open/close parenthesis, left/right parenthesis, paren/thesis, parenthisey, unparenthisey, open/close round bracket, ears, so/already, wax/wane * asterisk, star, splat, wildcard, gear, dingle, mult ("multiply") + plus sign, plus, add, cross, intersection , comma, tail - hyphen, dash, minus sign, worm . period, dot, decimal point, radix point, point, full stop, spot / virgule, slash, stroke, slant, diagonal, solidus, over, slat : colon, two-spot ; semicolon, semi, hybrid <> angle brackets, brokets, left/right angle, less/greater than, read from/write to, from/into, from/toward, in/out, comesfrom/ gozinta (all from UNIX), funnel, brokets, crunch/zap, suck/blow = equal sign, equals, quadrathorp, gets, half-mesh ? question mark, whatmark, what, wildchar, ques, huh, quark @ at sign, at, each, vortex, whorl, whirlpool, cyclone, snail, ape, cat V vee, book [] square brackets, left/right bracket, bracket/unbracket, bra/ket, square/unsquare, U turns \ reversed virgule, backslash, bash, backslant, backwhack, backslat, escape (from UNIX) ^ circumflex, caret, uparrow, hat, chevron, sharkfin, to ("to the power of"), fang _ underscore, underline, underbar, under, score, backarrow, flatworm ` grave accent, grave, backquote, left quote, open quote, backprime, unapostrophe, backspark, birk, blugle, back tick, push {} open/close brace, left/right brace, brace/unbrace, curly bracket, curly/uncurly, leftit/rytit, embrace/bracelet | vertical bar, bar, or, v-bar, spike, pipe, gozinta, thru, pipesinta (last four from UNIX) ~ tilde, squiggle, approx, wiggle, twiddle, swung dash, enyay ASSEMBLER (as'em-bler) 1. A program translator that allows human beings to generate machine code using mnemonics and symbolic names for memory locations rather than raw binary; distinguished from an HLL (q.v.) by the fact that a single assembler step generally maps to a single machine instruction (see also LANGUAGES OF CHOICE). 2.A NANOBOT which is a physical REPLICATOR. (This is the "official" term, coined by Eric Drexler; see NANOTECHNOLOGY). AUTOMAGICALLY (aw-toh-maj'i-klee, aw-toh-maj'i-kl-ee) adv. Automatically, but in a way which, for some reason (typically because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too trivial), I don't feel like explaining to you. See MAGIC. Example: Some programs which produce XGP output files spool them automagically. Back to Top = B = BACKBONE CABAL (bak'bohn k@-bawl') n. Semi-mythical group of large-site administrators who pushed through the GREAT RENAMING and reined in the chaos of USENET during most of the 1980s. The cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight, but the net hardly noticed. BACK DOOR (bak dor) n. A hole in the security of a system deliberately left in place by designers or maintainers. The motivation for this is not always sinister; some operating systems, for example, come out of the box with privileged accounts intended for use by field service or the vendor's maintenance programmers. Historically, back doors have often lurked in systems longer than any one expected or planned, and a few have become widely known. The famous RTM worm of late 1988, for example, used a back door in the BSD UNIX sendmail(1) utility. See also IRON BOX, CRACKER, WORM, LOGIC BOMB. BACKGROUND (bak'grownd) v.,adj. A task running in background is detached from the terminal where it was started and running at a lower priority (oppose FOREGROUND). Nowadays this term is primarily associated with UNIX, but it was appears first to have been used in this sense on OS/360. By extension, 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. Compare SLOPSUCKER. BAD THING (bad thing) n. Something which 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. BAGBITER (bag'biet-@r) 1. n. Equipment or program that fails, usually intermittently. 2. BAGBITING: adj. Failing hardware or software. "This bagbiting system won't let me get out of SPACEWAR." Usage: verges on obscenity. Grammatically separable; one may speak of "biting the bag". Synonyms: LOSER, LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS. BAMF (bamf) [from comix] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in VIRTUAL REALITY (q.v.) electronic fora when a character wishes to make a dramatic entrance or exit. BANG (bang) 1. n. Common alternate name for EXCL (q.v.), especially at CMU and when used in pronouncing a BANG PATH (q.v.) in spoken hackish. See SHRIEK. 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 PATH (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 the path "...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me" directs correspondents 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". See INTERNET ADDRESS and NETWORK. BAR (bar) 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. BARF (barf) [from the "layman" slang, meaning "vomit"] 1. interj. Term of disgust. See BLETCH. 2. v. Choke, as on input. May mean to give an error message. "The function `=' compares two fixnums or two flonums, and barfs on anything else." 3. BARFULOUS, BARFUCIOUS: adj. Said of something which would make anyone barf, if only for aesthetic reasons. See CHOKE, GAG. 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. BAZ (baz) 1. The third metasyntactic variable, after FOO and BAR and before QUX. "Suppose we have three functions FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls BAZ..." 2. Occasionally appended to FOO to produce FOOBAZ. BELLS AND WHISTLES (belz and hwis'@lz) [by analogy with locomotives] 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. BENCHMARK (bench'mark) n. An inaccurate measure of computer performance. As in "In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." BERKLIX (ber'kliks) n.,adj. Contraction of Berkeley UNIX. See BSD. Not used at Berkeley itself. [This one, in my experience, is more common among suit-wearers attempting to sound "hip" than hackers -- ESR] BERZERKELY (b@r-zer'klee) [from the name of a now-deceased record label] n. Humorous, often-used distortion of "Berkeley" used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the BSD UNIX hackers. BIG-ENDIAN (big'-en-di-@n) adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given 16- or 32-bit word, lower byte addresses have higher significance (the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most processors including the IBM 370 family and the PDP-10 and the Intel and Motorola microprocessor families and the various RISC designs current in 1990 are big-endian. See LITTLE-ENDIAN. BIG IRON (big ie'@rn) n. Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of number crunching supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Believed to have originated in the title of a paper given at a Usenix, "Unix on Big Iron". Term of approval, compare DINOSAUR. BIG RED SWITCH (big red swich) [IBM] n. The power switch on a computer, esp. on an IBM-PC where it really is large and red. As in "This !@%$% BITTY BOX is hung again, time to hit the big red switch". BIGNUMS (big'nuhms) [from Macsyma] n. 1. In backgammon, large numbers on the dice. 2. Multiple-precision (sometimes infinitely extendable) integers and, through analogy, any very large numbers. 3. EL CAMINO BIGNUM: El Camino Real, a street through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended (and still appears in places) all the way to Mexico City. It was termed "El Camino Double Precision" when someone noted it was a very long street, and then "El Camino Bignum" when it was pointed out that it was hundreds of miles long. BINARY (bie'na-ree) n. The object code for a program. BIT BANG (bit bang) n. Transmission of data on a serial line accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit at the appropriate times (popular on certain early models of PRIME computers, presumably when UARTs were too expensive; and on archaic Z-80 micros with a Zilog PIO but no SIO). The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT, SHIFT, OUT etc 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 BUCKET (bit buhk'@t) n. The great data sink in the sky. Data that is discarded is said to "go to the bit bucket". On UNIX, often used for /dev/null. Sometimes amplified as THE GREAT BIT BUCKET IN THE SKY. BIT DECAY (bit d@-kay') n. See SOFTWARE ROT. People with a physics background tend to prefer this one for the analogy with particle decay. BIT ROT (bit rot) n. See SOFTWARE ROT. BITBLT (bit'blit, bit'belt) n. [from BLT, q.v.] 1. One of a closely related family of 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. An early experimental bit-mapped terminal at Bell Labs, later commercialized as the AT&T 5620. 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 for it. Especially used of small, obsolescent, single-tasking-only personal machines like the Atari 800X, Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, or TRS-80. 2. More generally, the opposite of `real computer' (see GET A REAL COMPUTER). Pejorative. See also MESS-DOS, TOASTER, and TOY. BIXIE (biks'ee) n. Synonym for EMOTICON used on BIX (the Byte Information Exchange); BIXers believe the emoticon was invented there. BLAST (blast) v.,n. Synonym for BLT (q.v.), used esp. for large data sends over a network or comm line. Opposite of SNARF. Usage: uncommon. BLAZER (blay'zr) n. Nickname for the Telebit Trailblazer, an expensive but extremely reliable and effective high-speed modem, popular at UNIX sites that pass large volumes of EMAIL and USENET news. BLETCH (blech) [from German "brechen", to vomit (?)] 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. BLETCHEROUS: adj. Disgusting in design or function. "This keyboard is bletcherous!" Usage: slightly comic. BLINKENLIGHTS (blink'@n-lietz) n. Front-panel diagnostic lights on a mainframe CPU. Derives from the last word of the famous blackletter-Gothic "ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!" notice in mangled pseudo-German that once graced about half the computer rooms in the English-speaking world. The following text ran: "Das computermachine ist nicht fur gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. Ist nicht fur gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watch das blinkenlichten." This silliness dates back at least as far as the London University ATLAS site in the 1960s, but (judging by the idioms) was probably composed by an American at some still-earlier date. BLOCK (blok) [From computer science usage] 1. vi. To delay while waiting for something. "We're blocking until everyone gets here." 2. in BLOCK ON vt. To block, waiting for (something). "Lunch is blocked on Phil's arrival." BLOCK TRANSFER COMPUTATIONS (blok trans'fer kom-pyoo-tay'shns) n. From the Dr. Who television series: in the show, it referred to computations so fiendishly subtle and complex that they could not be performed by machines. Used to refer to any task that should be expressible as an algorithm in theory, but isn't. BLOW AWAY (bloh @-way') v. To remove files and directories from permanant storage with extreme prejudice, generally by accident. Oppose NUKE. BLOW OUT (bloh owt) v. Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as CRASH AND BURN. See BLOW PAST. BLOW PAST (bloh past) v. To BLOW OUT despite a safeguard. "The server blew past the 5K reserve buffer." BLT (blit, belt [very rarely]) v. To transfer a large contiguous package of information from one place to another. This usage has outlasted the PDP-10 BLock Transfer instruction for which it derives. See DD, CAT, BLAST, SNARF, Appendix B. BLUE GLUE (bloo gloo) [IBM] n. IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture) an incredibly losing and bletcherous protocol suite widely favored at commercial shops that don't know any better. See FEAR AND LOATHING. BLUE GOO (bloo goo) n. Term for "police" NANOBOTS intended to prevent GRAY GOO (q.v.), denature hazardous waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back into the stratosphere, prevent halitosis, and to promote truth, justice, and the American way, etc., etc. See NANOTECHNOLOGY. BNF (bee-en-ef) n. Hacker 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 postal address: ::= ::= [] ::= | "." ::= [] ::= "," 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 name-part consists of a first-name followed by an optional middle-part followed by a last-name. A middle-part consists of either a middle name or a middle initial followed by a dot. A street address consists of an optional apartment specifier followed by a street number, followed by a street name. A zip-part consts of a town-name, followed by a state code, followed by a zip code. Note that many things such as the format of a first-name, apartment specifier or zip-code are left unspecified. These are presumed to be obvious from context or detailed in another part of the specification the BNF is part of. BOA (bo'uh) [IBM] n. Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in DINOSAUR PENS. It is rumored within IBM that 370 channel cables are limited to 200 feet because beyond that length the boas get dangerous... BOAT ANCHOR (boht an'kr) n. Like DOORSTOP (q.v.) but more severe, implies that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. BOGOMETER (boh-goh'm@-tr) n. An instrument to measure BOGOSITY, generally a conversational device, as in "my bogometer is reading in the red on that idea" or "I think you just bent the needle on my bogometer". BOGON (bo'gon) [by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced by the similarity to "Vogon"] n. 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see QUANTUM BOGODYNAMICS). For instance, "the ethernet is emitting bogons again," meaning 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 extension, used to refer metasyntactically to any bogus thing, such as "I'd like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff bogon." BOGON FILTER (bo'gon fil'tr) n. Any device, software or hardware, which limits or suppresses the flow and/or emission of bogons. Example: "Engineering hacked a bogon filter between the Cray and the VAXen and now we're getting fewer dropped packets." BOGOSITY (boh-gos-@-tee) n. 1. The degree to which something is BOGUS (q.v.). At CMU, bogosity is measured with a bogometer; typical use: in a seminar, when a speaker says something bogus, a listener might raise his hand and say, "My bogometer just triggered." The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat (uL). 2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see QUANTUM BOGODYNAMICS. BOGUS (boh'guhs) [WPI, Yale, Stanford] 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. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas." (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of RANDOM.) [Etymological note from Lehman/Reid at CMU: "Bogus" was originally used (in this sense) at Princeton, in the late 60s. It was used not particularly in the CS department, but all over campus. It came to Yale, where one of us (Lehman) was an undergraduate, and (we assume) elsewhere through the efforts of Princeton alumni who brought the word with them from their alma mater. In the Yale case, the alumnus is Michael Shamos, who was a graduate student at Yale and is now a faculty member here. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized (e.g., autobogophobia: the fear of becoming bogotified).] BOHR BUG (bor buhg) [from quantum physics] n. A repeatable BUG; one which manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of HEISENBUG. BOINK (boynk) [USENET] 1. To have sex with; compare BOUNCE, sense #3. 2. After the original Peter Korn "Boinkcon" 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. BONDAGE-AND-DISCIPLINE LANGUAGE (bon'd@j @n dis'@-plin lang'w@j) A language such as Pascal, 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 or even vanilla general-purpose programming. See LANGUAGES OF CHOICE. BOOT (boot) [from "by one's bootstraps"] v.,n. To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer slang (having become jargon in the strict sense), but the following variants still are. COLD BOOT: a boot from a power- off condition. WARM BOOT: a reboot with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash. BOTTLENECKED (bot'l-nekt) adj. 1. Used by hackers specifically to describe hardware under which performance is usually limited by contention for one particular resource (such as disk, memory or processor CLOCKS); see BALANCED. 2. Less often, applied to the software analogue of sense #1, a slow code section or algorithm through which all computation must pass (see also HOT SPOT). BOUNCE (bowns) v. 1. [UNIX] An electronic mail message which is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to `bounce'. See also BOUNCE MESSAGE. 2. [Stanford] To play volleyball. "Bounce, bounce! Stop wasting time on the computer and get out to the court!" 3. To engage in sexual intercourse. BOUNCE MESSAGE (bowns mes'@j) [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. BOXEN (bok'sn) pl n. [back-formation from VAXEN] Fanciful plural of `box' often encountered in the phrase `UNIX boxen', used to describe commodity UNIX hardware. The implication is that any two UNIX boxen are interchangeable. BRAIN-DAMAGED (brayn'dam-@jd) [generalization of "Honeywell Brain Damage" (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in 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. BRANCH TO FISHKILL (branch to fish'kill) [IBM, from the location of one of their facilities] n. Any unexpected jump in a program that produces catastrophic or just plain weird results. See HYPERSPACE. BREAK (brayk) v. 1. To cause to be broken (in any sense). "Your latest patch to the system broke the TELNET server." 2. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may be examined for debugging purposes. The place where it stops is a BREAKPOINT. BREAKAGE (brayk'@j) [IBM] n. The extra people that must be added to an organization because its master plan has changed; used esp. of software and hardware development teams. BRITTLE (bri'tl) adj. Said of software that's easily broken. Often describes the results of a research effort that were never intended to be robust, but equally can apply commercially developed software. BROADCAST STORM (brod'kast 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. Also called NETWORK MELTDOWN. See also CHERNOBYL PACKET. BROKEN (broh'kn) adj. 1. Not working properly (of programs). 2. Behaving strangely; especially (of people), exhibiting extreme depression. BROKET (broh'k@t, broh'ket) [by analogy with "bracket": a "broken bracket"] (primarily Stanford) n. Either of the characters "<" and ">". (At MIT, and apparently in THE REAL WORLD (q.v.) as well, these are usually called ANGLE BRACKETS.) BRUTE FORCE AND IGNORANCE (broot fohrs @nd ig'nohr-ans) n. A popular design technique at many software houses. Dogmatic adherence to design methodologies tends to encourage it. Characteristic of early LARVAL STAGE programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI, as in: "Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly from BFI." Compare BOGOSITY. BSD (bee-ess-dee) n. [acronym for Berkeley System Distribution] a family of UNIX versions for the DEC VAX developed by Bill Joy and others at UC Berkeley starting around 1980, incorporating TCP/IP networking enhancements and many other features. The BSD versions (4.1, 4.2, and 4.3) and commercial versions derived from them (SunOS 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. BUCKY BITS (buh'kee bits) [primarily Stanford] n. The bits produced by the CTRL and META shift keys on a Stanford (or Knight) keyboard. It is rumored that these were in fact named for Buckminster Fuller during a period when he was consulting at Stanford. Unfortunately, legend also has it that "Bucky" was Niklaus Wirth's nickname when *he* was consulting at Stanford and that he first suggested the idea of the meta key, so its bit was named after him. DOUBLE BUCKY: adj. Using both the CTRL and META keys. "The command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F." See also META BIT, COKEBOTTLE. BUFFER OVERFLOW (buhf'r oh'vr-floh) n. What typically happens when an OS or application is fed data faster than it can buffer and process it. Used metaphorically of human mental processes. Ex. "Sorry, I got four phone calls in three minutes last night and lost your message to a buffer overflow." BUG (buhg) [from telephone terminology, "bugs in a telephone cable", blamed for noisy lines] n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program, esp. one which causes it to malfunction. See FEATURE. BULLETPROOF (bul'@t-proof) adj. Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely robust; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition. This is a rare and valued quality. BUM (buhm) 1. v. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more instructions." 2. n. A small change to an algorithm to make it more efficient. Usage: somewhat rare. See TUNE. BUMP (buhmp) v. Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator. Used esp. of counter variables, pointers (see POINTER ARITHMETIC) and index dummies in for, while, and do-until loops. BURBLE (ber'bl) v. Like FLAME, but connotes that the source is truly clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep contempt. BUSY-WAIT (bi'zee-wayt) v. To wait on an event by SPINning through a tight or timed-delay loop that checks for the event on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler and continuing execution on another part of the task. A wasteful technique, best avoided on time-sharing systems where a busy-waiting program may hog the processor. BUZZ (buhz) v. To run in a very tight loop, perhaps without guarantee of getting out. See SPIN. BWQ [bee duhb'l-yoo kyoo) [IBM] n. Buzz Word Quotient. Usually roughly proportional to BOGOSITY. See TLA. BYTESEXUAL (biet-seks'u-@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). Back to Top = C = C (see) n. 1. The third letter of the Latin alphabet. 