========= THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.4.1 14 JAN 1991 ================= Introduction ************ This document is a collection of slang terms used by various subcultures of computer hackers. Though some technical material is included for background and flavor, it is not a technical dictionary; what we describe here is the language hackers use among themselves for fun, social communication and debate within their communities. The `hacker culture' is actually a loosely networked collection of subcultures that is nevertheless conscious of some important shared experiences, shared roots, and shared values. It has its own myths, heroes, villains, folk epics, in-jokes, taboos and dreams. Because hackers as a group are particularly creative people who define themselves partly by rejection of `normal' values and working habits, it has unusually rich and conscious traditions for an intentional culture less than thirty-five years old. Hackers, as a rule, love word-play and are very conscious in their use of language. Thus, a compilation of their slang is a particularly effective window into their culture --- and, in fact, this one is the latest version of an evolving compilation called the `Jargon File' maintained by hackers themselves for over fifteen years. This one (like its ancestors) is primarily a lexicon, but also includes `topic entries' which collect background or sidelight information on hacker culture that would be awkward to try to subsume under a single term. Though the format is that of a reference, it is also intended that the material be enjoyable to browse or read straight through. Even a complete outsider should find at least a chuckle on nearly every page, and much that is amusingly thought-provoking. But it is also true that hackers use humorous word-play to make strong, sometime combative statements about what they feel. Some of these entries reflect the views of opposing sides in disputes which have been genuinely passionate, and they deliberately reflect this. We have not tried to moderate or pretty up these disputes; rather we have attempted to ensure that *everyone's* sacred cows get gored, impartially. Compromise is not particularly a hackish virtue, but the honest presentation of divergent viewpoints is. A selection of longer items of hacker folklore and humor are included in appendix A. The `outside' reader's attention is particularly directed to Appendix B, the Portrait of J. Random Hacker. Appendix C is a bibliography of non-technical works which have either influenced or described the hacker culture. Because hackerdom is an intentional culture (one which each individual must choose consciously to join), one should not be surprised that the line between description and influence can become more than a little blurred. Earlier Jargon File versions have played a central role in spreading hacker language and the culture that goes with it to successively larger populations, and we hope and expect that this one will do likewise. Revision History ================ The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker slang from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as `jargon-1' or `the File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975, though some terms in it date back considerably earlier ( and some senses of , for instance, go back to the MIT Model Railroad Club and are are believed to date at least back to the early nineteen-sixties). The revisions of jargon-1 were all un-numbered and may be collectively considered `Version 1'. In 1976, Mark Crispin brought the File to MIT; he and Guy Steele then added a first wave of new entries. Richard Frankel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter, and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the file (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic re-synchronizations). The file expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages. A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited by Guy L. Steele into a book published in 1983 as `The Hacker's Dictionary' (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods and Mark Crispin) contributed to the revision, as did also Richard M. Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book is hereafter referred to as `Steele-1983'. It is now out of print. Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983 the File effectively stopped growing and changing. The PDP-10-centered cultures that had originally nourished it were dealt a serious blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at DEC. The AI-Lab culture died and its best and brightest dispersed; the File's compilers moved on to other things. By the mid-1980s the File's contents was dated, but the legend that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book and softcopies snarfed off the ARPANET circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT's; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hackish slang and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials like the AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously, but the Jargon File passed from living document to icon and remained essentially untouched for seven years. This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries have been dropped following careful consultation with the editors of Steele-1983). It merges in about about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 which are now also obsolescent. 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 represent slang now current in the C and UNIX communities, but special efforts have been made to collect slang from other cultures including IBM-PC programmers, Mac fans and even the IBM mainframe world. The present maintainer of the jargon file is Eric S. Raymond (eric@snark.thyrsus.com) with some assistance from Guy L. Steele (gls@think.com); these are the persons primarily reflected in the File's editorial `we', though we take pleasure in acknowledging the special contribution of the other coauthors of Steele-1983. Please email all additions, corrections and correspondence relating to the jargon file to jargon@thyrsus.com (UUCP-only sites without connections to an autorouting smart site can use ...!uunet!snark!jargon). (Warning: other email addresses appear in this file *but are not guaranteed to be correct* later than the revision date on the first line. *Don't* email us if an attempt to reach your idol bounces --- we have no magic way of checking addresses or looking up people) Some snapshot of this on-line version will become the main text of a `New Hacker's Dictionary' possibly as early as Fall 1991. The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version of the jargon file through and beyond paper publication, and will continue to make it available to archives and public-access sites as a trust of the hacker community. Here is a chronology of the recent on-line revisions: Version 2.1.1, Jun 12 1990: the jargon file comes alive again after a seven-year hiatus. Reorganization and massive additions were by Eric S. Raymond, approved by Guy Steele. Many items of UNIX, C, USENET and microcomputer-based slang were added at that time (as well as The Untimely Demise of Mabel The Monkey). Some obsolete usages (mostly PDP-10 derived) were moved to appendix B. Version 2.1.5, Nov 28 1990: changes and additions by ESR in response to numerous USENET submissions and comment from the First Edition coauthors. The bibliography (Appendix C) was also appended. Version 2.2.1, Dec 15 1990: most of the contents of the 1983 paper edition edited by Guy Steele was merged in. Many more USENET submissions added, including the International Style and material. This version had 9394 lines, 75954 words, 490501 chars, and 1046 entries. Version 2.3.1, Jan 03 1991: the great format change --- case is no longer smashed in lexicon keys and cross-references. A very few entries from jargon-1 which were basically straight tech-speak were deleted; this enabled the rest of Appendix B to be merged back into main text and the appendix replaced with the Portrait of J. Random Hacker. More USENET submissions were added. This version had 10728 lines, 85070 words, 558261 characters, and 1138 entries. Version 2.4.1, Jan 14 1991: the Story of Mel and many more USENET submissions merged in. More material on hackish writing habits added. Numerous typo fixes. This version had 12362 lines, 97819 words, 642899 characters, and 1239 entries. Version numbering: Read versions as ... Major version 1 is reserved for the `old' (ITS) Jargon File, jargon-1. Major version 2 encompasses revisions by ESR with assistance from GLS. Someday, the next maintainer will take over and spawn `version 3'. In general, later versions will either completely obsolesce or incorporate earlier versions, so there is generally no point in keeping old versions around. Our thanks to the other co-authors of Steele-1983 for oversight and assistance; also to all the USENETters who contributed entries and encouragement. Special thanks go to our Scandinavian correspondent Per Lindberg (per@front.se), author of the remarkable Swedish language 'zine `Hackerbladet', for bringing FOO! comics to our attention and smuggling the IBM hacker underground's own baby jargon file out to us. Also, much gratitude to ace hacker/linguist Joe Keane (jkg@osc.osc.com) for helping us improve the pronunciation guides; and to Maarten Litmath for generously allowing the inclusion of the ASCII pronunciation guide he formerly maintained. Finally, Mark Brader (msb@sq.sq.com) submitted many thoughtful comments and did yeoman service in catching typos and minor usage bobbles. Format For New Entries ====================== Try to conform to the format already being used --- definitions and cross-references in angle brackets, pronunciations in slashes, etymologies in square brackets, single-space after definition numbers and word classes, etc. Stick to the standard ASCII character set (no high-half characters or [nt]roff/TeX/Scribe escapes), as one of the versions generated from the master file is an info document that has to be viewable on a character tty. Please note that as of 2.3.1 the preferred format has changed rather dramatically; please *don't* all-caps your entry keys any more. Besides preserving case information, this enables the maintainers to process the File into a rather spiffy [nt]roff document with font switches via an almost trivial lex(1) program. This is all in aid of preventing the freely-available on-line document and the book from diverging. 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. A few new definitions attached to entries are marked [proposed]. These are usually generalizations suggested by editors or USENET respondents in the process of commenting on previous definitions of those entries. These are *not* represented as established jargon. The jargon file will be regularly maintained and re-posted from now on and will include a version number. Read it, pass it around, contribute --- this is *your* monument! 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 in English is to double a verb and use it as an exclamation, such as "Bang, bang!" or "Quack, quack!". Most of these are names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise, sometimes sarcastic comment on what the implied subject does. Also, a doubled verb is often used to terminate a conversation, in the process remarking on the current state of affairs or what the speaker intends to do next. Typical examples involve , , , , , : "The disk heads just crashed." "Lose, lose." "Mostly he just talked about his @#!!$% crock. Flame, flame." "Boy, what a bagbiter! Chomp, chomp!" Some verb-doubled constructions have special meanings not immediately obvious from the verb. These have their own listings in the lexicon. Soundalike slang: Hackers will often make rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word or phrase into something more interesting. It is considered particularly if the phrase is bent so as to include some other slang word; thus the computer hobbyist magazine `Dr. Dobb's Journal' is almost always referred to among hackers as `Dr. Frob's Journal' or simply `Dr. Frob's'. Terms of this kind that have been in fairly wide use include names for newspapers: Boston Herald American -> Horrid (or Harried) American Boston Globe -> Boston Glob San Francisco Chronicle -> the Crocknicle New York Times -> New York Slime However, terms like these are often made up on the spur of the moment. Standard examples include: Prime Time -> Slime Time Data General -> Dirty Genitals Government Property - Do Not Duplicate (seen on keys) -> Government Duplicity - Do Not Propagate for historical reasons -> for hysterical raisins Margaret Jacks Hall -> Marginal Hacks Hall This is not really similar to the Cockney rhyming slang it has been compared to in the past, because Cockney substitutions are opaque whereas hacker rhyming slang is intentionally transparent. The -P convention: turning a word into a question by appending the syllable `P'; from the LISP convention of appending the letter `P' to denote a predicate (a Boolean-valued function). The question should expect a yes/no answer, though it needn't. (See T and NIL.) At dinnertime: Q: "Foodp?" A: "Yeah, I'm pretty hungry." or "T!" Q: "State-of-the-world-P?" A: (Straight) "I'm about to go home." A: (Humorous) "Yes, the world has a state." On the phone to Florida: Q: "State-p Florida?" A: "Been reading JARGON.TXT again, eh?" [One of the best of these is a Gosperism (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] Overgeneralization: A very conspicuous feature of hackerspeak is the frequency with which names of program tools, command language primitives, and even assembler opcodes are applied to contexts outside of computing wherever hackers find amusing analogies to them. Thus, (to cite one of the best-known examples) UNIX hackers often for things rather than *searching* for them. Many of the lexicon entries are generalizations of exactly this kind. Hackers enjoy overgeneralization on the grammatical level as well. Many hackers love to take various words and add the wrong endings to them to make nouns and verbs, often by extending a standard rule to nonuniform cases (or vice versa). For example, because porous -> porosity generous -> generosity hackers happily generalize: mysterious -> mysteriosity ferrous -> ferrocity obvious -> obviosity dubious -> dubiosity Also, note that all nouns can be verbed. e.g.: "All nouns can be verbed", "I'll mouse it up", "Hang on while I clipboard it over", "I'm grepping the files". English as a whole is already heading in this direction (towards pure-positional grammar like Chinese); hackers are simply a bit ahead of the curve. Similarly, all verbs can be nouned. Thus: win -> winnitude, winnage disgust -> disgustitude hack -> hackification Finally, note the prevalence of certain kinds of nonstandard plural forms. Anything ending in x may form plurals in -xen (see and in the main text). Even words ending in phonetic /k/ alone are sometimes treated this way; ex. `soxen' for a bunch of socks. Other funny plurals are `frobbotzim' for the plural of (see main text) and `Unices' and `Tenices' (rather than `Unixes' and `Tenexes'; see , in main text). But note that `Unixen' and `Tenexen' are *never* used; it has been suggested that this is because -ix and -ex are latin singular endings that attract a Latinate plural. The pattern here, as with other hackish grammatical quirks, is generalization of an inflectional rule which (in English) is either an import or a fossil (such as Hebrew plural in `-im', or the Anglo-Saxon plural in `en') to cases where it isn't normally considered to apply. This is not `poor grammar', as hackers are generally quite well aware of what they are doing when they distort the language. It is grammatical creativity, a form of playfulness. Spoken inarticulations: Words such as `mumble', `sigh', and `groan' are spoken in places where their referent might more naturally be used. It has been suggested that this usage derives from the impossibility of representing such noises on a comm link or in email. Another expression sometimes heard is "Complain!", meaning "I have a complaint!" Of the five listed constructions, verb doubling, peculiar noun formations, and (especially!) spoken inarticulations 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. Finally, note that many words in hacker jargon have to be understood as members of sets of comparatives. This is especially true of the adjectives and nouns used to describe the beauty and functional quality of code. Here is an approximately correct spectrum: MONSTROSITY BRAIN-DAMAGE SCREW BUG LOSE MISFEATURE CROCK KLUGE HACK WIN FEATURE ELEGANCE PERFECTION The last is spoken of as a mythical absolute, approximated but never actually attained. Coinages for describing seem to call forth the very finest in hackish linguistic inventiveness; it has been truly said that " have more words for equipment failures than Inuit have for snow". 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 of jargon or a breathless, excessively gung-ho attitude are considered tacky and the mark of a loser. This speech style is a variety of the precisionist English normally spoken by scientists, design engineers, and academics in technical fields. Unlike the jargon construction methods it is fairly constant throughout hackerdom. It has been observed that many hackers are confused by negative questions --- or, at least, the people they're talking to are often confused by the sense of their answers. The problem is that they've done so much coding that distinguishes between if (going) { and if (!going) { that when they parse the question "Aren't you going?" it seems to be asking the opposite question from "Are you going?", and so merits an answer in the opposite sense. This confuses English-speaking non-hackers because they were taught to answer as though the negative part weren't there (in some other languages, including Chinese and Japanese, the hackish interpretation is standard and the problem wouldn't arise). Hackers often find themselves wishing for a word like French `si' or German `doch' with which one could unambiguously answer `yes' to a negative question. For similar reasons, English-speaking hackers almost never use a double negative even if they live in a region where colloquial usage allows it. The thought of uttering something that logically ought to be an affirmative knowing it will be mis-parsed as a negative tends to disturb them. Hacker Writing Style ==================== Hackers tend to use quotes as balanced delimiters like parens, much to the dismay of American editors. Thus, if "Jim is going" is a phrase, and so is "Bill runs" and "Spock groks", then hackers generally prefer to write: "Jim is going", "Bill runs", and "Spock groks". This is incorrect according to standard American usage (which would put the continuation commas and the final period inside the string quotes) but it is counter-intuitive to hackers to mutilate literal strings with characters that don't belong in them. Given the sorts of examples that can come up in discussing programming, American-style quoting can even be grossly misleading. When communicating command lines or small pieces of code extra characters can be a real pain in the neck. For example: First do "foo -acrZ tempo | bar -," then... is different from First do "foo -acrZ tempo | bar -", then... from a computer's point of view. While the first is correct according to the stylebooks and would probably be parsed correctly by the a human recipient, the second is unambiguous. The Jargon File follows hackish usage consistently throughout. Interestingly, a similar style is now preferred practice in Great Britain, though the older style (which became established for typographical reasons having to do with the aesthetics of comma and quotes in typeset text) is still accepted there. Hart's Rules and the Oxford Dictionary for Writers and Editors call it `new' or `logical' style quoting. Another hacker quirk about quoting style is a tendency to distinguish between `marking' quotes and "speech" quotes; that is, to use British-style single quotes for emphasis and reserve double quotes for actual reports of speach or text included from elsewhere. Interestingly, some authorities describe this as correct general usage, but mainstream American English has gone to using double-quotes thoroughly enough that hacker usage appears marked [and, in fact, I thought this was a personal quirk of mine until I checked with USENET -- ESR]. One further permutation that is definitely *not* standard is a hackish tendency to do marking quotes by using apostrophes in pairs; that is, 'like this'. This is modelled on string and character literal syntax in some programming languages. There seems to be a meta-rule behind these nonstandard hackerisms to the effect that precision of expression is more important than conformance to traditional rules; where the latter create ambiguity or lose information they can be discarded without a second thought. It is notable in this respect that other hackish inventions (for example, in vocabulary) also tend to carry very precise shades of meaning even when constructed to appear slangy and loose. There is another respect in which hackish usage often parallels British usage; it tends to choose British spellings whenever these seem more phonetically consistent than the American ones. For example, a hacker is likely to insist on (British-style) `signalling' rather than American-standard `signaling' on the grounds that the latter ought to be pronounced /sig'nay'ling/ rather than /sig'n@-ling/. Similarly, `travelling' is preferred to `traveling'. Hackers have also developed a number of punctuation and emphasis conventions adapted to single-font all-ASCII communications links, and these are occasionally carried over into written documents even when normal means of font changes, underlining and the like are available. One of these is that TEXT IN ALL CAPS IS INTERPRETED AS `LOUD', and this becomes such a synesthetic reflex that a person who goes to caps-lock while in (see main text) may be asked to "stop shouting, please, you're hurting my ears!". Also, it is common to use bracketing with asterisks to signify emphasis, as in "What the *hell*?". An alternative form uses paired slash and backslash: "What the \hell/?". The latter is never used in text documents, as many formatters treat backslash as an and may do inappropriate things with the following text. Also note that there is a semantic difference between *emphasis like this*, (which emphasizes the phrase as a whole) and *emphasis* *like* *this* (which suggests the writer speaking very slowly and distinctly, as if to a very young child or mentallly impaired person). Two asterisks in a row, on the other hand, are a shorthand for exponentiation (this derives from FORTRAN). Thus, one might write `2 ** 8 = 256'. Another notation for exponentiation one sees more frequently uses the caret (^, ASCII 1011110); one might write instead `2 ^ 8 = 256'. This goes all the way back to Algol-60, which used the archaic ASCII `up-arrow' that later became caret; this was picked up by Kemeny & Kurtz's original BASIC, which in turn influenced the design of the bc(1) and dc(1) UNIX tools that have probably done most to reinforce the convention on USENET. The notation is mildly confusing to C programmers, because `^' means logical in C. Despite this, it was favored 3-1 over ** in a late-1990 snapshot of USENET. It is used consistently in this text. Another on-line convention used specifically for powers of 10 derives from FORTRAN (and now C) conventions for `scientific notation' output of floating-point quantities. In this idiom, 10 ^ is rendered `1e', with an explicit plus or minus sign; thus `10 ^ 9' is rendered `1e+9' and `10 ^ -6' is `1e-6'. Underlining is often suggested by substituting underscores for spaces and prepending and appending one underscore to the underlined phrase. Example: "It is often alleged that Haldeman wrote _The_Forever_War_ in response to Robert Heinlein's earlier _Starship_Troopers_" On USENET and in the MUD world (see in main text) common C boolean operators (`|, !, ==, !=, >, <') are often combined with English by analogy with mainstream usage of &. The Pascal not-equals, `<>', is also recognized. The use of prefix `!' as a loose synonym for `not-' or `no-' is particularly common; thus, `!clue' is read `no-clue' or `clueless'. Another habit is that of using enclosure to genericize a term; this derives from conventions used in . Uses like the following are common: So this walks into a bar one day, and... In flat-ASCII renderings of the Jargon File, you will see <> used in exactly this way to bracket words which themselves have entries in the File. This isn't done all the time for every such word, but it is done everywhere that the reader needs specially to be aware that the term has a jargon meaning and might wish to refer to its entry. One quirk that shows up frequently in the style of UNIX hackers in particular is a tendency for some things which are normally all-lowercase (including usernames and the names of commands and C routines) to remain uncapitalized even when they occur at the beginning of sentences. It is clear that for many hackers, the case of such identifiers becomes a part of their internal representation (the "spelling") and cannot be overridden without mental effort (an appropriate reflex because UNIX and C both distinguish cases and confusing them can lead to lossage). Another way of dealing with this is simply to avoid using these constructions at the beginning of sentences. Finally, it should be noted that hackers exhibit much less reluctance to use multiply-nested parentheses than is normal in English. Partly this is almost certainly due to influence from LISP ((which uses deeply nested parentheses (like this) in its syntax) (a lot (see?))), but it has also been suggested that a more basic hacker trait of enjoying playing with complexity and pushing systems to their limits is in operation. International Style =================== Although the Jargon File remains primarily a lexicon of hacker usage in American English, we have made some effort to get input from abroad. Though the hacker-speak of other languages often uses translations of English slang (often as transmitted to them by earlier Jargon File versions!) the local variations are interesting, and knowledge of them may be of some use to travelling hackers. There are some references to `Commonwealth English'. These are intended to describe some variations in hacker usage as reported in the English spoken in Great Britain and the Commonwealth (Canada, Australia, India etc., though Canada is heavily influenced by American usage). There is also an entry on COMMONWEALTH HACKISH, which see. Hackers in Western Europe and (especially) Scandinavia are reported to often use a mixture of English and their native languages for technical conversation. Occasionally they develop idioms in their English usage which are influenced by their native-language styles. Some of these are reported here. A note or two on hackish usages in Russian have been added where they are parallel with and comprehensible to English-speakers. UNIX Conventions ================ References such as `malloc(3)' and `patch(1)' are to UNIX facilities (some of which, such as patch(1), are actually freeware distributed over USENET). The UNIX manuals use `foo(n)' to refer to item foo in section (n) of the manual, where n=1 is utilities, n=2 is system calls, n=3 is C library routines, n=6 is games, and n=8 (where present) is system administration utilities. Sections 4, 5, and 7 have changed roles frequently and in any case are not referred to from any of the entries. Pronunciation Guide =================== Pronunciation keys are provided in the jargon listing for all entries which are neither dictionary words pronounced as in standard English nor obvious compounds of same. Slashes bracket a phonetic pronunciation to be interpreted using the following conventions: 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 `kh' is the guttural of `loch' or `l'chaim'. 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/, not /kit'@n/ and /kul'@r/. Entries are sorted in case-blind ASCII collation order (rather than the letter-by-letter order ignoring interword spacing common in mainstream dictionaries). The case-blindness is a feature, not a bug. The Jargon Lexicon ****************** {= [^A-Za-z] (see ) =} <@-party> /at'part`ee/ n. (also `@-sign party' /at'sien par`tee/) Semi-closed parties thrown at SF conventions (esp. the annual Worldcon) for hackers; one must have a to get in, or at least be in company with someone who does. One of the most reliable opportunities for hackers to meet face to face with people who might otherwise be represented by mere phosphor dots on their screens. Compare . <@Begin> [primarily CMU] n. SCRIBE equivalent of <\Begin>. <'Snooze> [Fidonet] n. Fidonews, the weekly official on-line newsletter of Fidonet. As the editorial policy of Fidonews is "anything that arrives, we print", there are often large articles completely unrelated to Fidonet, which in turn tend to elicit in subsequent issues. <(tm)> [USENET] ASCII rendition of the trademark symbol, appended to phrases that the author feels should be recorded for posterity, perhaps in the Jargon File. Sometimes used ironically as a form of protest against the recent spate of software and algorithm patents, and `look and feel' lawsuits. /dev-nuhl/ [from the UNIX null device, used as a data sink] n. A notional `black hole' in any information space being discussed, used or referred to. A controversial posting, for example, might end "Kudos to rasputin@kremlin.org, flames to /dev/null". See , . <120 reset> n. To cycle power on a machine in order to reset or unjam it. Compare . <2 (infix)> n. In translation software written by hackers, infix 2 often represents the syllable to with the connotation "translate to"; as in dvi2ps (DVI to PostScript), int2string (integer to string) and texi2roff (Texinfo to [nt]roff). <\Begin> with \End, used humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the surrounded text. From the LaTeX 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} The Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in an identical way. On USENET, this construct would more frequently be rendered as "" and "". {= A =} n. Archaic term for a register. Cited here because on-line use of it is a fairly reliable indication that the user has been around for quite a while, and/or the architecture under discussion is quite old. The term in full is never used of microprocessor registers, for example, though symbolic names for arithmetic registers beginning in A derive from historical use of `accumulator' (and not, actually, from `arithmetic'!). Confusingly, though, an `A' register name prefix may also stand for `address', as for example on the Motorola 680x0 family. /ak/ interj. 1. [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000110] Acknowledge. Used to register one's presence (compare mainstream Yo!). An appropriate response to or . 2. [prob. from the Bloom County comic strip] An exclamation of surprised disgust, esp. in "Oop ack!". Semi-humorous. 3. Used to politely interrupt someone to tell them you understand their point. See . Thus, for example, you might cut off an overly long explanation with "Ack. Ack. Ack. I get it now". See also . There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense #1) meaning "Are you there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no reply, or during a lull in to see if the person has gone away (the standard humorous response is of course (sense #2), i.e. "I'm not here"). /adj'r/ [UCLA] vt. To make a bonehead move that could have been foreseen with a slight amount of mental effort. E.g., "He started removing files and promptly adgered the whole project." Compare . /ad-hok'@r-ee/ [Purdue] n. 1. Gratuitous assumptions made inside certain programs, esp. expert systems, which lead to the appearance of semi-intelligent behavior, but are in fact entirely arbitrary. 2. Special-case code to cope with some awkward input which would otherwise cause a program to , presuming normal inputs are dealt with in some cleaner and more regular way. /ad'vent/ n. The prototypical computer adventure game, first implemented on the by Will Crowther as an attempt at computer-refereed fantasy gaming, and expanded into a puzzle-oriented game by Don Woods. Now bet operating system only permitted 6-letter filenames. This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style now expected in text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have become fixtures of hacker-speak. "A huge green fierce snake bars the way!" "I see no X here." (for X some noun). "You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little maze of twisty passages, all different." The "magic words" and also derive from this game. Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the Mammoth/Flint Ridge cave system; it actually *has* a `Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary entrance. pl.n. A series of pastiches of Zen teaching riddles created at the MIT AI Lab around various major figures of the Lab's culture. A selection are included in Appendix A. See also and . /ayds/ n. Short for A* Infected Disk Syndrome ("A*" matches, but not limited to, Apple), this condition is the quite often the result of practicing unsafe . See , , [C programmers] n. A class of subtle programming errors which can arise in code that does dynamic allocation, esp. 