2. The name of a programming language designed by Dennis Ritchie during the early 1970s and first used to implement UNIX (q.v.). So called because many features derived from an earlier interpreter 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 LANGUAGES OF CHOICE. CAMBRIDGE NOTATION (kaym'brij no-ta'shn) [LISP] n. The now-standard way of writing LISP expressions as nested lists, with parens and spaces; as opposed to the earlier and technically purer practice of writing full S-expressions with cons dots. Supposedly invented as a KLUGE because a full parser for S-expressions would have been harder to write. CAN (can) v. 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!". Synymous with GUN. CANONICAL (k@-nahn'i-kl) adj. The usual or standard state or manner of something. A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance at the use of jargon. Over his loud objections, we made a point of using jargon 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: "He just used `canonical' in the canonical way." CASTERS UP MODE (cas'trz uhp mohd) [IBM] n. Yet another synonym for `broken' or `down'. CAT (cat) [from UNIX cat(1)] v. To spew an entire (notionally large) file to the screen or some other output sink without pause; 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. CATATONIA (kat-@-toh'nee-uh) n. A condition of suspended animation in which the system is in a wedged (CATATONIC) state. CDR (ku'dr) [from LISP] v. With "down", to trace down a list of elements. "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. CELL-REPAIR MACHINES (sel r:-peir' m:-sheens') n. An often-discussed probable consequence of NANOTECHNOLOGY; NANOBOTS specifically programmed to repair tissue at the cellular level. Possible uses include reversing freezing damage from CRYONICS procedures and correction of mutagen-damaged DNA (including eradication of retrovirii and oncogenes). 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'. CHAIN (chayn) [orig. from BASIC's CHAIN statement] v. When used of programming languages, refers to a statement that allows a parent executable to hand off execution to a child without going through the OS command interpreter. 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. CHAR (keir; [rarely] char) n. Shorthand for `character'. Esp. used by C programmers, as `char' is C's typename for character data. CHASE POINTERS (chays uh poyn'tr) v. 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. CHERNOBYL PACKET (cher-no'b@l pa'k@t) n. An IP Ethergram with both source and destination Ether and IP address set as the respective broadcast address. So called because it induces NETWORK MELTDOWN. CHINESE RAVS (chie'neez ravs) [MIT] n. Pot-stickers. Kuo-teh. Gyoza. Oriental dumplings, especially when pan-fried rather than steamed. A favorite hacker appetizer. See ORIENTAL FOOD, STIR-FRIED RANDOM. CHOKE (chohk) vi. To reject input, often ungracefully. Examples: "I tried building X, but cpp choked on all those #define's." See BARF, GAG. CHOMP (chomp) v. To lose; 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, consisting of the four fingers held together as if in a mitten or hand puppet, and the fingers and thumb open and close rapidly to illustrate a biting action. The gesture alone means CHOMP CHOMP (see Verb Doubling). CHRISTMAS TREE PACKET (krist'm@s tree pa'k@t) n. A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use. CHROME (krohm) [from automotive slang via wargaming] n. Showy features added to attract users, but which contribute little or nothing to the power of a system. "The 3D icons in Motif are just chrome!" Distinguished from BELLS AND WHISTLES by the fact that the former are usually added to gratify developers' own desires for featurefulness. CHURCH OF THE SUB-GENIUS (cherch @v dh@ suhb-gee'-ny@s) A mutant offshoot of DISCORDIANISM launched in 1981 as a spoof of fundamentalist Christianity by the "Rev." 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 Sub-Genius theory is concerned with the acquisition of the mystical substance or quality of "slack". CLASSIC C (klas'ik see) n. The C programming language as defined in the first edition of the book ``The C Programming Language'' by ``Brian W. Kernighan and Dennis M. Ritchie'' with some small additions. It is also known as ``K & R C.'' The name came into use during the standardisation process for C by the ANSI X3J11 committee. CLOCKS (kloks) 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. CLONE (klohn) n. 1. An exact duplicate, as in "our product is a clone of their product." 2. A shoddy, spurious copy, as in "their product is a clone of our product." 3. A PC-BUS/ISA or EISA-compatible 80x86 based microcomputer (in-context shorthand for "PC clone"). 3. In the construction UNIX CLONE: An OS designed to deliver a UNIX-lookalike environment sans UNIX license fees, or with additional "mission-critical" features such as support for real-time programming. CLOSE (klohz) n. Abbreviation for "close (or right) parenthesis", used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. See OPEN. CLUSTERGEEKING (kluh'ster-gee'king) [CMU] n. An activity defined by spending more time at a computer cluster doing CS homework than most people spend breathing. COBOL FINGERS (koh'bol fing'grs) n. Reported from Sweden, a (hypothetical) disease one might get from programming in COBOL. The language requires extremely voluminous code. Programming too much in COBOL causes the fingers to wear down (by endless typing), until short stubs remain. This malformity is called COBOL FINGERS. "I refuse to type in all that source code again, it will give me cobol fingers!" CODE GRINDER (kohd grien'dr) 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. This is about as far from hackerdom as you can get and still touch a computer. Connotes pity. See REAL WORLD. 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, and utter lack of imagination. CODE POLICE (kohd p@-lees') [by analogy with "thought police"] n. A mythical team of Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst into one's office and arrest one for violating style rules. May be used either "seriously" (to underline a claim that a particular style violation is dangerous) or (more often) ironically (to suggest that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by anal-retentive weenies). CODEWALKER (kohd'wok-r) 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. As in "This language extension would require a codewalker to implement." COKEBOTTLE (kohk'bot-l) n. Any very unusual character. 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. Since the demise of the SPACE-CADET KEYBOARD this is no longer a serious usage, but may be invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. COME FROM (kuhm fruhm) n. A semi-mythical language construct dual to the `go to'; COME FROM would cause the referenced label to act as a sort of trapdoor, so that if the program ever reached it control would quietly fall through to the statement following the COME FROM. COME FROM was first proposed in a Datamation article in 1973 that parodied the then-raging `structured programming' wars (see CONSIDERED HARMFUL). It was actually implemented for the first time seventeen years later, in C-INTERCAL (see INTERCAL, RETROCOMPUTING); knowledgeable observers are still reeling from shock. COMPRESS (k@m-pres') [UNIX] v. When used witchout a qualifier, generally refers to CRUNCHing of a file using a particular C implementation of Lempel-Ziv compression by James A. Woods et. al. and widely circulated via USENET. Use of CRUNCH (q.v.) itself in this sense is rare among UNIX hackers. COMPUTER GEEK (kuhm-pyoo-tr geek) n. One who eats [computer] bugs for a living. One who fulfills all of 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 true-hacker in LARVAL STAGE. Also called TURBO NERD, TURBO GEEK. See also CLUSTERGEEKING. COMPUTRON (kom-pyoo-tron) n. A notional unit of computing power combining instruction speed and storage capacity, dimensioned roughly in instructions-per- sec times megabytes-of-main-store types megabytes-of-mass-storage. "That machine can't run GNU Emacs, it doesn't have enough computrons!" This term is usually used 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. CONNECTOR CONSPIRACY (k@-nek'ter k@n-spi'r@h-see) [probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10, none of whose connectors match anything else] n. The tendency of manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors of anything) to come up with new products which don't fit together with the old stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or expensive interface devices. CONS (kons) [from LISP] 1. v. To add a new element to a list. 2. CONS UP: v. To synthesize from smaller pieces: "to cons up an example". CONSIDERED HARMFUL (k@n-si'derd harm'fl) adj. Edsger Dijkstra's infamous March 1968 CACM note, _Goto_Statement_Considered_Harmful_, fired the first salvo in the "structured programming" wars. In the years since then a number of both serious papers and parodies have borne titles of the form "X considered Y" in reference to it. 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. COOKIE MONSTER (ku'kee mon'str) n. Any of a family of early (1970s) hacks reported on ITS and elswhere that would lock up either the victim's terminal (on a time-sharing machine) or the operator's console (on a batch mainframe), repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". The required responses ranged in complexity from "HAVE A COOKIE" upward. See also WABBIT. COPYLEFT (kop'ee-left) n. 1. The copyright notice carried by GNU EMACS and other Free Software Foundation software granting re-use and reproduction rights to all comers. 2. By extension, any copyright notice intended to achieve similar aims. CORE (kor) n. Main storage or DRAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic, but still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like same. CORE DUMP (kor duhmp) n. [from UNIX] 1. Catastrophic program failure due to internal error. 2. By extension, used for humans passing out or registering extreme shock. Usage: rare. CORE WARS (kohr wohrz) n. A game between "assembler" programs in a simulated machine, where the objective is to kill your opponent's program by overwriting it. This was popularized by A.K. Dewdney's column in _Scientific_American_. It is rumored that the game is a civilized version of an amusement common on pre-MMU multitasking machines. CORGE (korj) n. Yet another meta-syntactic variable, invented by Mike Galleher and propagated by the Gosmacs documentation. See GRAULT. CP/M (see-pee-em) [Control Program for Microcomputers] An early microcomputer OS written by hacker Gary Kildall for Z-80 based machines, very popular in the late 1970s until virtually wiped out by MS-DOS after the release of the IBM PC in 1981 (legend has it that Kildall's company blew their chance to write the PC's OS because Kildall decided to spend the day IBM's reps wanted to meet with him enjoying the perfect flying weather in his private plane). Many of its features and conventions strongly resemble those of early DEC operating systems such as OS9, RSTS and RSX-11. See MS-DOS, OPERATING SYSTEM. CRACKER (krak'r) n. One who breaks security on a system. Coined c. 1985 by hackers in defense against journalistic misuse of HACKER, see definition #6. CRANK (krank) [from automotive slang] v. Verb used to describe the performance of a machine, especially sustained performance. "This box cranks about 6 MegaFLOPS, with a burst mode of twice that on vectorized operations" CRASH (krash) 1. n. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the system (q.v., definition #1), sometimes of magnetic disk drives. "Three lusers lost their files in last night's disk crash." A disk crash which entails 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". 2. v. To fail suddenly. "Has the system just crashed?" 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. Sometimes said of people hitting the sack after a long HACKING RUN, see GRONK OUT. CRASH AND BURN (krash @n bern) v.,n. A spectacular crash, in the mode of the conclusion of the car chase scene from Steve McQueen's "Bullitt". Sun-3 monitors losing the flyback transformer and lightning strikes on VAX-11/780 backplanes are notable crash and burn generators. CRAWLING HORROR (kraw'lng hor'@r) n. Ancient crufty hardware or software that forces beyond the control of the hackers at a site refuse to let die. 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. One of the line of supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer at all. CRAYON (krayon) n. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically implies a programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and and almost certainly wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Unicos systems types who have a Unix background tend not to be described as crayons. CREEPING FEATURITIS (kree'ping fee-ch@r-ie't@s) n. Describes a systematic tendency to load more CHROME onto systems at the expence of whatever ELEGANCE they may have posessed when originally designed. See FEEPING CREATURITIS. "You know, the main problem with BSD UNIX has always been creeping featuritis". CRETIN (kre'tn) 1. n. Congenital LOSER (q.v.). 2. CRETINOUS: adj. See BLETCHEROUS and BAGBITING. Usage: somewhat ad hominem. CRIPPLEWARE (krip'@l-weir) n. SHAREWARE which has some important functionality deliberately removed, so as to entice potential users to pay for a working version. See also GUILTWARE. CRLF (ker'lif, sometimes krul'lif) n. A carriage return (CR) followed by a line feed (LF). See TERPRI. CROCK (krok) [from mainstream "crock of shit"] n. 1. An awkward feature or programming technique that ought to be made cleaner. Example: Using small integers to represent error codes without the program interpreting them to the user (as in, for example, UNIX make(1)) is a crock. 2. Also, a technique that works acceptably but which is quite prone to failure if disturbed in the least, for example depending on the machine opcodes having particular bit patterns so that you can use instructions as data words too; a tightly woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure. CROSS-POST (kros'pohst) [USENET] To post an article to several newsgroups or topics. 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!" CRUFTY (kruhf'tee) [from "cruddy"] adj. 1. Poorly built, possibly overly complex. "This is stanction "file crunch(ing)" to distinguish it from "number crunch(ing)".) See COMPRESS. 3. n. The character "#". Usage: used at Xerox and CMU, among other places. See ASCII. CRUNCHA CRUNCHA CRUNCHA (kruhnchah kruhnchah kruhnchah) interj. An encouragement sometimes muttered to a machine bogged down in serious GROVELLING. Also describes a notional sound made by grovelling hardware. See WUGGA WUGGA. CRYONICS (kry-o'niks) n. The practice of freezing oneself in hopes of being revived in the future by CELL REPAIR MACHINES. A possible route to technological immortality already taken by 1990 by more than a handful of persons with terminal illnesses. CTSS (see-tee-ess-ess) n. Compatible Time-Sharing System. An early (1963) experiment in the design of interactive time-sharing operating systems. Cited here because it was ancestral to MULTICS, UNIX, and ITS (q.v.). CUBING (kyoo'bing) [parallel with "tubing"] v. 1. Hacking on an IPSC (Intel Personal SuperComputer) hypercube. "Louella's gone cubing AGAIN!!" 2. An indescribable form of self-torture, see sense #1. CUSPY (kuhs'pee) [from the DEC acronym CUSP, for Commonly Used System Program, i.e., a utility program used by many people] [WPI] adj. 1. (of a program) Well-written. 2. Functionally excellent. A program which performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy. See RUDE. CYBERPUNK (sie'ber-puhnk) [orig. by SF critic Garder Dozois] n.,adj. A subgenre of SF launched in 1982 by William Gibson's epoch-making novel _Neuromancer_. 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 futures in ways hackers have since found both irritatingly naive and tremendously stimulating. Gibson's work was widely imitated, in particular by the short-lived but innovative "Max Headroom" TV series. See CYBERSPACE, ICE, GO FLATLINE. CYBERSPACE (sie'ber-spays) n. Notional "information-space" loaded with visual cues and navigable with brain-computer interfaces called "cyberspace decks"; a characteristic prop of CYBERPUNK SF. At time of writing (1990) serious efforts to construct VIRTUAL REALITY interfaces modelled explicitly on CYBERSPACE are already under way, using more conventional devices such as glove sensors and binocular TV headsets. Few hackers are prepared to outright deny the possibility of a cyberspace someday evolving out of THE NETWORK. Back to Top = D = DAEMON (day'mun, dee'mun) [archaic form of "demon", which has slightly different connotations (q.v.)] n. A program which is not invoked explicitly, but which lays 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, writing a file on the lpt spooler's directory will invoke the spooling daemon, which prints the file. The advantage is that programs which want (in this example) files printed need not compete for access to the lpt. They simply enter their implicit requests and let the daemon decide what to do with them. Daemons are usually spawned automatically by the system, and may either live forever or be regenerated at intervals. Usage: DAEMON and DEMON (q.v.) are often used interchangeably, but seem to have distinct connotations. DAEMON was introduced to computing by CTSS people (who pronounced it dee'mon) and used it to refer to what is now called a DRAGON or PHANTOM (q.v.). The meaning and pronunciation have drifted, and we think this glossary reflects current usage. DAY MODE (day mohd) See PHASE (of people). DD (dee-dee) [from archaic UNIX dd(1)] v. Equivalent to CAT or BLT. Very rare outside UNIX sites and now nearly obsolescent even there, as dd(1) has been DEPRECATED for a long time. Replaced by BLT or simple English `copy'. DEADLOCK (ded'lok) n. A situation wherein two or more processes are unable to proceed because each is waiting for another to do something. A common example is a program communicating to a PTY or STY, which may find itself waiting for output from the PTY/STY before sending anything more to it, while the PTY/STY is similarly waiting for more input from the controlling program before outputting anything. (This particular flavor of deadlock is called "starvation". Another common flavor is "constipation", where each process is trying to send stuff to the other, but all buffers are full because nobody is reading anything.) See DEADLY EMBRACE, RACE CONDITION. DEADLY EMBRACE (ded'lee em-brays') n. Same as DEADLOCK (q.v.), though usually used only when exactly two processes are involved. DEADLY EMBRACE is the more popular term in Europe; DEADLOCK in the United States. DEFENESTRATION (dee-fen-uh-stray'shn) [from the traditional Czechoslovak method of assassinating prime ministers, via ESR and SF fandom] n. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that was *awful*!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" See also H INFIX. DEEP SPACE (deep spays) adj. 1. Describes the "location" of any program which has gone OFF THE TROLLEY. Esp. used of programs which just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some output is expected. 2. Also, the metaphorical "location" of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some esoteric form of BOGOSITY that he/she no longer responds coherently to normal communication. Compare PAGE OUT. DEMENTED (dee-men't@d) 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. For example, a program that generates large numbers of meaningless error messages implying it is on the point of imminent collapse. DEMIGOD (de'mi-god) n. 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 50% 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. DEMON (dee'mun) n. 1. [MIT] A portion of a program which is not invoked explicitly, but which lays 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. Demons are particularly common in AI programs. For example, a knowledge manipulation program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which 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. 2. [outside MIT] Often used equivalently to DAEMON, especially under UNIX where the the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic. DEPRECATED (de'pre-kay-t@d) [from UNIX documentation] n. 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. DE-REZZ (dee rez) [from the movie TRON] v. 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 slang, and adopted in a spirit of irony by real hackers years after the fact. DEVO (dee'vo) [orig. in-house slang at Symbolics] n. A person in a development group. See also DOCO and MANGO. DICKLESS WORKSTATION (dik'less werk'sta-shn) 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. DIDDLE (di'dl) v. To work with in a not particularly serious manner. "I diddled with 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. DIKE (diek) [from "diagonal cutters"] v. To remove a module or disable it. "When in doubt, dike it out." DING (ding) n.,v. Synonym for FEEP (q.v.). Usage: rare among hackers, but commoner in THE REAL WORLD. DINOSAUR (die'n@-sor) n. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power. Used especially of old minis and mainframes when contrasted with newer microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from the '88 UNIX EXPO, Bill Joy compared the 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. DINOSAUR PEN (die'n@-sor 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. DISCORDIANISM (dis-kor'di-uhn-ism) n. The veneration of ERIS, aka Discordia. Popularized by Robert Anton Wilson's _Illuminatus!_ trilogy 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. Usually connected with an elaborate conspiracy theory/joke involving millenia-long warfare between the partisans of Eris and a malevolent secret society called the Illuminati. See Appendix C and HA HA ONLY SERIOUS. DISPLAY HACK (dis-play' hak) 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 program. DOCO (do'ko) [orig. in-house slang at Symbolics] n. A documentation writer. See also DEVO and MANGO. DO PROTOCOL (doo proh'toh-kahl) [from network protocol programming] v. 