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 . Avoidable by use of allocation strategies that never alias allocated core. Also called a . See also , , , , , . /awlt/ [PDP-10] n.obs. Alternate name for the ASCII ESC character, after the keycap labeling on some older terminals. Also "ALT-MODE". This character was almost never pronounced "escape" on an ITS system, in TECO, or under TOPS-10 --- always ALT, as in "Type ALT ALT to end a TECO command" or "ALT U onto the system" (for "log onto the [ITS] system"). This was probably because ALT is more convenient to say than "escape", especially when followed by another ALT or a character (or another ALT *and* a character, for that matter!). /alt bit/ [from alternate] adj. See . [MIT] n. `Common Lisp: The Language', by Guy L. Steele Jr., Digital Press, first edition, 1984, second edition 1990. Strictly speaking, only the first edition is the aluminum book, since the second edition has a yucky pale green cover. See also , , , , , , , , . /@-mee'b@/ n. Humorous term for the Commodore Amiga personal computer. [Purdue] vt. To run in . From the UNIX shell `&' operator. n. Either of the characters `<' and `>' (ASCII less-than or greater-than signs). The angle bracket used by typographers is actually taller than a less-than or greater-than sign. See , . 1. /aws/ (East coast), /ay-os/ (West coast) [based on a PDP-10 increment instruction] vt.,obs. To increase the amount of something. "Aos the campfire." Usage: considered silly, and now obsolescent. See . Now largely supplanted by . 2. A crufty -derived OS supported at one time by Data General. This was pronounced /ay-oh-ess/ or /ay-ahs/, the latter being prevalent internally at DG. A spoof of the standard AOS system administrator's manual (`How to load and generate your AOS system') was created, issued a part number, and allegedly released. It was called `How to goad and levitate your chaos system'. /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 , . [primarily MSDOS] vt. to create a compressed archive from a group of files using the SEA ARC, PKWare PKARC, or compatible program. Rapidly becoming obsolete as the ARC compression method is falling into disuse, having been replaced by newer compression techniques. See , . [primarily MSDOS] n. over which archiving program one should use. The first arc war was sparked when System Enhancement Associates (SEA) sued PKWare for copyright and trademark infringement on its ARC program. PKWare's PKARC outperformed ARC on both compression and speed while largely retaining compatibility (it introduced a new compression type which could be disabled for backward-compatibility). PKWare settled out of court to avoid enormous legal costs (both SEA and PKWare are small companies); as part of the settlement, it was prohibited from distributing ARC-compatible archivers in the future. The public backlash against SEA for bringing suit helped to hasten the demise of ARC as a standard when PKWare and others introduced new, incompatible but better-compressing, archivers. [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 , , , . /arg/ n. Abbreviation for "argument" (to a function), used so often as to have become a new word (like `piano' from `pianoforte'). "The sine function takes one arg, but the arc-tangent function can take either one or two args". Compare , . n. Syn. for . n. Once, long ago at MIT, there was a so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been recognized by the "asbestos cork award". Persons in any doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under . Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity --- but there's no agreement on *which* few. n. Metaphoric garments often donned by posters just before emitting a remark they expect will elicit . Also "asbestos underwear", "asbestos overcoat", etc. [American Standard Code for Information Interchange] /as'kee/ n. Common slang names for ASCII characters are collected here. See individual entries for , , , , , , , , , , , and . This list derives from revision 2.2 of the USENET ASCII pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order, and character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character, common names are given in rough order of popularity followed by names which are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCIT names are parenthesized. ! Common: bang, pling, excl shriek, (exclamation point). Rare: factorial, exclam, smash, cuss, boing, yell, wow, hey, wham, soldier. " Common: double quote, quote. Rare: literal mark, double-glitch, (quotation marks), (diaresis), dirk. # Common: (number sign), pound, hash, sharp, crunch, mesh, hex. Rare: flash, crosshatch, grid, pig-pen, tictactoe, scratchmark, octothorpe, thud. $ Common: dollar, (dollar sign). Rare: currency symbol, buck, cash, string (from BASIC), escape (from ), ding, cache. % Common: percent, (percent sign), mod, grapes. & Common: (ampersand), amper, and. Rare: address (from C), reference (from C++), andpersand, bitand, background (from `sh(1)'), pretzel. ' Common: single quote, quote, (apostrophe). Rare: prime, glitch, tick, irk, pop, spark, (closing single quotation mark), (acute accent) () Common: left/right parenthesis, open/close, open/close parenthesis. Rare: (opening/closing parenthesis), paren/thesis, lparen/rparen, parenthisey, unparenthisey, open/close round bracket, so/already, wax/wane * Common: star, splat, (asterisk). Rare: wildcard, gear, dingle, mult, spider, aster, times, twinkle, glob (see ). + Common: (plus), add. Rare: cross. , Common: (comma). Rate: (cedilla) - Common: dash, (hyphen), (minus). Rare: worm, option, dak, bithorpe. . Common: dot, (period), (decimal point), point. Rare: radix point, full stop, spot. / Common: slash, stroke, (slant), forward slash. Rare: diagonal, solidus, over, slat, slak, virgule. : Common: (colon) ; Common: (semicolon), semi <> Common: angle brackets, brokets, left/right angle, (less/greater than). Rare: from/into, suck/blow, in/out, crunch/zap, comesfrom/gozinta, read from/write to, from/towards, (all from UNIX). = Common: (equals). Rare: quadrathorp, half-mesh ? Common: (question mark), query. Rare: whatmark, what, wildchar, ques, huh, hook, hunchback. @ Common: at-sign, at, strudel. Rare: each, vortex, whorl, whirlpool, cyclone, snail, ape, cat, rose, cabbage, (commercial at). V Rare: vee, book. [] Common: left/right square brackets, (opening/closing brackets), left/right brackets, bra/ket. Rare: bracket/unbracket, square/unsquare, U turns. \ Common: backslash, escape (from C/UNIX), reverse slash, slosh, backslant. Rare: bash, backwhack, backslat, (reversed slant), reversed virgule. ^ Common: hat, control, (as in `control to'), uparrow, (caret). Rare: (circumflex), chevron, sharkfin, to ("to the power of"), fang. _ Common: (underline), underscore, underbar, under. Rare: score, backarrow. ` Common: backquote, left quote, open quote, (grave accent), grave. Rare: backprime, unapostrophe, backspark, birk, blugle, back tick, back glitch, push, (opening single quotation mark) {} Common: open/close brace, left/right brace, left/right squiggly bracket, (opening/closing brace), left/right curly bracket. Rare: brace/unbrace, curly/uncurly, leftit/rytit. | Common: bar, or, or-bar, v-bar, pipe. Rare: vertical bar, (vertical line), gozinta, thru, pipesinta (last four non-official ones from UNIX) ~ Common: (tilde), squiggle, twiddle, not. Rare: approx, wiggle, swung dash, enyay. The pronunciation of `#' as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad idea; Commonwealth hackish has its own rather more apposite use of `pound'. The U.S. practice seems to derive from an old-time habit of using `#' to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The `#', `$', `>' and `&' chars, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in particular, $ in the 6502 world, > at Texas Instruments, and & on the Sinclair and some other Z80 machines). adj. Infinitely close to. This is used in a generalization of its mathematical meaning to allege that something is some standard, reference or goal (see ). /aw'to-boh-got'@-foh`bee-uh/ n. See . /aw-toh-maj'i-klee/ or /aw-toh-maj'i-k@l-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), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining to you. See . "The C-INTERCAL compiler generates C, then automagically invokes `cc(1)' to produce an executable." n. 1. [UNIX] An interpreted language developed by Aho, Weinberg and Kernighan (the name is from their initials). characterized by: C-like syntax, a BASIC-like approach to variable typing and declarations, associative arrays, and field-oriented text processing. See also . 2. Editing term for an expression awkward to manipulate through normal regular expression facilities. {= B =} n. A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the and reined in the chaos of during most of the 1980s. The cabal disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight, but the net hardly noticed. 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 anyone 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 `sendmail(1)' utility. Syn. ; may also be called a "wormhole". See also , , , . vt.,adj. A task running in background is detached from the terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower priority); oppose . Nowadays this term is primarily associated with , but it 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 matters are not claiming your undivided attention, and "to background" something means to relegate it to a lower priority. Compare , . [from the 1962 Sellars & Yeatman parody `1066 and All That'] 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 . British correspondents confirm that and (and prob. therefore and ) come from the book referenced in the etymology, which discusses rulers who were Good Kings, but Bad Things. This has apparently created a mainstream idiom on their side of the pond. /bag'biet-@r/ n. 1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. Example: "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: , , . 3. Also in the form "bagbiting" adj. Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This bagbiting system won't let me compute the factorial of a negative number." Compare , , , "barfucious" (under ) and "chomping" (under ). 4. "bite the bag" vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag." The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, probably referring to the scrotum, but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized. /bamf/ 1. [from old X-men comics] interj. Notional sound made by a person or object teleporting in or out of the hearer's vicinity. Often used in (esp. ) electronic fora when a character wishes to make a dramatic entrance or exit. 2. [from `Don Washington's Survival Guide'] n. Acronym for `Bad-Ass Mother Fucker', used to refer to one of the handful of nastiest monsters on an LPMUD or similar MUD. n. 1. Used by hackers in a generalization of its technical meaning as the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person or transmission medium can handle. "Those are amazing graphics but I missed some of the detail --- not enough bandwidth, I guess." 2. Attention span. 3. On , a measure of network capacity that is often wasted by people complaining about how network news items posted by others are a waste of bandwidth. 1. n. Common spoken name for `!' (ASCII 0100001), especially when used in pronouncing a in spoken hackish. In elder days this was considered a CMUish usage, with MIT and Stanford hackers preferring or ; but the spread of UNIX has carried with it (esp. via the term ) and it is now certainly the most common spoken name for `!'. Note that it is used exclusively for non-emphatic written `!'; one would not say "Congratulations bang", but if one wanted to specify the exact characters `FOO!', one would speak "Eff oh oh bang". See , . 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 immediately after one has been called on it. 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 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'. In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang addresses using the { } convention (see ) to give paths from *several* big machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to get mail to one of them reliable (example: ...!{seismo, ut-sally, gatech}!rice!beta!gamma!me). Bang paths of 8 to ten hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late night dial-up uucp links would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages would often get lost. See , , and . /bar/ n. 1. The second metasyntactic variable, after and before . "Suppose we have two functions FOO and BAR. FOO calls BAR..." 2. Often appended to to produce . n. 1. New computer hardware, unadorned with such snares and delusions as an , or even assembler. Commonly in the phrase `programming on the bare metal' which refers to the arduous work of needed to create these basic tools for a new machine. Real bare-metal programming involves things like building boot proms and BIOS chips, implementing basic monitors used to test device drivers, and writing the assemblers that will be used to write the compiler back ends that will give the new machine a real development environment. 2. The same phrase is also used to describe a style of that relies on bit-level peculiarities of a particular hardware design, esp. tricks for speed and space optimization that rely on crocks like overlapping opcodes (or, as in the famous case described in Appendix A, interleaving of opcodes on a magnetic drum to minimize fetch delays due to the device's rotational latency). This sort of thing has become less common as the relative costs of programming time and machine resources have changed, but is still found in heavily constrained environments like industrial embedded systems. See . /barf/ [from mainstream slang meaning `vomit'] 1. interj. Term of disgust. See . 2. To say "Barf!" or emit some similar expression of disgust. 3. vi. To fail to work because of unacceptable input. May mean to give an error message. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you try to divide by zero." (that is, division by zero fails in some unspecified spectacular way) "The text editor barfs if you try to read in a new file before writing out the old one." See , . Note that in Commonwealth hackish, `barf' is generally replaced by `puke' or `vom'. is sometimes also used as a metasyntactic variable like or . adj. (also ) Said of something which would make anyone barf, if only for esthetic reasons. interj. Variation of used around the Stanford area. An exclamation, expressing disgust. On seeing some particularly bad code one might exclaim, "Barfulation! Who wrote this, Quux?" adj. Feature-encrusted; complex; gaudy; verging on excessive. Said of hardware or (esp.) software designs, this has many of the connotations of or but is less extreme and not pejorative in itself. n. Any of the MUDs which are devived from the original MUD game (see ) or use the same software drivers. BartleMUDs are noted for their (usually slightly offbeat) humour, dry but friendly syntax, and lack of adjectives in object descriptions, so a player is likely to come across `brand172', for instance (see ). Some mudders intensely dislike Bartle and this term, preferring to speak of `MUD-1'. /bawd barf/ n. The garbage one gets on the monitor when using a modem connection with some protocol setting (esp. line speed) incorrect, or when someone picks up a voice extension on the same line, or when really bad line noise disrupts the connection. Baud barf is not completely , by the way; hackers with a lot of serial-line experience can usually tell whether the device at the other end is expecting a higher or lower speed than the terminal is set to. *Really* experienced ones can identify particular speeds. /baz/ n. [Stanford corruption of ] 1. The third metasyntactic variable, after and and before . "Suppose we have three functions FOO, BAR, and BAZ. FOO calls BAR, which calls BAZ..." 2. interj. Term of mild annoyance. In this usage the term is often drawn out for two or three seconds, producing an effect not unlike the bleating of a sheep; /baaaaaaz/. 3. Occasionally appended to to produce `foobaz'. /bee'bord/ [contraction of "bulletin board"] n. 1. Any electronic bulletin board; esp. used of systems running of personal micros, less frequently of a USENET . 2. At CMU and other colleges with similar facilities, refers to campuswide electronic bulletin boards. 