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 the waitress for the check, calculate the tip and everybody's share, generate change as necessary, and pay the bill. DOGWASH (dog'wahsh) [From a quip in the "urgency" field of a very optional software change request, about 1982. It was something like, "Urgency: Wash your dog first."] v.,n. A project of minimal priority, undertaken as an escape from more serious work. Also, to engage in such a project. Many games and much FREEWARE gets written this way. DON'T DO THAT, THEN (dohnt doo dhat, dhen) interj. 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." Compare RTFM. DONGLE (don-gl) n. 1. A security device for commercial microcomputer programs consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in an RS-232 connector shell. Programs that use a dongle query the port at startup and programmed intervals thereafter, and terminate if it does not respond with the dongle's programmed validation code. Thus, users could make as many copies of the program as they want but must pay for each dongle. The idea was clever but a practical failure, as users disliked tyng up a serial port this way. 2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferable ID required for a program to function. See DONGLE DISK. DONGLE-DISK (don'g@l disk) n. See DONGLE; a DONGLE-DISK is a floppy disk with some coding which allows an application to identify it uniquely. It can therefore be used as a DONGLE. Also called a "key disk". DOORSTOP (dor-stop) n. Used to describe equipment that is non-functional and halfway expected to remain so, especially obsolescent equipment kept around for political reasons or ostensibly as a backup. "When we get another Wyse-50 in here that ADM3 will turn into a doorstop." Compare BOAT ANCHOR. DOT FILE (dot fiel) [UNIX] n. A file that is invisible to normal directory-browsing tools (on UNIX, files named beginning with a dot are invisible). DOWN (down) 1. adj. Not working. "The up escalator is down." 2. TAKE DOWN, BRING DOWN: v. To deactivate, usually for repair work. See UP. DOWNLOAD (down'lohd) v. 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 device. Oppose UPLOAD. DRAGON (dra'gn) n. [MIT] A program similar to a "daemon" (q.v.), 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 are, what they're running, etc. along with some random picture (such as a unicorn, Snoopy, or the Enterprise) which is generated by the "NAME DRAGON". See PHANTOM. Usage: rare outside MIT -- under UNIX and most other OSs this would be called a `background DEMON' or `DAEMON' (q.v). DRAGON BOOK, THE (dra'gn buk, dh@) n. Aho, Sethi and Ullman's classic compilers text _Compilers:_Principles,_Techniques,_and_Tools_, so called because of the cover design depicting a knight slaying a dragon labelled "compiler complexity". DRAIN (drayn) [IBM] v. Syn. for FLUSH (sense 4). DRECNET (drek'net) [fr. Yiddish `dreck'] 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 (among other things, they implemented the wrong HEARTBEAT speed). DROOL-PROOF PAPER (drool-proof pay'per) n. Documentation which 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". DROP ON THE FLOOR (drop on dh@ flor) vt. To discard silently. Example: "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. DRUGGED (druhgd) adj., also ON DRUGS. Conspicuously stupid, heading towards BRAIN DAMAGE. Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint. DRUNK MOUSE SYNDROME (druhnk mows sin'drohm) n. A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some workstations. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move to random directions and not in sync with the moving of the actual mouse. Can usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. DUSTY DECKS (duhs'tee deks) [a holdover from card-punch days] n. Old software (especially applications) with which one is obliged to remain compatible. Used esp. when referring to old scientific and number-crunching software, much of which was written in FORTRAN and very poorly documented but would be too expensive to replace. See FOSSIL. DWIM (dwim) [Do What I Mean] 1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, what result was intended when provided with bogus input. Often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program. A related term, more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing). 2. n. The INTERLISP function that attempts to accomplish this feat by correcting many of the more common errors. See HAIRY. Back to Top = E = EASTER EGGING (ees'tr e'g@ng) [IBM] n. The act of replacing unrelated parts more or less at random in hopes that a malfunction will go away. Hackers consider this the normal operating mode of FIELD CIRCUS techs and do not love them for it. EARTHQUAKE (erth'kwayk) [IBM] n. The ultimate REAL WORLD shock test for computer hardware. Hacker sources at IBM deny the rumor that the Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by the company to test Q&A at its California plants. EIGHTY-COLUMN MIND (ay'tee kol'@m miend) [IBM] n. The sort said to be employed by persons for whom the transition from card to tape was traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people will be buried `9-EDGE-FORWARD-FACE-DOWN'. [These people are thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base, and its thinking -- ESR]. ELEGANT (e'l@-gnt) [from mathematical usage] adj. Said of an algorithm, program, or system that combines simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than `clever', `winning' or even CUSPY. ELEPHANTINE (el'@-fn-teen) adj. Used of programs or systems which are both conspicuous HOGs (due 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 (like the old joke about being in bed with an elephant) it's tough to have around all the same, esp. a bitch to maintain. In extreme cases, hackers have been known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive zoomorphic 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 SYNDROME. EMACS (ee'maks) [from Editing MACroS] n. The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a program editor with an entire LISP interpreter inside it. Originally written by Richard Stallman in TECO at the MIT-AI lab, but the most widely used versions now run 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. EMAIL (ee-mayl) v.,n. Electronic mail. Contrast SNAIL-MAIL. EMOTICON (ee-moh'ti-cahn) n. An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in email or news. Hundreds have been proposed, but only a few are in common use. These include: :-) Smiley face (indicates laughter) :-( Frowney face (indicates sadness, anger or upset) ;-) Half-smiley (ha ha only serious), aka winkey face. :-/ Wry face Of these, the first two are by far the most frequently encountered. Hyphenless forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie and BIX; see also BIXIE. EMPIRE (em'pier) n. Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago. There are 5 or 6 multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication, and one single-player version implemented for both UNIX and VMS which is even available as MS-DOS freeware. All are notoriously addictive. EOF (ee-oh-ef) [UNIX/C] n. End Of File. 1. Refers esp. to whatever pseudo-character value is returned by C's sequential input functions (and their equivalents in other environments) when the logical end of file has been reached (this was 0 under V6 UNIX, is -1 under V7 and all subsequent versions and all non-UNIX C library implementations). 2. Used by extension in non-computer contexts when a human is doing something that can be modelled 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." EPOCH, THE (ee'p@k, dh@) [UNIX] n. Syn. for ERA. EPSILON (ep'si-lahn) [from standard mathematical notation for a small quantity] 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. ERA, THE (ee'ra, dh@) [from UNIX] n. The time and date corresponding to zero in an operating system's clock and timestamp values. Under most UNIX versions, midnight of January 1st 1970. System time is measured in TICKS past the era. Syn. with EPOCH. See TICKS, WALL TIME. ERIS (e'r@s) pn. The Greco-Roman goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion and Things You Know Not Of; aka Discordia. Not a very friendly deity in the Classical original, she was re-invented 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 SUB-GENIUS. ESSENTIALS (e-sen'tiuhls) n. Things necessary to maintain a productive and secure hacking environment. "A jug of wine, a loaf of bread, a 20-megahertz 80386 box with 8 meg of core and a 300-megabyte disk supporting full UNIX with source and X windows and EMACS and UUCP to a friendly Internet site, and thou." EXCL (eks'kl) n. Abbreviation for "exclamation point". See BANG, SHRIEK, WOW. EXE (ex'ee) An executable binary file. Some operating systems use the extension .EXE to mark such files. This usage is also found among UNIX programmers even though UNIX executables don't have any required extension. EXEC n. 1. [UNIX] Synonym for CHAIN, derives from the exec(2) call. 2. obs. The command interpreter for an OS (see SHELL); term esp. used on mainframes, and prob. derived from UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems. Back to Top = F = FALL OVER (fol o'vr) [IBM] v. Yet another synonym for CRASH or LOSE. `Fall over hard' equates to CRASH AND BURN. FANDANGO ON CORE (fan-dang'go on kor) [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 third-world dances such as the rhumba, cha-cha or watusi may be substituted. See ALIASING SCREW, PRECEDENCE SCREW, SMASH THE STACK, MEMORY LEAK, OVERRUN SCREW. FASCISTIC (fa-shis'tik) adj. 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. FAULTY (fawl'tee) adj. Same denotation as "bagbiting", "bletcherous", "losing", q.v., but the connotation is much milder. FEAR AND LOATHING (feer @nd loh'thing) [from Hunter Thompson] n. State inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain REAL WORLD systems and standards which are totally BRAIN DAMAGED but ubiquitous -- Intel 8086s, or COBOL, or any IBM machine except the Rios. "Ack. Theywant PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and loathing time!" See also IBM. FEATURE (fee'chr) n. 1. A surprising property of a program. Occasionally documented. To call a property a feature sometimes means the author of the program did not consider the particular case, and the program makes an unexpected, although not strictly speaking an incorrect response. See BUG. "That's not a bug, that's a feature!" A bug can be changed to a feature by documenting it. 2. A well-known and beloved property; a facility. Sometimes features are planned, but are called crocks by others. FEATURECTOMY (fee'ch@r-ek'to-mee) n. The act of removing a feature from a program. Featurectomies generally come in two varieties, 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. (This 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 bell of a display terminal (except for a VT-52!); a beep. 2. v. To cause the display to make a feep sound. TTY's do not have feeps. Alternate forms: BEEP, BLEEP, or just about anything suitably onomatopoeic. The term BREEDLE was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly "soft" (they sound more like the musical equivalent of sticking out one's tongue). The "feeper" on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a `52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also DING. FEEPING CREATURITIS (fee'ping kree'ch@r-ie'tis) n. Deliberate spoonerization of CREEPING FEATURITIS, meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. FENCEPOST ERROR (fens'post eir'@r) n. 