3. The term "physical bboard" is sometimes used to refer to a non-electronic old-fashioned cork memo board. At CMU, it refers to a particular one outside the CS Lounge. In either of senses 1 or 2, the term is usually prefixed by the name of the intended board (`the Moonlight Casino bboard' or `market bboard'); however, if the context is clear, the better-read bboards may be referred to by name alone, as in [at CMU] "Don't post for-sale ads on general". [acronym, Bulletin Board System] n. An electronic bulletin board system; that is, a message database where people can log in and leave broadcast messages for others grouped (typically) into topic areas. Thousands of local BBS systems are in operation throughout the U.S., typically run by amateurs for fun out of their homes on MS-DOS boxes with a single modem line each. Fans of USENET and Internet or the big commercial timesharing boards like CompuServe or GEnie tend to consider local BBSes the `low-rent district' of the hacker culture, but they serve a valuable function by knitting together lots of hackers and users in the personal-micro world who would otherwise be unable to exchange code at all. [from Star Trek Classic's "Beam me up, Scotty!"] vt. To transfer of a file electronically; most often in combining forms such as "beam me a copy" or "beam that over to his site". Compare , , . n.,v. Syn. . This term seems to be preferred among micro hobbyists. [by analogy with steam calliopes] n. Features added to a program or system to make it more from a hacker's point of view, without necessarily adding to its utility for its primary function. Distinguished from which is intended to attract users. "Now that we've got the basic program working, let's go back and add some bells and whistles." However, no one seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a whistle. n. An inaccurate measure of computer performance. "In the computer industry, there are three kinds of lies: lies, damn lies, and benchmarks." Well known ones include Dhrystone, Whetstone, the Gabriel LISP benchmarks (see ), Rhealstone (see ) and LINPACK. See also , . /ber'kliks/ n.,adj. Contraction of Berkeley UNIX. See . Not used at Berkeley itself. May be more common among attempting to sound like cognoscenti than hackers, who usually just say `BSD'. vi. A term meaning to gain points *only* by killing other players and mobiles (non-player characters). Hence a Berserker-Wizard is a player character that has achieved enough points to become a wizard, but only by killing other characters. Berserking is sometimes frowned upon because of its inherently antisocial nature, but some MUDs have a "berserker mode" in which a player becomes *permanently* berserk, can never flee out of a fight, cannot use magic, get no score for treasure, but they *do* get double kill points. "Berserker wizards can seriously damage your elf!" [from "berserk"] /b@r-zer'klee/ [from the name of a now-deceased record label] n. Humorous, distortion of `Berkeley' used esp. to refer to the practices or products of the UNIX hackers. See , . /be't@/, /bay't@/ or (Commonwealth) /bee't@/ n. 1. In the software often goes through two stages of testing: Alpha (in-house) and Beta (out-house?). Software is said to be "in beta". 2. Beta software is notoriously buggy, hence anything that is new and experimental is in beta. "His girlfriend is in beta." n. See . Also encountered in the variant "BFMI", `brute force and "massive" ignorance'. n. As used by hackers, usually refers to one of a small number of fundamental source books including or . /bif/ [USENET] n. The most famous , and the prototypical . Articles from BIFF are characterized by all upper case letters sprinkled liberally with bangs, typos, `cute' misspellings (EVRY BUDY LUVS GOOD OLD BIFF CUZ HE"S A K00L DOOD AN HE RITES REEL AWESUM THINGZ IN CAPITULL LETTRS LIKE THIS!!!), use (and often misuse) of fragments of abbreviations, a long (sometimes even a ), and unbounded naivete. BIFF posts articles using his elder brother's VIC-20. BIFF's location is a mystery, as his articles appear to come from a variety of sites. However, BITNET seems to be the most frequent origin. The theory that BIFF is a denizen of BITNET is supported by BIFF's (unfortunately invalid) electronic mail address: BIFF@BIT.NET. See also . /bif/ vt. To notify someone of incoming mail; from the BSD utility `biff(1)' which was in turn named after the implementor's dog; it barked whenever the mailman came. [From Swift's `Gulliver's Travels' via a famous 1981 paper `On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace' by Danny Cohen] adj. Describes a computer architecture in which, within a given word, lower byte addresses have higher significance (the word is stored `big-end-first'). Most processors including the IBM 370 family and the and Motorola microprocessor families and most of the various RISC designs current in 1990 are big-endian. See , , . n. What greets a user searching for documentation. A full VMS kit comes on a pallet, the documentation taking up around 15 feet of shelf space before adding layered products such as compilers, databases, multivendor networking, programming tools etc. Recent (since VMS V5) DEC documentation comes with grey binders; under VMS V4 the binders were orange ("big orange wall"), under V3 they were blue. See . n. Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of number crunching supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval; compare , oppose . [IBM] n. The power switch on a computer, esp. the `Emergency Pull' switch on an IBM mainframe or the power switch on an IBM-PC where it really is large and red. "This !@%$% is hung again, time to hit the big red switch." Sources at IBM report that, in tune with the company's passion for s this is often acronymized as "BRS" (this has also become established on FidoNet and in the PC world). It is alleged that the emergency pull switch on a 360/91 actually fired a non-conducting bolt into the main power feed. Compare . /big'num/ [orig. from MIT MACLISP; the name is said to derive from a pun on the FORTRAN REAL type] n. 1. A multiple-precision computer representation for very large integers. More generally, any very large number. "Have you ever looked at the United States Budget? There's bignums for you!" Most computer languages provide a kind of data called `integer', but such computer integers are usually very limited in size; usually they must be smaller than 2 ^ 31 (2147483648) or (on a losing ) 2 ^ 15 (32768). If you want to work with numbers larger than that, you have to use floating-point numbers, which are usually only accurate to six or seven decimal places. Computer languages that provide bignums can perform exact calculations on very large numbers, such as 1000! (the factorial of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times ... times 2 times 1) exactly. For example, this value for 1000! was computed by the MACLISP system using bignums: 4023872600770937735437024339230039857193748642107146325437999104 2993851239862902059204420848696940480047998861019719605863166687 2994808558901323829669944590997424504087073759918823627727188732 5197795059509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910563938 8743788648733711918104582578364784997701247663288983595573543251 3185323958463075557409114262417474349347553428646576611667797396 6688202912073791438537195882498081268678383745597317461360853795 3452422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155861103697680 1357304216168747609675871348312025478589320767169132448426236131 4125087802080002616831510273418279777047846358681701643650241536 9139828126481021309276124489635992870511496497541990934222156683 2572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975602900950537616475 8477284218896796462449451607653534081989013854424879849599533191 0172335555660213945039973628075013783761530712776192684903435262 5200015888535147331611702103968175921510907788019393178114194545 2572238655414610628921879602238389714760885062768629671466746975 6291123408243920816015378088989396451826324367161676217916890977 9911903754031274622289988005195444414282012187361745992642956581 7466283029555702990243241531816172104658320367869061172601587835 2075151628422554026517048330422614397428693306169089796848259012 5458327168226458066526769958652682272807075781391858178889652208 1643483448259932660433676601769996128318607883861502794659551311 5655203609398818061213855860030143569452722420634463179746059468 2573103790084024432438465657245014402821885252470935190620929023 1364932734975655139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623 7738753823048386568897646192738381490014076731044664025989949022 2221765904339901886018566526485061799702356193897017860040811889 7299183110211712298459016419210688843871218556461249607987229085 1929681937238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013742853 1926649875337218940694281434118520158014123344828015051399694290 1534830776445690990731524332782882698646027898643211390835062170 9500259738986355427719674282224875758676575234422020757363056949 8825087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994871701244516 4612603790293091208890869420285106401821543994571568059418727489 9809425474217358240106367740459574178516082923013535808184009699 6372524230560855903700624271243416909004153690105933983835777939 4109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000. 2. BIGNUMS [from Macsyma] n. In backgammon, large numbers on the dice, especially a roll of double fives or double sixes. See also . [from the mainstream meaning and "binary digit"] n. 1. The unit of information; the amount of information obtained by asking a yes-or-no question (this is straight technicalese). 2. A computational quantity that can take on one of two values, such as true and false, or zero and one. 3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done eventually. Example: "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't seen you for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something.) A bit is said to be "set" if its value is true or one, and "reset" or "clear" if its value is false or zero. One speaks of setting and clearing bits. To "toggle" or "invert" a bit is to change it, either from zero to one or from one to zero. 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. instructions 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 . n. (also, "bit diddling" or "bit twiddling") Term used to describe any of several kinds of low-level programming characterized by manipulation of , , and other smaller-than-character sized pieces of data: these include low-level device control, encryption algorithms, checksum and error-correcting codes, hash functions, some flavors of graphics programming (see ), and assembler/compiler code generation. May connote either tedium or a real technical challenge (more usually the former). "The command decoding for the new tape driver looks pretty solid but the bit-bashing for the control registers still has bugs." See also . n. The universal data sink (originally, the mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off the end of a register during a shift instruction). Data that is discarded, lost, or destroyed is said to "go to the bit bucket". On , often used for . Sometimes amplified as "the Great Bit Bucket in the Sky". This term is used purely in jest. It's based on the fanciful notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed, but only misplaced. This appears to have been a mutation of an earlier term "bit box", about which the same legend was current; old-time hackers also report that trainees used to be told that when the CPU stored bits into memory it was actually pulling them "out of the bit box". See also , . n. See . People with a physics background tend to prefer this one for the analogy with particle decay. n. obs. A non-standard keyboard layout which seems to have originated with the Teletype ASR-33 and remained common for several years on early computer equipment. The TTY was a mechanical device (see ) so the only way to generate the character codes from keystrokes was by some physical linkage. The design of the ASR-33 assigned each character key a basic pattern which could be modified by flipping bits if the SHIFT or CTRL key were pressed. This meant that in order to avoid making the thing more of a Rube Goldberg kluge than it already was the design had to group on one keytop characters which shared the same basic bit pattern. Looking at the ASCII chart, we find: b7b6b5 b4b3b2b1 --- (in decimal) 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0 1 0 sp ! " # $ % & ' ( ) 0 1 1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 That's why the shifted decimal digits on a Teletype are arranged that way (except that 0 was moved over to the right-hand side). This was the weirdest variant of layout widely seen, by the way; that palm probably goes to the keycaps on IBM's even clunkier 029 card punch. When electronic terminals became popular in the early nineteen-seventies there was no agreement in the industry over how the keyboards should be laid out. Some vendors opted to emulate the Teletype keyboard, while others used the flexibility of electronic circuitry to make their product look like an office typewriter. These alternatives became known as `bit-paired' and `typewriter-paired' keyboards. To a hacker, the bit-paired keyboard seemed far more logical --- and because most hackers in those days had never learned to touch-type, there was little pressure from the pioneering users to adapt keyboards to the typewriter standard. The doom of the bit-paired keyboard was the large-scale introduction of the computer terminal into the normal office environment, where out-and-out technophobes were expected to use the equipment. The `typewriter-paired' standard became universal, `bit-paired' hardware was quickly junked or relegated to dusty corners, and both terms passed into obsolescence. n. Also . Hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has changed'. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become increasingly garbled. There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (the alpha particles such as are found in cosmic rays can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage) but they are quite rare. The term is almost synonymous. /bit'blit/ n. [from , q.v.] 1. Any 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. Synonym for or n. 1. Information. Examples: "I need some bits about file formats." ("I need to know about file formats.") Compare , sense #4. 2. Machine-readable representation of a document, specifically as contrasted with paper. "I only have a photocopy of the Jargon File; does anyone know where I can get the bits?". See . 3. Also in n. A person from whom (or a place from which) information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly competent secretary. /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 800, Osborne, Sinclair, VIC-20, or TRS-80. 2. More generally, the opposite of `real computer' (see ). Pejorative. See also , , and . /biks'ee/ n. Synonym for used on BIX (the Byte Information Exchange); many BIXers believe (incorrectly) the emoticon was invented there. n. A collection of arcane, unpublished, and (by implication) mostly ad-hoc techniques developed for a particular application or systems area. VLSI design and compiler code optimization were (in their beginnings) considered classic examples of black art; as theory developed they became , and once standard textbooks had been written became merely . The huge proliferation of formal and informal channels for spreading around new computer-related technologies during the last twenty years has made both the term `black art' and what it describes less common than formerly. See also . n. Something which is opaque so that you cannot see how it works inside, typically said of very complex algorithms. "That image restoration technique is a black box." The application to is general technical English, of course. n. When a piece of email or netnews disappears mysteriously between its origin and destination sites (that is, without returning a ) it is commonly said to have "fallen into a black hole". Similarly, one might say "I think there's a black hole at foovax!" to convey suspicion that site foovax has been dropping a lot of stuff on the floor lately (see ). The implied metaphor of email as interstellar travel is interesting in itself. vt.,n. Synonym for , used esp. for large data sends over a network or comm line. Opposite of . Usage: uncommon. The variant "blat" has been reported. 2. vt. [HP/Apollo] Synonymous with (sense #3). Sometimes the message "Unable to kill all processes. Blast them (y/n)?" would appear in the command window upon logout. n. (also <'blazer>) Nickname for the Telebit Trailblazer, an expensive but extremely reliable and effective high-speed modem, popular at UNIX sites that pass large volumes of and news. /blech/ [from Yiddish/German "brechen", to vomit] 1. interj. Term of disgust. Often in "Ugh, bletch". /blech'@-rus/ adj. Disgusting in design or function; esthetically unappealing. This word is seldom used of people. "This keyboard is bletcherous!" (Perhaps the keys don't work very well, or are misplaced). See , , , , and . applies to the esthetics of the thing so described; similarly for . By contrast, something that is or may be failing to meet objective criteria. See and , which have richer and wider shades of meaning than any of the above. /blink'@n-lietz/ n. Front-panel diagnostic lights on a computer, esp. a . 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 sign in its entirety ran: ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS 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 watchen das blinkenlichten. This silliness dates back at least as far as 1959 at Stanford University and had already gone international by the early '60s, when it was reported at London University's ATLAS computing site. There are several variants of it in circulation, some of which actually do end with the word `blinkenlights'. It is reported, by the way, that an analogous travesty in mangled English is posted in German computer laboratories. /blit/ vt. 1. To copy a large array of bits from one part of a computer's memory to another part, particularly when the memory is being used to determine what is shown on a display screen. "The storage allocator picks through the table and copies the good parts up into high memory, and at the end s it all back down again." See , ,
, , , . More generally, to perform some operation (such as toggling) on a large array of bits while moving them. 2. All-capsed as "BLIT": An early experimental bit-mapped terminal designed by Rob Pike at Bell Labs, later commercialized as the AT&T 5620. The folk etymology from `Bell Labs Intelligent Terminal' is incorrect. [From computer science usage] 1. vi. To delay while waiting for something. "We're blocking until everyone gets here." 2. in vt. To block, waiting for (something). "Lunch is blocked on Phil's arrival." 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. vt. To remove files and directories from permanent storage with extreme prejudice, generally by accident. Oppose . vi. Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as . See . vt. To despite a safeguard. "The server blew past the 5K reserve buffer." vi. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon either overflow or at least go . /bee ell tee/, /bl@t/ or (rarely) /belt/ n.,vt. 1. Synonym for . This is the original form of and the ancestor of . In these versions the usage has outlasted the BLock Transfer instruction for which derives; nowadays, the assembler mnemonic almost always means `Branch if Less Than Zero'. n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard references on the page-layout and graphics-control language PostScript (`PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook', Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley 1985, QA76.73.P67P68, ISBN 0-201-10179-3); the other two official guides are known as the and . 2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on Smalltalk: `Smalltalk-80: The Language and its Implementation'. David Robson, Addison-Wesley 1983, QA76.8.S635G64, ISBN 0-201-11371-63 (this is also associated with green and red books). 3. Any of the 1988 standards issues by the CCITT 9th plenary assembly. Until now, they have changed color each review cycle (1984 was , 1992 would be ); however, it is rumored that this convention is going to be dropped before 1992. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also , , , , , , , , . [IBM] n. IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture) an incredibly and protocol suite widely favored at commercial shops that don't know any better. See . It may not be irrelevant that is the trade name of a 3M product that is commonly used to hold down the carpet squares to the removable panel floors so common in computer installations. A correspondent at U.Minn. reports that the CS dept there has about 80 bottles of Blue Glue hanging about, so they often refer to any messy work to be done `using the blue glue". n. Term for "police" s intended to prevent , 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 . /bee-en-ef/ n. 1. 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. See also . A major reason BNF is listed here is that the term is also used loosely for any similar notation, possibly containing some or all of the wildcards. 2. In BNF expands to "Big Name Fan" (someone famous or notorious). Years ago a fan started handing out black-on-green BNF buttons at SF conventions. This confused the hacker contingent terribly. [IBM] n. Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a . It is rumored within IBM that 370 channel cables are limited to 200 feet because beyond that length the boas get dangerous... n. 1. Like but more severe, implies that the offending hardware is irreversibly dead or useless. 2. Also used of people who just take up space. n. The generic bad algorithm. The origin is a fictitious contest at CMU to design the worst running time sort algorithm (Apparently after a student found an n^3 algorithm to do sorting while trying to design a good one). Bogo-sort is equivalent to throwing a deck of cards in the air, picking them up, then testing whether they are in order. If not, repeat. Usage: when one is looking at a program and sees a dumb algorithm, one might say "Oh, I see, this program uses bogo-sort." Compare , . n. See . /boh'gon/ [by analogy with proton/electron/neutron, but doubtless reinforced after 1980 by the similarity to Douglas Adams's `Vogons', see Appendix C] n. 1. The elementary particle of bogosity (see ). 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, as in "I'd like to go to lunch with you but I've got to go to the weekly staff bogon." 5. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things. This was historically the original usage, but has been overtaken by its derivatives in 1-4. /boh'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." /boh-go's@-tee/ n. 1. The degree to which something is . At CMU, bogosity is measured with a ; 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). The consensus is that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use. 2. The potential field generated by a bogon flux; see . [Historical note: microLenat was invented as a attack against noted computer scientist Doug Lenat by a . Doug had failed him on the AI Qual after the student gave "AI is bogus" as his answer to the questions. The slur is generally considered unmerited, but it has become a running gag nevertheless. Some of Doug's friends argue that "of course" a microLenat is bogus, since it's only one millionth of a Lenat. Others have suggested that the unit should be re-designated after the grad student, as the microReid.] /boh-go't@-fie/ vt. To make or become bogus. A program that has been changed so many times as to become completely disorganized has become bogotified. If you tighten a nut too hard and strip the threads on the bolt, the bolt has become bogotified and you'd better not use it any more. This coinage led to the notional (aw'to-boh-got'@-foh`bee-uh) n., defined as the fear of becoming bogotified; but is not clear that the latter has ever been `live' slang rather than a self-conscious joke in jargon about jargon. /bohg owt/ vi. to becomes bogus, suddenly and unexpectedly. "His talk was relatively sane until somebody asked him a trick question, then he bogued out and did nothing but afterwards." [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. Unbelievable. "You claim to have solved the halting problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus." 6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas." Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of .) [Etymological note: `Bogus' was originally used in the hackish 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. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized (see under ). By the mid-1980s it was also current in something like the hackish sense in West Coast teen slang.] Further note: A correspondent at Cambridge claims these uses of bogus grate on British nerves; in Britain the word means rather specifically `counterfeit' as in "a bogus pound note". /bohr buhg/ [from quantum physics] n. A repeatable ; one which manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of . /boynk/ [USENET, perh. fr the TV series "Moonlighting"] 1. To have sex with; compare , sense #3. In Commonwealth hackish the variant "bonk" is more common. 2. After the original Peter Korn `Boinkon' parties, used for almost any net social gathering, e.g. Miniboink, a small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compare <@-party>. v. 1. General synonym for , esp. used of software or OS failures. "Don't run Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll bomb out." 2. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of or (sense 2), where icons of little black-powder bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed indicating the system has died. On the Mac this may be accompanied by a hexadecimal number indicating what went wrong, similar to the Amiga GURU MEDITATION number. machines tend to get in this situation. 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. Often abbreviated `B&D'; thus, one may speak of things "having the B&D nature" etc. See . interj. In the community, it has become trdaitional to express pique or censure by `bonking' the offending person. There is a convention that one should acknowledge a bonk by saying `oif!' and a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some early MUDs which did not support implemented special commands for bonking and oifing See also . [from `by one's bootstraps'] vi.,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 it is sometimes used of human thought processes, as in the following exchange: "You've lost me." "O.K., reboot. Here's the theory...". Also found in the variants "cold boot" (from power-off condition) and "warm boot" (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash). Another variant: "soft boot", re-initialization of only part of a system, under control of other software that's still running: "If you're running the emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running." Opposed to this there is "hard boot", which connotes frustration at or malice towards the thing being booted. "I'll have to hard boot theis losing Sun" or "I recommend booting it hard." adj. A slow code section, algorithm, or hardware subsystem through which computation must pass (see also ); anything with lower than is available for the rest of the computation. A system is said to be "bottlenecked" when performance is usually limited by contention for one particular resource (such as disk, memory or processor ); the opposite condition is called "balanced", which is more jargon in the strict sense and may be found in technical dictionaries. vi. 1. [UNIX, perhaps from the image of a thrown ball bouncing off a wall] An electronic mail message which is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to `bounce'. See also . 2. [Stanford] To play volleyball. At one time there was a volleyball court next to the computer laboratory. From 5:00 PM to 7:00 PM was the scheduled maintenance time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5:00 the computer would become unavailable, and over the intercom a voice would cry , "Bounce, bounce!" 3. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob. fr. the expression `bouncing the mattress', but influenced by Piglet's psychosexually-loaded "Bounce on me too, Tigger!" from the Winnie the Pooh books. 4. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily among users. [UNIX] n. Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay to the intended recipient or the next link in a (see ). Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a down relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see . [within IBM] n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction "foo box" where foo is some functional qualifier, like `graphics', or the name of an OS (thus, "UNIX box", "MS-DOS box", etc. 2. Without qualification but within an -using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor or FEP. An FEP is a small computer necessary to enable an IBM mainframe to communicate beyond the limits of the . Typically used in expressions like the cry that goes up when an SNA network goes down, "Looks like the has ." See also , , . /bok'sn/ pl n. [by analogy with ] Fanciful plural of often encountered in the phrase "UNIX boxen", used to describe commodity hardware. The implication is that any two UNIX boxen are interchangeable. [generalization of `Honeywell Brain Damage' (HBD), a theoretical disease invented to explain certain utter cretinisms in Honeywell ] adj. Obviously wrong; ; . There is an implication that the person responsible must have suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling something brain-damaged is really bad; it also implies it is unusable, and that its failure to work is due to poor design rather than some accident. adj. Brain-damaged in the extreme. Not quite like mainstream use, as it tends to imply terminal design failure rather than malfunction or simple stupidity. n. The act of telling someone everything one knows about a particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to let a new party maintain a piece of code. Analogous to an operating system in the sense that the state of the person's important "registers" are saved before exiting. Example: "You'll have to give me a brain dump on FOOBAR, before you start your new job at hackercorp." See (sense #4). At Sun, this is also known as "TOI" (transfer of information). /bray'no/ n. Syn. for . [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 . n. Humorous catch-phrase from , in which player were described carrying a list of objects, the most common of which would usually be a brand. Often used as a joke in as in "Fred the wizard is here, carrying brand ruby brand brand brand kettle broadsword flamethrower". Prob. influenced by the infamous Monty Python `Spam' skit. vt. 1. To cause to be broken (in any sense). "Your latest patch to the editor broke the paragraph commands." 2. (of a program) To stop temporarily, so that it may be examined for debugging purposes. The place where it stops is a "breakpoint". 3. To send an RS-232 break (125 msec. of line high) over a serial comm line. 4. [UNIX] To strike whatever key currently causes the tty driver to send SIGINT to the current process. Normally break (sense 3) or delete does this. [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. [Xerox PARC] An Ethernet packet that contained bootstrap code, periodically sent out from a working computer to infuse the `breath of life' into any computer on the network that had happened to crash. The crashed machines had hardware or firmware that would wait for such a packet after a catastrophic error. adj. Said of software that's functional but easily broken by changes in operating environment or configuration. Often describes the results of a research effort that were never intended to be robust, but can be applied to commercially developed software. Oppose . 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 . See also . adj. 1. Not working properly (of programs). 2. Behaving strangely; especially (of people), exhibiting extreme depression. /broh'k@t/ or /broh'ket/ [by analogy with `bracket': a `broken bracket'] n. Either of the characters `<' and `>'. This word originated as a contraction of the phrase `broken bracket', that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle. (At MIT, and apparently in as well, these are usually called .) adj. Describes a certain kind of primitive programming style; broadly speaking, one where the programmer relies on the computer's processing power instead of using his/her own intelligence to simplify the problem, often ignoring problems of scale and applying naive methods suited to small problems directly to large ones. The example of a brute force algorithm is associated with the `Travelling salesman problem' (TSP), a classical NP-hard problem: suppose a person is in Boston and wishes to drive to N other cities. In what order should he/she visit them in order to minimize the distance travelled? The brute force method is to simply generate all possible routes and compare the distances; while guaranteed to work and simple to implement, this algorithm is clearly very `stupid' in that it considers even obviously absurd routes (like going from Boston to Houston via San Francisco and New York, in that order). For small N it works well, but it rapidly becomes absurdly inefficient when N increases (for N=15, there are already 1,307,674,368,000 possible routes to consider). See also . A more simple-minded example of brute-force programming is finding the smallest number in a large list by first using an existing program to sort the list in ascending order, and then picking the first number off the front. Note that whether brute-force programming should be considered stupid or not depends on the context; if the problem isn't too big, the extra CPU time spent on a brute-force solution may cost less than the programmer time it would take to develop a more `intelligent' algorithm. Alternatively, a more intelligent algorithm may imply more long-term complexity cost and bug-chasing than are justified by the speed improvement. Ken Thompson, co-inventor of UNIX, is reported to have uttered the epigram "When in doubt, use brute force". He probably intended this as a , but the original UNIX kernel's preference for simple, robust and portable algorithms over fragile `smart' ones does seem to have been a significant factor in the success of that OS. Like so many other tradeoffs in software design, the choice between brute force and complex, finely-tuned cleverness is often a difficult one that requires both engineering savvy and the most delicate esthetic judgement. n. A popular design technique at many software houses --- coding unrelieved by any knowledge of how problems have been previously solved in elegant ways. Dogmatic adherence to design methodologies tends to encourage it. Characteristic of early programming; unfortunately, many never outgrow it. Often abbreviated BFI, as in: "Gak, they used a bubble sort! That's strictly from BFI." Compare . /bee-ess-dee/ n. [acronym for Berkeley System Distribution] a family of versions for the DEC developed by Bill Joy and others at University of California at 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, ULTRIX and Mt. Xinu) held the technical lead in the UNIX world until AT&T's successful standardization efforts after about 1986, and are still widely popular. See , . /buh'kee bits/ [primarily Stanford] n. The bits produced by the CTRL and META shift keys, esp. on a Stanford (or Knight) keyboard (see ). 