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 ten feet apart, how many posts do you need?" (Either 9 or 11 is a better answer than the obvious 10.) FIELD CIRCUS (feeld ser'k@s) 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 swapping tires to see which one is flat. Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer who is out of gas? A: He's swapping tires to see which one is flat. FILK (filk) [from SF fandom, where a typo for "folk" was adopted as a new word] n.,v. A "filk" is 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 technical humor of quite sophisticated nature. FILM AT 11 (film at @-lev'n) [MIT, in imitation of TV network news squibs.], interj. Used in conversation to announce ordinary events, with a sarcastic implication that these events are earth-shattering. This is hard to describe. Examples: "ITS crashes; film at 11." "Bug found in scheduler; film at 11." FILTER (fil'tr) [orig. UNIX, now also in MS-DOS] n. A program which processes an input text stream into an output text 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, (q.v.). FINE (fien) [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 (fing'gr) [BSD UNIX] 1. n. A program that displays 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. May also display a "plan file" left by the user. 2. v. To apply finger to a username. 3. v. By extension, to check a human's current state by any means. "Foodp?" "T!" "OK, finger Lisa and see if she's idle". FIREBOTTLE (fier'bo'tl) n. A large, primitive, power-hungry active electrical device, similar to an FET 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. FIREWALL MACHINE (fier'wal m:-sheen') n. A dedicated gateway machine with special security precautions on it, used to service outside network/mail/news connections and/or accept remote logins for (read only) shared-file-system access via FTP. The idea is to protect cluster of more loosely administered machines `hidden' behind it from crackers. The typically `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. FIRMWARE (ferm'weir) n. Software installed into a computer-based piece of equipment on ROM. So-called because it's harder to change than software but easier than hardware. FLAG DAY (flag day) [from a bit of Multics history involving a change in the ASCII character set originally scheduled for June 14, 1966] n. A software change which is neither forward nor backward compatible, and which is costly to make and costly to revert. "Can we install that without causing a flag day for all users?" FLAKEY (flay'kee) adj. Subject to frequent lossages. See LOSSAGE. FLAMAGE (flaym'@j) n. High-noise, low-signal postings to USENET or other electronic fora. Often in the phrase "the usual flamage". FLAME (flaym) v. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude. FLAME ON: v. To continue to flame. See RAVE, BURBLE. FLAME WAR (flaym wor) n. Acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as USENET. FLAMER (flay'mr) v. One who habitually flames others. Said of obnoxious USENET personalities. FLAP (flap) v. To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...). Old 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! FLAVOR (flay'vr) n. 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." 2. The attribute of causing something to be FLAVORFUL. "This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to..." See VANILLA. FLAVORFUL (flay'vr-fl) adj. Aesthetically pleasing. See RANDOM and LOSING for antonyms. See also the entries for TASTE and ELEGANCE. FLIPPY (flip'ee) n. A single-side 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. FLUSH (fluhsh) v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous. "All that nonsense has been flushed." Standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation. 2. 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." 3. To exclude someone from an activity. 4. [UNIX/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an fflush(3) call. UNIX hackers find the ITS usage confusing and vice versa. FLYTRAP (flie'trap) n. See FIREWALL. FOO (foo) 1. [from Yiddish "feh" or the Anglo-Saxon "fooey!"] interj. Term of disgust. 2. [from FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition), from WWII, often seen as FOOBAR] Name used for temporary programs, or samples of three-letter names. Other similar words are BAR, BAZ (Stanford corruption of BAR), and rarely RAG. These have been used in Pogo as well. 3. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything. The old `Smokey Stover' comic strips often included the word FOO, in particular on license plates of cars. 4. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also: BAR, BAZ, QUX, QUUX, QUUUX, CORGE, GRAULT, GARPLY, WALDO, FRED, PLUGH, XYZZY. MOBY FOO: See MOBY. [It is possible that hacker usage of FOO actually springs from the title "FOO, Lampoons and Parody" of a comic book first issued in September 1958; the byline read "C. Crumb" but my source believes this was a sort-of pseudonym for noted weird-comix artist Robert Crumb. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover -- ESR] FOOL (fool) n. As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded to do otherwise by evidence; 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. FOOTPRINT (fut'print) 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'). FOREGROUND (for'grownd) [UNIX] adj.v. On a time-sharing system, a task executing in foreground is one running at normal priority and able to accept input from and return output to the user; oppose BACKGROUND. There may be only one forground task per terminal (or terminal window). By extension, "to foreground" a task is to bring it to the top of one's PDL or STACK for immediate processing, and in this sense hackers often use it for non-computer tasks. FORTUNE COOKIE (for'chn ku'kee) [UNIX] n. A random quote, item of trivia, joke or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or (more rarely) at logout time. Items from this jargon file have often been used as fortune cookies. FOSSIL (fohs'sl) 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 modern byte-addressible architectures. See DUSTY DECKS. 2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (IUCLC/OLCUC) bits in the UNIX tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. FRED (fred) n. The personal name most frequently used as a metasyntactic variable (see FOO). The reasons for this are obscure. FREEWARE (free'weir) n. Free software, often written by enthusiasts and usually distributed by electronic mail, local bulletin boards, USENET, or other electronic media. See SHAREWARE. FRIED (fried) adj. 1. Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out. 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." FROB (frob) 1. n. [MIT] The official Tech Model Railroad Club definition is "FROB = protruding arm or trunnion", and by metaphoric extension any somewhat small thing. See FROBNITZ. 2. v. Abbreviated form of FROBNICATE. FROBNICATE (frob'ni-kayt) v. To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. Derived from FROBNITZ (q.v.). Usually abbreviated to FROB. Thus one has the saying "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. FROBNITZ (frob'nits), pl. FROBNITZEM (frob'nitsm) 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 and FROBULE. Starting perhaps in 1979, FROBOZZ (fruh-bahz') has also become very popular. These can also be applied to nonphysical objects, such as data structures. FROG alt. PHROG (frog) 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. Of people, somewhere inbetween a turkey and a toad. 4. FROGGY: adj. Similar to BAGBITING (q.v.), but milder. "This froggy program is taking forever to run!" FROTZ (frotz) 1. n. See FROBNITZ. 2. MUMBLE FROTZ: An interjection of very mild disgust. FRY (frie) v. 1. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. 2. More generally, to become non-working. Usage: never said of software, only of hardware and humans. See FRIED, MAGIC SMOKE. FTP (ef-tee-pee, NOT "fittip") 1. n. The File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the ARPAnet. 2. v. To transfer a file using the File Transfer Program. "Lemme get this copy of Wuthering Heights FTP'd from uunet." FUD WARS (fud worz) n. [from `Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt'] Political posturing engaged in by hardware and software vendors ostensibly committed to standardization but actually willing to fragment the market to protect their own share. The OSF vs. UNIX International conflict, for example. FUDGE (fuhj) 1. v. 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." 2. n. The resulting code. FUDGE FACTOR (fuhj faktr) 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 which 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. An example might be the coefficients of an equation, where the coefficients are varied in an attempt to make the equation fit certain criteria. FUEL UP (fyool uhp) v. 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. FUGGLY (fuhg'lee) adj. Emphatic form of FUNKY; funky + ugly. Unusually for hacker slang, this may actually derive from black street-jive. To say it properly, the first syllable should be growled rather than spoken. Usage: humorous. "Man, the ASCII-to-EBCDIC code in that printer driver is *fuggly*." See also WONKY. FUNKY (fuhn'kee) adj. Said of something which 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." See FUGGLY. FUZZ (fuhz) n. In floating-point arithmetic, the maximum difference allowed between two quantities for them to compare equal. Has to be set properly relative to the FPU's precision limits. FUZZBALL (fuhz'bawl) [TCP/IP hackers] n. A DEC LSI-11 running a particular suite of homebrewed software by Dave Mills and assorted co-conspirators, used in the early 80's for Internet protocol testbedding and experimentation. These were used as NSFnet backbone sites in its early 56KB-line days; a few of these are still active on the Internet as of early 1990, doing odd jobs such as network time service. Back to Top = G = GABRIEL (gay'bree-@l) [for Dick Gabriel, SAIL volleyball fanatic] n. An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces or hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer to the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, "pulling a Gabriel", "Gabriel mode". GAG (gag) vi. Equivalent to CHOKE, but connotes more disgust. "Hey, this is Fortran code. No wonder the C compiler gagged." See also BARF. GARBAGE COLLECT (gar'b@j k@-lekt') v., GARBAGE COLLECTION n. See GC. GARPLY (gar'plee) n. [Stanford] Another meta-word popular among SAIL hackers. GAS (gas) [as in "gas chamber"] interj. 