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. See , . n. What typically happens when an or application is fed data faster than it can handle. Used metaphorically of human mental processes. "Sorry, I got four phone calls in three minutes last night and lost your message to a buffer overflow." n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or hardware, esp. one which causes it to malfunction. Antonym of . Examples: "There's a bug in the editor: it writes things out backwards." "The system crashed because of a hardware bug." "Fred is a winner, but he has a few bugs." (e.g. Fred is a good guy, but he has a few personality problems.) Some have said this term came from telephone company usage: "bugs in a telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines, but this appears to be an incorrect folk etymology. Admiral Grace Hopper (an early computing pioneer better known for inventing COBOL) liked to tell a story in which a technician solved a persistent in the Harvard Mark II machine by pulling an actual physical bug out from between the contacts of one of its relays, and she subsequently promulgated in its hackish sense as a joke about the incident (though, as she was careful to admit, she was not there when it happened). For many years the logbook associated with the incident and the actual bug in question (a moth) sat in a display case at the Naval Surface Warfare Center, and now resides in the Smithsonian. The entire story, with a picture of the logbook and the moth taped into it, is recorded in the Annals of the History of Computing (Volume 3, Number 3 (July 1981) on pages 285 and 286. Interestingly, the text of the log entry, which is said to read "First example of an actual computer `bug'." establishes that the term was already in use at the time; and a similar incident is alleged to have occurred on the original ENIAC machine. Indeed, the use of `bug' to mean an industrial defect was already established in Thomas Edison's time, and `bug' in the sense of an disruptive event goes back to Shakespeare! In the First Edition of Johnson's Dictionary a `bug' is a `frightful object'; this is traced to `bugbear', a Welsh term for a variety of mythological monster which (to complete the circle) has recently been reintroduced into the popular lexicon through fantasy role-playing games. In any case, in hacker's slang the word almost never refers to insects. Here is a plausible conversation that never actually happened: "This ant-farm has a bug." "What do you mean? There aren't even any ants in it." "That's the bug." n. Said of a design or revision the design of which has been badly compromised by a requirement to be compatible with s or s in other programs or (esp.) previous releases of itself. adj. Used of an algorithm or implementation considered extremely ; lossage-resistant; capable of correctly recovering from any imaginable exception condition. This is a rare and valued quality. Syn. . 1. vt. To make highly efficient, either in time or space, often at the expense of clarity. "I managed to bum three more instructions out of that code." 2. n. A small change to an algorithm, program, or hardware device to make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump instruction faster." Usage: now uncommon, largely superseded by . Note that both these uses are rare in Commonwealth hackish, because in the parent dialects of English `bum' is interpreted as a rude synonym for `buttocks'. vt. Synonym for increment. Has the same meaning as C's ++ operator. Used esp. of counter variables, pointers and index dummies in for, while, and do-until loops. vi. Like , but connotes that the source is truly clueless and ineffectual (mere flamers can be competent). A term of deep contempt. vi. To wait on an event by ning through a tight or timed-delay loop that polls for the event on each pass, as opposed to setting up an interrupt handler and continuing execution on another part of the task. A wasteful technique, best avoided on time-sharing systems where a busy-waiting program may hog the processor. Syn. vi. 1. Of a program, to run with no indication of progress and perhaps without guarantee of ever finishing; esp. said of programs thought to be executing tight loops of code. The state of a buzzing program resembles , but you never get out of catatonia, while a buzzing loop may eventually end of its own accord. Example: "The program buzzes for about ten seconds trying to sort all the names into order." See . 2. [ETA Systems] To test a wire or PCB trace for continuity by applying an AC signal as opposed to applying a DC signal. Some wire faults will pass DC tests but fail a buzz test. /bee duhb'l-yoo kyoo/ [IBM] n. Buzz Word Quotient. Usually roughly proportional to . See . /biet-seks'u-@l/ adj. Said of hardware, denotes willingness to compute or pass data in either or format (depending, presumably, on a mode bit somewhere). See also . {= C =} 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 . 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 . [Cambridge] n. Syn. for . vt. To abort a job on a time-sharing system. Used esp. when the person doing the deed is an operator, as in `canned from the console'. Frequently used in an imperative sense, as in "Can that print job, the LPT just popped a sprocket!". Synonymous with . It is said that the ASCII character with mnemonic CAN (0011000) was used as a kill-job character on some early OSs. adj. The usual or standard state or manner of something. This word has a somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics. For example, one sometimes speaks of a formula as being in canonical form. Two formulas such as `9 + x' and `x + 9' are said to be equivalent because they mean the same thing, but the second one is in canonical form because it is written in the usual way, with the highest power of `x' first. Usually there are fixed rules you can use to decide whether something is in canonical form. The slang meaning is a relaxation of the technical meaning (this generalization is actually not confined to hackers, and may be found throughout academia). 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: "Bob just used `canonical' in the canonical way." Of course, canonicality depends on context, but is implicitly defined as the way *hackers* normally do things. Thus, a hacker may claim with a straight face that "according to religious law" is *not* the canonical meaning of the word canonical. n. An EDP programmer who grinds out batch programs that do stupid things like print people's paychecks. Compare . See also . /cas'trz uhp mohd/ [IBM] n. Yet another synonym for `broken' or `down'. n. The act of getting a to run a particular program and type at it because it never works for anyone else; esp. used when nobody can ever see what the guru is doing different from what J. Random Luser does. Compare , , . [from "cut and paste"] n. 1. The addition of a new to an existing system by selecting the code from an existing feature and pasting it in with minor changes. Common in telephony circles because most operations in a telephone switch are selected using case statements. Leads to . [from "concatenate" via `cat(1)'] vt. 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
, . n. A condition of suspended animation in which something is so that it makes no response. For example, if you are typing on a terminal and suddenly the computer doesn't even echo the letters back to the screen as you type, let alone do what you're asking it to do, then the computer is suffering from catatonia (possibly because it has crashed). /ku'dr/ [from LISP] vt. To remove the first item from a list of things. In the form "cdr down", to trace down a list of elements. "Shall we cdr down the agenda?" Usage: silly. See also . /chad/ n. 1. The perforated edge strips on printer paper, after they have been separated from the printed portion. Also called and . 2. obs. the confetti-like paper bits punched out of cards or paper tape; this was also called "chaff", "computer confetti", and "keypunch droppings". Historical note: one correspondent believes `chad' (sense #2) derives from the Chadless keypunch (named for its inventor), which cut little u-shaped tabs in the card to make a hole when the tab folded back, rather than punching out a circle/rectangle; it was clear that if the `Chadless' keypunch didn't make them, then the stuff that other keypunches made had to be `chad'. n. computers contained boxes inside them, about the size of a lunchbox, that held the , squares of paper punched out of punch cards. You had to open the covers of the card punch periodically and empty the chad box. The is the equivalent device in the CPU enclosure, which was typically across the room in another great grey-and-blue box. [orig. from BASIC's CHAIN statement] vi. 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 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 . Oppose the more modern . /keir/ or /char/; rarely, /kar/ n. Shorthand for `character'. Esp. used by C programmers, as `char' is C's typename for character data. 1. vi. To go through multiple levels of indirection, as in traversing a linked list or graph structure. Used esp. by programmers in C, where explicit pointers are a very common data type. This is almost jargon in the strict sense, but remains slang when used of human networks. "I'm chasing pointers. Bob said you could tell me who to talk to about..." 2. [Cambridge] or : the process of going through a dump (interactively or on a large piece of paper printed with hex ) following dynamic data-structures. Only used in a debugging context. [Cambridge University] n. Someone who wastes CPU time on number-crunching when you'd far rather the CPU was doing something more productive, such as working out anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running patterns. May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry. /cher-noh'b@l pak'@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 . vt. To reject input, often ungracefully. "I tried building , but `cpp' choked on all those #defines." See , , . vt. To lose; to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth. See . 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 (much like what the PacMan does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means "chomp chomp" (see Verb Doubling). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. For example, to do this to a person is equivalent to saying "You chomper!" If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it. n. Someone or something that is chomping; a loser. See , , . n. A kind of RS-232 line tester or breakout box featuring rows of blinking red and green LEDs like Christmas lights. n. A packet with every single option set for whatever protocol is in use. [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 by the fact that the latter are usually added to gratify developers' own desires for featurefulness. n. A mutant offshoot of 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'. See also . [CMU] n. `Introduction to Automata Theory, Languages', and Computation', by John Hopcroft and Jeffrey Ullman, Addison-Wesley, 1979. So-called because the cover depicts a girl (notionally Cinderella) sitting in front of a Rube Goldberg device and holding a rope from that device. The back cover depicts the girl with the Rube Goldberg in shambles after pulling on the rope. /klas'ik see/ [a play on "Coke Classic"] n. The C programming language as defined in the first edition of , with some small additions. It is also known as `K&R C.' The name came into use during the standardization process for C by the ANSI X3J11 committee. Also . This is sometimes applied elsewhere: thus, `X Classic' where X = Star Trek (referring to the original TV series), or X = PC (referring to IBM's ISA-bus machines as opposed to the PS/2 series). This construction is especially used of product series in which the newer versions are considered serious losers relative to the older ones. In one particularly strong parallel to the Coke fiasco, Apple Computer released a new computer called the Mac Classic. Unfortunately, just as the Coca Cola company had `restored' Coke Classic made with nasty-tasting corn syrup rather than real sugar, the new Mac Classic was inferior to the machine Mac hackers had always called the Mac Classic (the original 128K Macintosh) causing much confusion and upset. adj. Used of hardware or software designs, implies `elegance in the small', that is, a design or implementation which may not hold any surprises but does things in a way that is reasonably intuitive and relatively easy to comprehend from the outside. The antonym is or . [Sun, `Career Limiting Move'] 1. n. Endangering one's future prospects of getting plum projects and raises, also possibly one's job. "He used a bubblesort! What a CLM!" 2. adj. denoting extreme severity of a bug, discovered by a customer and obviously due to poor testing: "That's a CLM bug!" vt. Mistakenly overwrite. As in "I walked off the end of the array and clobbered the stack." Compare , , , and . 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. Compare . n. 1. An exact duplicate, as in "Our product is a clone of their product." Implies a legal re-implementation from documentation or by reverse-engineering, as opposed to the illegalities under sense #3. Also connotes lower price. 2. A shoddy, spurious copy, as in "Their product is a clone of our product." 3. A blatant ripoff, most likely violating copyright, patent, or trade secret protections, as in "Your product is a clone of my product." This usage implies legal action is pending. 4. A "PC clone"; a PC-BUS/ISA or EISA-compatible 80x86 based microcomputer (this use is sometimes spelled "klone"). 5. 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. /klohz/ [from the verb `to close', thus the `z' sound] 1. n. Abbreviation for `close (or right) parenthesis', used when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. See . 2. adj. Of a delimiting character, used at the right-hand end of a grouping. Used in such terms as "close parenthesis", "close bracket", etc. 3. vt. To release a file or communication channel after access. /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. n. Synonymous with . Hackers believe all COBOL programmers are s or s, and no self-respecting hacker will ever admit to having learned the language. Its very name is seldom uttered without ritual expressions of disgust or horror. /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!" n. 1. A -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 . 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. Compare . [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 ironically, to suggest that the practice under discussion is condemned mainly by anal-retentive weenies. The ironic usage is perhaps more common. n. A program component that traverses other programs for a living. Compilers have codewalkers in their front ends; so do cross-reference generators and some database front-ends. Other utility programs which try to do too much with source code may turn into codewalkers. As in "This new vgrind feature would require a codewalker to implement." n. Hackish speech makes heavy use of pseudo-mathematical metaphors. Four particularly important ones involve the terms "coefficient", "factor", "index" and "quotient". They are often loosely applied to things you cannot really be quantitative about, but there are subtle distinctions between them that convey information about the way the speaker mentally models whatever he or she is describing. "Foo factor" and "foo quotient" tend to describe something for which the issue is one of presence or absence. The canonical example is . It's not important how much you're fudging; the term simply acknowledges that some fudging is needed. You might talk of liking a movie for its silliness factor. Quotient tends to imply that the property is a ratio of two opposing factors: "I would have won except for my luck quotient.' This could also be, "I would have won except for the luck factor", but using *quotient* emphasises that it was bad luck overpowering good luck. "Foo index" and "coefficient of foo" both tend to imply that foo is, if not strictly measurable, at least something that can be larger or smaller. Thus, you might refer to a paper or person as having a "high bogosity index", whereas you would be less likely to speak of a "high bogosity factor". "Foo index" suggests that foo is a condensation of many quantities, as in the mundane cost of living index; "coefficient of foo" suggests that foo is a fundamental quantity, as in a coefficient of friction. The choice between these terms is often one of personal preference; e.g., some people might feel that bogosity is a fundamental attribute and thus say "coefficient of bogosity", whereas others might feel it is a combination of factors and thus say "bogosity index". /kohk'bot-l/ n. Any very unusual character, particularly one that isn't on your keyboard so you can't type it. MIT people used to complain about the `control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained right back about the `altmode-altmode-cokebottle' commands at MIT. After the demise of the cokebottle faded away as serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an (unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window manager, mwm, has a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of keybindings and behaviour. This keystroke is (believe it or not) `control-shift-meta-exclam'. Since the exclamation point looks a lot like an upside down coke bottle, Motif hackers have begun referring to this keystroke as cokebottle. See also . n. A semi-mythical language construct dual to the `go to'; COME FROM