1. 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. A term suggesting that someone or something ought to be flushed out of mercy. "The system's wedging every few minutes. Gas!" 3. v. FLUSH (q.v.). "You should gas that old crufty software." 4. GASEOUS adj. Deserving of being gassed. Usage: primarily used by Geoff Goodfellow at SRI, but spreading; became particularly popular after the Moscone/Milk murders in San Francisco, when it was learned that Dan White (who supported Proposition 7) would get the gas chamber under 7 if convicted. GATEWAY (gayt'way) n. 1. A computer or item of special-purpose hardware that links two or more normally incompatible data networks and does protocol translation between them. 2. On compatible or common-carrier networks, a piece of software that translates between normally incompatible data formats and addressing conventions. GC (jee-see) [from LISP terminology] 1. v. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll GC the top of my desk today." 2. v. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use. 3. n. An instantiation of the GC process. GEDANKEN (g@-dahn'kn) [from Einstein's term "gedanken-experimenten", such as the standard proof that E=mc^2] adj. An AI project which is written up in grand detail without ever being implemented to any great extent. 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 a program-related concept such as an algorithm. GENDER MENDER (jen'dr-men'dr) n. (also GENDER BENDER) A cable connector shell with either two male or two female connectors on it, used for mating like-sexed cables. Used esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM PC's bogus D-9 format. GENERATE (gen'@-rayt) v. 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. GET A REAL COMPUTER (get uh reel kuhm'pyoo-tr) imp. Typical hacker response to news that somebody is having trouble getting work done on a system that is a) single- tasking, b) has no Winchester, or c) has less than a megabyte of DRAM. This is as of 1990; 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 considered `unreal' in five years. See BITTY BOX and TOY. GIGO (gie'goh) [acronym] garbage in, garbage out. Usually said in response to lusers who complain that a program didn't complain about faulty data. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete or imprecise data. GLARK (glark) v. To figure something out from context, taken from an old Scientific American "Mathematical Games" column, where the phrase "glark the meaning from context" was used as an example...of glarking something from context. "The System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from context". GLASS (glas) [IBM] n. Synonym for SILICON. GLASS TTY (glas tee-tee-wie, glas ti-tee) n. A terminal which has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or other printing terminal. An example is the ADM-3 (without cursor control). A glass tty can't do neat DISPLAY HACKs, and you can't save the output either. See TUBE, TTY. GLITCH (glich) [from the Yiddish "glitshen", to slide] 1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. 2. v. To commit a glitch. See GRITCH. 3. v. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen. 4. (obs.) Same as MAGIC COOKIE, sense #2. 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. v. Similar to GLITCH (q.v.), but usually used reflexively. "My program just glorked itself." GNARLY (nar'lee) adj. Both OBSCURE and HAIRY in the sense of complex. "Yeech -- 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 for "GNU's Not UNIX!"] A UNIX-workalike development effort of the Free Software Foundation headed by Richard Stallman (aka RMS). GNU EMACS and the GNU C compiler, two tools designed for this project, have become very popular in hackerdom. See EMACS, COPYLEFT. 2. Noted UNIX hacker John Gilmore (gnu@hoptoad.com), ironically enough one of the best-known and most vocal opponents of the "information should not be property" philosophy behind GNU. See RMS. GO FLATLINE (flat'lien) [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] v., 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. A particular failure mode of video tubes in which vertical scan is lost, so all one sees is a bright horizontal line bisecting the screen. GOBBLE (go'bl) v. To consume or to obtain. GOBBLE UP tends to imply "consume", while GOBBLE DOWN tends to imply "obtain". "The output spy gobbles characters out of a TTY output buffer." "I guess I'll gobble down a copy of the documentation tomorrow." See SNARF. GONK (gonk) v.,n. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognitions. In German the term is "GONKEN", in spanish the verb becomes "GONKAR." "You're gonking me. That story you just told me is a bunch of gonk". In German, "Du Gonkst mir". (You're pulling my leg) See also GONKULATOR. GONZO (gon'zo) [from Hunter S. Thompson] adj. Overwhelming; very large, esp. used of collections of source code, source files or individual functions. Has some of the connotations of MOBY and HAIRY, q.v. 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. GOOD THING (gud thing) adj. Always 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 which 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. GORP (gorp) [CMU, perhaps from a brand of dried hiker's food?] Another metasyntactic variable, like FOO and BAR. GORILLA ARM (gor-il'uh arm) n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early eighties. 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 selects the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized, hence "gorilla arm". This is now considered a classic Horrible Example and cautionary tale to human-factors designers; "remember the gorilla arm" is shorthand for "how's this gonna fly in *real* use?" GREAT RENAMING (grayt ree-naym'ing) n. The FLAG DAY on which all of the groups on the USENET had their names changed from the net.* format to the current 7 hierarchies scheme. GREAT-WALL (grayt-wahl) [from SF fandom] v.,n. a mass expedition to an oriental restaurant. See ORIENTAL FOOD, CHINESE RAVS, STIR-FRIED RANDOM. GREEN LIGHTNING (green liet'ning) [IBM] n. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals while a programmable symbol set is being loaded. This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as some bright spark suggested that this would let the user know that `something is happening'. It certainly does. 2. [generalization of #1 proposed by ESR] Any bug perverted into an alleged feature by adroit rationalization or marketing. E.g. "Motorola calls the CISC cruft in the 8800 architecture `compatibility logic', but I call it green lightning". GRAULT (grawlt) n. Yet another meta-syntactic variable, invented by Mike Galleher and propagated by the Gosmacs documentation. See CORGE. GRAY GOO (gray goo) n. A hypothetical substance composed of billions of sub-micron-sized Von Neumann machines (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 most naive and easiest to demolish of the NANOTECHNOLOGY (q.v.) disaster scenarios. GREP (grep) [from the UNIX grep tool] v. To rapidly scan a file or file set looking for a particular string or pattern. By extension, to look for something by pattern. "Grep the bulletin board for the system backup schedule, would you?" GRIND (griend) v. 1. [MIT and Berkeley] To format code, especially LISP code, by indenting lines so that it looks pretty. Hence, PRETTY PRINT, 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, performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar to CRUNCH, GROVEL. GRIND CRANK (griend 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, CHUNGA CHUNGA CHUNGA and WUGGA WUGGA. GRITCH (grich) 1. n. A complaint (often caused by a GLITCH (q.v.)). 2. v. To complain. Often verb-doubled: "Gritch gritch". 3. Glitch. GROK (grok) [from the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", by Robert Heinlein, where it is a Martian verb meaning literally "to drink" and metaphorically "to be one with"] v. To understand, usually in a global sense. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. GRONK (gronk) [popularized by the cartoon strip "B.C." by Johnny Hart, but the word apparently predates that] v. 1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More severe than "to frob" (q.v.). 2. To break. "The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the system down." 3. GRONKED: adj. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired or sick. 4. GRONK OUT: v. To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep. "I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow." GROVEL (gruh'vl) v. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used with "over". "The compiler grovelled over my code." Compare GRIND and CRUNCH. Emphatic form: GROVEL OBSCENELY. GRUNGY (gruhn'jee) adj. Incredibly dirty or grubby. Anything which has been washed within the last year is not really grungy. Also used metaphorically; hence some programs (especially crocks) can be described as grungy. Now (1990) also common in mainstream slang. GUBBISH (guh'bish) [a portmanteau of "garbage" and "rubbish"?] n. Garbage; crap; nonsense. "What is all this gubbish?" GUILTWARE (gilt'weir) n. FREEWARE decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on this program and intimating that one is a no-good shit if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money. GUMBY (guhm'bee) [from the claymation character] n. An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in GUMBY MANEUVER or PULL A GUMBY. GUN (guhn) [from the GUN command on ITS] v. 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. GURFLE (ger'fl) interj. An expression of shocked disbelief. "He said we have to recode this thing in FORTRAN by next week. Gurfle!" GURU (gur'oo) n. A UNIX expert. Implies not only WIZARD skill but 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". Back to Top = H = H INFIX (aych in-fix) [from SF fandom] A method of "marking" common words in the linguist's sense, i.e. calling attention to the fact that they are being used in a nonstandard, ironic or humorous way. Orig. in the fannish catchphrase "Bheer is the One True Ghod" from decades ago. H-infix marking of "Ghod" and other words spread into the Sixties counterculture via underground comix, and into early hackerdom either from the counterculture or SF fandom (all three overlapped heavily at the time). More recently, the h infix has become an expected feature of benchark names, i.e. Whetstone, Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc; this is prob. patterning on the original Whetstone name but influenced by the fannish/counterculture H infix. HA HA ONLY SERIOUS (ha ha ohn'lee see'ree-us) [from SF fandom] A phrase that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse (sometimes seen abbreviated as HHOS). Applied especially to parodies, absurdities and ironic jokes that are both intended and perceived to contain a possibly disquieting amount of truth, or truths which are constructed on in-joke and self-parody. The jargon file 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 or one in LARVAL STAGE. For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also HUMOR, HACKER. HACK (hack) n. 1. Originally a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. The result of that job. 3. NEAT HACK: A clever technique. Also, a brilliant practical joke, where neatness is correlated with cleverness, harmlessness, and surprise value. Example: the Caltech Rose Bowl card display switch circa 1961. 