/dee-dee/ [from IBM ] vt. Equivalent to or . A UNIX copy command with special options suitable for block-oriented devices. Often used in heavy-handed system abuse, as in "Let's dd the root partition onto a tape, then use the boot prom to load it back on to a new disk". The UNIX `dd(1)' was desugned with a weird, distinctly non-UNIXy keyword option syntax reminiscent of IBM System/360 JCL (which had a similar DD command); though the command filled a need, the design choice looks to have been somebody's joke. The slang usage is now very rare outside UNIX sites and now nearly obsolescent even there, as `dd(1)' has been for a long time (though it has no replacement). Replaced by or simple English `copy'. /dee-dee-tee/ n. 1. Generic term for a program that helps you to debug other programs by showing individual machine instructions in a readable symbolic form and letting the user change them. In this sense the term DDT is now slightly archaic, having been widely displaced by `debugger' 2. [ITS] Under MIT's fabled operating system, its DDT was also used as the SHELL or top level command language used to execute other programs. 3. Any one of several specific DDTs (sense 1) supported on early DEC hardware. The DEC PDP-10 Reference Handbook (1969) contained a footnote on the first page of the documentation for DDT which illuminates the origin of the term: Historical footnote: DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1 computer in 1961. At that time DDT stood for "DEC Debugging Tape". Since then, the idea of an on-line debugging program has propagated throughout the computer industry. DDT programs are now available for all DEC computers. Since media other than tape are now frequently used, the more descriptive name "Dynamic Debugging technique" has been adopted, retaining the DDT acronym. Confusion between DDT-10 and another well known pesticide, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane (C14-H9-Cl5) should be minimal since each attacks a different, and apparently mutually exclusive, class of bugs. Sadly, this quotation was removed from later editions of the handbook as the s took over and DEC became much more `businesslike'. n. Routines which can never be accessed because all calls to them have been removed, or code which cannot be reached because it is guarded by a control structure which provably must always transfer control somewhere else. The presence of dead code may reveal either logical errors due to alterations in the program or significant changes in the assumptions and environment of the program (see also ); a good compiler should detect flag dead code so a maintainer can think about what it means. Syn. . n. 1. 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 server, which may find itself waiting for output from the server before sending anything more to it, while the server is similarly waiting for more input from the controlling program before outputting anything. (It is reported that this particular flavor of deadlock is sometimes called a "starvation deadlock", though that term is more properly used for situations where a program can never run simply because it never gets high enough priority. Another common flavor is "constipation", where each process is trying to send stuff to the other, but all buffers are full because nobody is reading anything.) See . 2. Also used of deadlock-like interactions between humans, as when two people meet in a narrow corridor, and each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the other pass, but they end up swaying from side to side without making any progress because they always both move the same way at the same time. n. Same as , though usually used only when exactly two processes are involved. This is the more popular term in Europe; in the United States. Also "deadly embrace" is often restricted to the case where exactly two processes are involved, while can involve any number. [from the movie `Star Wars'] The AT&T corporate logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and bears an uncanny resemblance to the `Death Star' in the movie. This usage is particularly common among partisans of UNIX, who tend to regard the AT&T versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. AT&T's internal magazine, `Focus', uses "death star" for an incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top left is dark instead of light -- a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images. n. A 1983 posting by Alan Hastings and Steve Tarr, spoofing the `Star Wars' movies in hackish terms. Some years later, ESR (disappointed by Hastings/Tarr's failure to exploit a great premise more thoroughly) posted a three-times-longer complete rewrite called `UNIX WARS'; the two are often confused. /dek'l/ n. Two s; 10 bits. Reported among developers for Mattel's GI 1600 (the Intellivision games processor), a chip with 16-bit-wide RAM but 10-bit-wide ROM. [from the traditional Czechoslovak method of assassinating prime ministers, via SF fandom] n. 1. Proper karmic retribution for an incorrigible punster. "Oh, ghod, that was *awful*!" "Quick! Defenestrate him!" See also . 2. [proposed] The requirement to support a command-line interface. As: "It has to run on a VT100." "Curses! I've been defenestrated". adj. Currently in the role of, usually in an off-the-organization-chart sense. "Pete is currently defined as bug prioritizer". vt. To clear a condition. vt. To modify code to remove problems detected when linting. See . [Sun] n. State of being in order to finish code in time for a demo, usually due RSN. [poss. fr. C.S. Lewis's `Narnia' books.] n. An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one not generally published and available to hackers at large (compare ). one which could only have been uttered by a true . Compiler optimization techniques and many aspects of design used to be ; many techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics and AI still are. Compare . Esp. found in comments of the form "Deep magic begins here...". Compare . adj. 1. Describes the notional location of any program which has gone . Esp. used of programs which just sit there silently grinding long after either failure or some output is expected. Compare , , . 2. The metaphorical location of a human so dazed and/or confused or caught up in some esoteric form of that he/she no longer responds coherently to normal communication. Compare . n. 1. A change, especially a small or incremental change. Example: "I just doubled the speed of my program!" "What was the delta on program size?" "About thirty percent." (He doubled the speed of his program, but increased its size by only thirty percent.) 2. [UNIX] A , especially a stored under the set of version-control tools called SCCS (Source Code Control System). 3. n. A small quantity, but not as small as . The slang usage of and stems from the traditional use of these letters in mathematics for very small numerical quantities, particularly in so-called `epsilon-delta' proofs in the differential calculus. is often used once has been mentioned to mean a quantity that is slightly bigger than but still very small. For example, "The cost isn't epsilon, but it's delta" means that the cost isn't totally negligible, but it is nevertheless very small. Compare , : that is, close to and even closer to. 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. 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 and C) and Richard M. Stallman (inventor of ). 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 , . n. 1. [MIT] A portion of a program which is not invoked explicitly, but which lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. See . 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 , especially in the world where the latter spelling and pronunciation is considered mildly archaic. 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. /dee-rez'/ [from the movie `Tron'] 1. vi. To disappear or dissolve; the image that goes with it is of an object breaking up into raster lines and static and then dissolving. Occasionally used of a person who seems to have suddenly "fuzzed out" mentally rather than physically. Usage: extremely silly, also rare. This verb was actually invented as *fictional* hacker slang, and adopted in a spirit of irony by real hackers years after the fact. 2. vt. On a Macintosh, the data is compiled separately from the program, in small segments of the program file known as "resources". The standard resource compiler is Rez. The standard resource decompiler is DeRez. Usage: very common. /dee'voh/ [orig. in-house slang at Symbolics] n. A person in a development group. See also and . 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. 1. vt. To work with in a not particularly serious manner. "I diddled a copy of so it didn't double-space all the time." "Let's diddle this piece of code and see if the problem goes away." See and . 2. n. The action or result of diddling. See also , , . n. 1. Differences, especially difference in source code or documents. Includes additions. "Send me your diffs for the jargon file!" 2. (often in the singular ) the output from the `diff(1)' utility, esp. when used as specification input to the `patch(1)' utility (which can actually perform the modifications). This is a common method of distributing patches and source updates in the UNIX/C world. /dij'it/ n. An employee of Digital Equipment Corporation. See also , , , , . vt. To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a computer or a subroutine from a program. A standard slogan runs: "When in doubt, dike it out." (The implication is that it is usually more effective to attack software problems by reducing complexity rather than increasing it). The word `dikes' is widely used among mechanics and engineers to mean `diagonal cutters', a heavy-duty metal-cutting device; to `dike something out' means to use such cutters to remove something. Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended to non-physical objects such as sections of code. /ding/ n.,vi. 1. Synonym for . Usage: rare among hackers, but commoner in the . 2. : What happens when someone in authority gives you a minor bitching about something, esp. something you consider trivial. "I was dinged for having a messy desk". adj. Said of a machine which has the nature; a machine too small to be worth bothering with, sometimes the current system you're forced to work on. First heard from an MIT hacker (BADOB) working on a CP/M system with 64K in reference to any 6502 system, then from people writing 32 bit software about 16 bit machines. "GNUmacs will never work on that dink machine." Probably derived from mainstream `dinky', which isn't sufficiently perjorative. 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 . 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 . n. Electrical mains voltage which is unfriendly to the delicate innards of computers. , spikes, average voltage significantly higher or lower than nominal or plain noise can all cause problems of varying subtlety and severity. /dis-kor'di-@n-ism/ n. The veneration of , aka Discordia; widely popular among hackers. 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 anarcho-surrealist partisans of Eris and a malevolent, authoritarian secret society called the Illuminati. See Appendix B, , and . n. A program with the same approximate purpose as a kaleidoscope: to make pretty pictures. Famous display hacks include , , the BSD UNIX `rain(6)' program, `worms(6)' on miscellaneous UNIXes, and the kaleid program. Display hacks can also be implemented without programming by creating text files containing numerous escape sequences for interpretation by a video terminal; one notable example displayed, on any VT100, a Christmas tree with twinkling lights and a toy train circling its base. Syn. . /do'koh/ [orig. in-house slang at Symbolics] n. A documentation writer. See also and . [from network protocol programming] vt. To perform an interaction with somebody or something that follows a clearly defined procedure. For example, "Let's do protocol with the check" at a restaurant means to ask for the check, calculate the tip and everybody's share, collect money from everybody, generate change as necessary, and pay the bill. adj. Syn. with . Preferred outside the U.S. [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."] 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 gets written this way. [from an old doctor's office joke about a patient with a trivial complaint] 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 . /dong'gl/ n. 1. A security device for commercial microcomputer programs consisting of a serialized EPROM and some drivers in a D-25 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 initially a failure, as users disliked tying up a serial port this way. Most dongles on the market today (1990) will pass data through the port, and monitor for `magic codes' (and combinations of status lines) with minimal if any interference with devices further down the line (this innovation was necessary to allow daisy-chained dongles for multiple pieces of software). The devices are still not widely used, as the industry has trended away from copy-protection schemes in general. 2. By extension, any physical electronic key or transferrable ID required for a program to function. See . /don'gl disk/ n. See ; 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 . Also called a "key disk". n. Collective noun for any set of memory bits. This is really archaic and may no longer be live slang; it dates from the days of ferrite-core memories in which each bit was represented by a doughnut-shaped magnetic flip-flop. Compare . 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 . [UNIX] n. A file that is not visible to normal directory-browsing tools (on UNIX, files named beginning with a dot are normally invisible to the directory lister). adj. Using both the CTRL and META keys. "The command to burn all LEDs is double bucky F." See also , , , . The following lyrics were written on May 27, 1978, in celebration of the Stanford keyboard. A typical MIT comment was that the Stanford (control and meta shifting keys) were nice, but there weren't enough of them; you could only type 512 different characters on a Stanford keyword. An obvious thing was simply to add more shifting keys, and this was eventually done; one problem, is that a keyboard with that many shifting keys is hard on touch-typists, who don't like to move their hands away from the home position on the keyboard. It was half-seriously suggested that the extra shifting keys be pedals; typing on such a keyboard would be very much like playing a full pipe organ. This idea is mentioned below, in a parody of a very fine song by Jeffrey Moss called `Rubber Duckie', which was published in `The Sesame Street Songbook'. Double Bucky Double bucky, you're the one! You make my keyboard lots of fun. Double bucky, an additional bit or two: (Vo-vo-de-o!) Control and meta, side by side, Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide! Double bucky! Half a thousand glyphs, plus a few! Oh, I sure wish that I Had a couple of Bits more! Perhaps a Set of pedals to Make the number of Bits four: Double double bucky! Double bucky, left and right OR'd together, outta sight! Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you! --- The Great Quux (with apologies to Jeffrey Moss) [This is, by the way, an excellent example of computer --- ESR] [USENET] n. A that has been included twice in a article or, less frequently, in an electronic mail message. An article or message with a doubled sig can be caused by improperly configured software. More often, however, it reveals the author's lack of experience in electronic communication. See , . 1. adj. Not operating. "The up escalator is down." That is considered a humorous thing to say, but "The elevator is down" always means "The elevator isn't working" and never refers to what floor the elevator is on. With respect to computers, this usage has passed into the mainstream; the extension to other kinds of machine is still hackish. 2. "go down" vi. To stop functioning; usually said of the . The message every hacker hates to hear from the operator is, "The system will go down in five minutes." 