4. REAL HACK: A crock (occasionally affectionate). v. 5. With "together", to throw something together so it will work. 6. To bear emotionally or physically. "I can't hack this heat!" 7. To work on something (typically a program). In specific sense: "What are you doing?" "I'm hacking TECO." In general sense: "What do you do around here?" "I hack TECO." (The former is time-immediate, the latter time-extended.) More generally, "I hack x" is roughly equivalent to "x is my bag". "I hack solid-state physics." 8. To pull a prank on. See definition 3 and HACKER (def #6). 9. v.i. To waste time (as opposed to TOOL). "Watcha up to?" "Oh, just hacking." 10. HACK UP (ON): To hack, but generally implies that the result is meanings 1-2. 11. HACK VALUE: Term used 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 has features for reading and printing roman numerals, which was installed purely for hack value. 12. [UNIX] A dungeon game similar to ROGUE (q.v.) but more elaborate, distributed in C source over USENET and very popular at UNIX sites and on PC-class machines. Recent versions are called `nethack'. HAPPY HACKING: A farewell. HOW'S HACKING?: A friendly greeting among hackers. HACK HACK: A somewhat pointless but friendly comment, often used as a temporary farewell. HACKER (hak'r) [originally, someone who makes furniture with an axe] n. 1. A person who enjoys learning the details of programming 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, or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating HACK VALUE (q.v.). 4. A person who is good at programming quickly. Not everything a hacker produces is a hack. 5. An expert at a particular program, or one who frequently does work using it or on it; example: "A UNIX hacker". (Definitions 1 to 5 are correlated, and people who fit them congregate.) 6. (deprecated) A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker". See CRACKER. HACK MODE (hak mohd) n. 1. What one is in when hacking, of course. 2. More specifically, a Zen-like state of total focus on The Problem which may be achieved when one is hacking. 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 an almost 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 do code. HACKING RUN (hak'ing ruhn) [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). HACKISH (hak'ish) adj. (also HACKISHNESS n.) 1. Being or involving a hack. 2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also TRUE-HACKER. HAIR (heir) n. The complications which 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): "GNU elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes." "Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right." HAIRY (heir'ee) adj. 1. Overly 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." 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. HAND-HACKING (hand hak'ing) n. The practice of translating HOT SPOTS from an HLL into custom hand-optimized 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. HANDWAVE (hand'wayv) 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!" 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 still while rotating the hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone can suffice as a remark. HANLON'S RAZOR (han'lnz ray'zr) n. A "murphyism" parallel to Occam's Razor that reads "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". 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 the well-intentioned but shortsighted. HARDWARILY (hard-weir'i-lee) adv. In a way pertaining to hardware. "The system is hardwarily unreliable." The adjective "hardwary" is NOT used. See SOFTWARILY. HAS THE X NATURE (has dh@ eks nay'tyoor) [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. Ex: "Anyone who can't even use a program with on-screen help embedded in it truly has the LOSER nature!" HASH COLLISION (hash k@-li'zhn) [from the technical usage] n. 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." HCF (aych-see-eff) n. Mnemonic for "Halt and Catch Fire", any of several undocumented and semi-mythical instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC68000 microprocessor was the first for which the HCF opcode became widely known. The 68000 HCF causes the processor to toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it can; in some configurations this can actually cause lines to burn up. HEARTBEAT (hart'beet) n. 1. The master clock signal propagated across an Ethernet; by extension, the time-baseline synchronization signal at the physical level of any network. 2. The `natural' oscillation frequency of a computer's clock crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's CLOCK RATE. HEISENBUG (hie'sen-buhg) [from quantum physics] n. A bug which disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of BOHR BUG (q.v.). In C, 9 out of 10 heisenbugs result from either FANDANGO ON CORE phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc ARENA) or errors which SMASH THE STACK. HELLO SAILOR! (he'lo say'lr) interj. Occsional West Coast equivalent of `Hello, world!'. See HELLO WORLD. HELLO WALL (he'lo wahl) See WALL. HELLO WORLD! (he'lo werld) interj. 1. The canonical minimal test message in the C/UNIX universe. In folklore, the first program a C coder is supposed to write in a new environment is one that just prints "Hello, world!" to his standard output. 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. 2. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is the VAX back up yet?" HIGH BIT (hie bit) n. See META BIT HIRSUTE (heer's[y]oot) adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for HAIRY. HLL (aych-el-el) 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 = `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' = `Medium-Level Language' and is sometimes used half-jokingly to describe C, alluding to its `structured-assembler' image. See also LANGUAGES OF CHOICE. HOG (hawg) n.,v. Favored term to describe programs which seem to eat far more than their share of a system's resources, esp. those which noticeably degrade general timesharing response. *Not* used of programs which are simply extremely large or complex or which 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. HOOK (huk) n. An extraneous piece of software or hardware included in order to simplify later additions or debug options. For instance, a program might execute a location that is normally a JFCL, but by changing the JFCL to a PUSHJ one can insert a debugging routine at that point. HOME BOX (hohm boks) n. A hacker's personal machine, especially one he owns. "Yeah? Well, *my* home box runs a full 4.2BSD, so there!" HOSE (hohz) 1. v. To Make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance, as in "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 in a system that represent performance bottlenecks. 3. Cabling, especially thick Ethernet cable. Sometimes "bit hose". HOSED (hohzd) adj. Same as DOWN. Used primarily by UNIX hackers. Humorous: also implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. Probably a back-formation from the Canadian slang `hoser' popularized by the Bob and Doug skits on SCTV. See HOSE. HOT SPOTS (hot spotz) [primarily C/UNIX programmers, but spreading] n. 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 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. HOUSE WIZARD (hows wi'zrd) [prob. from ad-agency lingo, cf. `house freak'] n. A lone 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 experts. The term HOUSE GURU is equivalent. HUMONGOUS (hyoo-mohng'gus) alt. HUMUNGOUS (hyoo-muhng'gus) See HUNGUS. HUMOR, HACKER (hyoo'm@r, hak'r) n. A distinct 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 an index card in front of him/her with "THIS IS GREEN" written on it in bold red ink, or vice-versa (note, however, that this is only funny the first time). 2) Elaborate deadpan parodies of large intellectual constructs such as standards documents, language descriptions (see INTERCAL) and even entire scientific theories (see QUANTUM BOGODYNAMICS, COMPUTRON). 3) Jokes which 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, Charlie Chaplin movies, the B-52s, and Monty Python's Flying Circus. Humor which 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. See also FILK, COMPUTER; REROCOMPUTING; and Appendix C. If you have an itchy feeling that all six 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 (hung) [from "hung up"] adj. Equivalent to WEDGED, q.v. but more common at UNIX/C sites. Not used of people. HUNGUS (hung'ghis) [perhaps related to current slang "humongous"; which one came first (if either) is unclear] adj. Large, unwieldy, usually unmanageable. "TCP is a hungus piece of code." "This is a hungus set of modifications." HYPERSPACE (hie'per-spays) n. A memory location within a virtual memory machine that is many, many megabytes (or gigabytes) away from where the program counter should be pointing. "Another core dump...looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow." Back to Top = I = IBM (ie bee em) Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-INFINITE number of many even less complementary expansions, including "International Business Machines". See TLA. These abbreviations illustrate the considerable antipathy most hackers have long felt for the "industry leader" (see FEAR AND LOATHING). What galls hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level isn't so much that they're underpowered and overpriced (though that counts against them) but that the designs are incredibly archaic, crufty and ELEPHANTINE and you can't *fix* them -- source is locked up tight and programming tools are expensive, hard to find, and a bitch 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 the jargon list now includes a number of entries marked `IBM'; these derive from a rampantly unofficial jargon list circulated among IBM's own beleaguered hacker underground. ICE (ies) [from William Gibson's cyberpunk SF: notionally, "Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics"] Security software. Also, ICEBREAKER: a program designed for cracking security on a system. Neither term is in serious use yet as of 1990, but many hackers find the metaphor attractive and they may be in the near future. ILL BEHAVED (il-bee-hayvd') adj. Software which 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 incompatible with other pieces of software. In the IBM PC/MS-DOS world, where this term originated, there is a folk theorem to the effect that (due to gross inadequacies and performance penalties in the OS interface) all