3. "take down", "bring down" vt. To deactivate purposely, usually for repair work. "I'm taking the system down to work on that bug in the tape drive." vt. To transfer data or (esp.) code from a larger `host' system (esp. a mainframe) over a digital comm link to a smaller `client' system, esp. a microcomputer or specialized peripheral device. Oppose . n. Data Processing. Listed here because according to hackers, use of it marks one immediately as a . See . /d@-pib'/ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] vt., obs. To plop something down in the middle. Usage: silly. Example: "Dpb yourself into that couch, there." The connotation would be that the couch is full except for one slot just big enough for you to sit in. DPB means `DePosit Byte', and was the name of a PDP-10 instruction that inserts some bits into the middle of some other bits. This usage has been kept alive by the Common Lisp function of the same name. n. Data Processor. Hackers are absolutely amazed that use this term self-referentially. "*Computers* process data, not people!" See . n. [MIT] A program similar to a , 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 was generated by the `name dragon'. Usage: rare outside MIT --- under UNIX and most other OSs this would be called a "background demon" or . The best-known UNIX example of a dragon is `cron(1)'. At SAIL they called this sort of thing a "phantom". 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'. This actually describes the `Red Dragon Book'; an earlier edition (sans Sethi and titled `Principles Of Compiler Design') was the `Green Dragon Book'. See also , , , , , , , , . [IBM] v. Syn. for (sense 4). n. A condition endemic to PRIME (formerly PR1ME) minicomputers which results in all the characters having their high (0x80) bit ON rather than OFF. This of course makes transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention talking to true eightbit devices. It is reported that PRIME adopted the reversed eight bit convention in order to save 25 cents/serial line/machine. This probably qualifies as one of the most design tradeoffs ever made. See . /drek'net/ [fr. German & Yiddish `dreck'] n. Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking protocol used in the community. So-called because DEC helped write the Ethernet specification, and then (either stupidly or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also . n. Documentation which has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only a could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the `drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been `written on drool-proof paper'. For example, this is an actual quote from Apple's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to open fire or flame." vt. To react to an error condition by silently discarding messages or other valuable data. 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. See also . [prob. by anology with ] n. Spurious characters appearing on a terminal or console due to line noise or a system malfunction of some source. Esp. used when these are interspered with your own typed input. Compare . n. 1. A variety of "power glitch" (see ); momentary zero voltage on the electrical mains. 2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or system saturation (this can happen under UNIX, for example, when a bad connect to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character interrupts). 3. Mental glitches; used as a way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut down for a couple of beats. See , . adj., also "on drugs". 1. Conspicuously stupid, heading towards . Often accompanied by a pantomime of toking a joint. 2. Of hardware, very slow relative to normal performance. 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. Another recommended fix is to rotate your optical mouse pad 90 degrees. /duhm'ass @-tak'/ [Purdue] n. A novice's mistake made by the experienced, especially one made by running as root under UNIX, e.g. typing `rm -r *' or `mkfs' on a mounted file system. Compare . /doop loop/ (also ) [Fidonet] n. an incorrectly configured system or network gateway may propagate duplicate messages on one or more s, with different identification information which renders ineffective. If such a duplicate message passes eventually reaches a system which it had already passed through (with the original identification information), all systems passed on the way back to that system are said to be involved in a . /doop killer/ [Fidonet] n. Software which is supposed to detect and delete duplicates of a message which may have reached the Fidonet system via different routes. n. Old software (especially applications) with which one is obliged to remain compatible. The term implies that the software in question is a holdover from card-punch days. Used esp. when referring to old scientific and number-crunching software, much of which was written in FORTRAN and very poorly documented but would be too expensive to replace. See . /dwim/ [Do What I Mean] 1. adj. Able to guess, sometimes even correctly, what result was intended when provided with bogus input. 2. n.,obs. The INTERLISP function that attempted to accomplish this feat by correcting many of the more common errors. See . 3. Occasionally, an interjection hurled at a balky computer, esp. when one senses one might be tripping over legalisms. DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex program; also, occasionally described as the single instruction the ideal computer would have. Back when proof of program correctness were in vogue, there were also jokes about "DWIMC": Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing), see . /din'r/ 32 bits, by analogy with and byte. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See also , , . {= E =} [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 QA at its California plants. n. 1. A message hidden in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by persons disassembling or browsing the code. 2. A message, graphic, or sound-effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes, intended as a joke or to display program credits. One well-known early Easter egg found in a couple of OSs caused them to respond to the command `make love' with `not war?'. Many personal computers (other than the IBM PC) have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM, including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations, snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire development team. [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 techs and do not love them for it. imp. A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous comic; supposed to derive from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic in which X was "non-Aryan mongrels" or something of the sort. Used in humorously overblown expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, users!" n. An alleged character set used on IBM s that exists in six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such delights as non-contiguous letter sequences and the absence of several ASCII punctuation characters fairly important for modern computer languages (exactly which characters are absent vary according to which version of EBCDIC you're looking at). IBM created EBCDIC in the early nineteen-sixties as a customer-control tactic, spurning the already established ASCII standard. Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own description of the EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them is still internally classified top-secret, burn-before reading. Hackers blanch at the very *name* of EBCDIC and consider it a manifestation of purest . See also . [Fidonet] n. A topic group on 's echomail system. Compare . [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, like (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be buried `face down, 9-edge first'. This is inscribed on IBM's 1422 and 1602 card readers, and referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called "The Last Bug": He died at the console Of hunger and thirst. Next day he was buried, Face down, 9-edge first. The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base, and its thinking. See , , . /el' k@-mee'noh big'num/ n. El Camino Real. El Camino Real is the name of a street through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended (and still appears in places) all the way down to Mexico City. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which is assumed to run north and south even though it doesn't really in many places (see ). El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University, and so is familiar to hackers. The Spanish word `real' (which has two syllables (ray-ahl')) means `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'. Now the English word `real' is used in mathematics to describe numbers (and by analogy is misused in computer jargon to mean floating-point numbers). In the FORTRAN language, for example, a `real' quantity is a number typically precise to seven decimal places, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen decimal places. When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976 or so, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on `real', he started calling it `El Camino Double Precision' --- but when the hacker was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it `El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck. (See .) [from mathematical usage] adj. Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than `clever', `winning' or even . adj. Used of programs or systems which are both conspicuous s (due perhaps to poor design founded on ) and exceedingly 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 . See also and . /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 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 inside it. Some versions running under window managers iconify as an overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the editor doesn't include. Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too heavyweight and for their taste, and expand the name as `Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its heavy reliance on complex bucky-bitted keystrokes. Other spoof expansions include Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping, Eventually malloc()s All Computer Storage, and EMACS Makes A Computer Slow (see ). See also . /ee'mayl/ vt.,n. Electronic mail automatically passed through computer networks and/or via modems common-carrier lines. Contrast , , . See . /ee-moh'ti-con/ 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) Also known as "semi-smiley" or "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 . On , "smiley" is often used as a generic (synonym for emoticon) as well as specifically for the happy-face emoticon. Note for the : overuse of the smiley is a mark of loserhood! More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that you've gone over the line. 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. n.,obs. The source code for a program, which may be in any language, as opposed to . The idea behind the term is that to a real hacker, a program written in his favorite programming language is as readable as English. Usage: obsolete, used mostly by old-time hackers, though recognizable in context. /enkw/ [from the ASCII mnemonic for 0000101] 1. An on-line convention for querying someone's availability. After opening a connection to someone apparently in heavy hack mode, one might type "SYN SYN ENQ?" (the SYNs representing notional synchronization bytes) expecting a return of or NAK depending on whether or not the person felt interruptible. See ; compare , , and the usage of "FOO?" listed under . /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 pretty fast, all the library had was a manual." /ee-oh-yoo/ The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control character (End Of User) that could make a Model 33 Teletype explode on receipt. This parodied the numerous obscure record-delimiter control characters left in ASCII from the days when it was more associated with wire-service teletypes than computers (e.g. FS, GS, RS, US, EM, SUB, ETX and esp. EOT). It is worth remembering that ASR-33s were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a lot of clattering parts; the notion that one might explode was nowhere near as ridiculous as it might seem to someone sitting in front of a or flatscreen today. [UNIX] [perhaps from astronomical timekeeping] n. The time and date corresponding to zero in an operating system's clock and timestamp values. Under most UNIX versions, 00:00:00 GMT January 1, 1970. System time is measured in seconds or s past the epoch. See s, . Note that weird problems may ensue when the clock wraps around (see ), and that this is not a necessarily a rare event; on systems counting 10 s per second, a 32 bit count of ticks is only good for 6.8 years. The 1-per-second clock of UNIX is good until January 18, 2038, assuming word lengths don't increase by then. [see for etymology] 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. : close enough to be indistinguishable for all practical purposes. this is even closer than being . Example: "That's not what I asked for, but it's within epsilon of what I wanted." Alternatively, it may mean not close enough, but very little is required to get it there: "My program is within epsilon of working." See . n. A quantity even smaller than , as small in comparison to it as it is to something normal. If you buy a supercomputer for a million dollars, the cost of the thousand-dollar terminal to go with it is , and the cost of the ten-dollar cable to connect the two is . Syn. . The Webster's Unabridged makes these words almost synonymous, but `era' usually connotes a span of time rather than a point in time. The usage is recommended. n. Notional group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting c. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way. Well known examples include Eric Allman of fame, Erik Fair (coauthor of NNTP); your editor has heard from about fourteen others by email, and the organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one site. /e'ris/ 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 and has since been a semi-serious subject of veneration in several `fringe' cultures including hackerdom. See , . /ee-ro'tiks/ n. Reported from Scandinavia as English-language university slang for electronics. Often used by hackers, maybe because of its exciting aspects. 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." adj. As used by hackers, implies that some system, program, person or institution is sufficiently mal-designed as to be not worth the bother of dealing with. Unlike the adjectives in the // series, `evil' does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's. This is more an esthetic and engineering judgement than a moral one in the mainstream sense. "We thought about adding a interface but decided it was too evil to deal with." " is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're prone to typos." Often pronounced with the first syllable lengthened, as /eeeevil/. /ek's@/ pref. Multiplier, 10 ^ 18 or [proposed] 2 ^ 60. See . n. The process of rooting through a core dump or hex image in the attempt to discover the bug that brought your program or system down. Compare , , . /eks'ch@, eksch/ vt. To exchange two things, each for the other; to swap places. If you point to two people sitting down and say "Exch!", you are asking them to trade places. , meaning EXCHange, was originally the name of a PDP-10 instruction that exchanged the contents of a register and a memory location. Many newer hackers tend to be thinking instead of the PostScript exchange operator. /eks'kl/ n. Abbreviation for "exclamation point". See , , . /eks'ee/ An executable binary file. Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS, VMS, and TOPS-20/TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files. This usage is also occasionally found among UNIX programmers even though UNIX executables don't have any required extension (in fact, the term `extension' in this sense is not part of UNIX jargon). /eg-zek'/ [shortened from "executive" or "execute"] vt.,n. 1. [UNIX] Synonym for , derives from the `exec(2)' call. 2. (obs) The command interpreter for an (see ); term esp. used on mainframes, and prob. derived from UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2 and EXEC 8 operating systems. [Technical reference books] Used to complete a proof when one doesn't mind a , or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is: "The proof (or rest) is left as an exercise for the reader." {= F =} /fab/ [from English fabricate] 1. To produce chips from a design that may have been created by someone at another company. chips based on the designs of others is the activity of a . 2. Also "fab line" the production system (lithographry, diffusion, etching, etc.) for chips at a chip manufacturer. Different "fab lines" are run with different process parameters, die sizes, or technologies, or simply to provide more manufacturing volume. [IBM] vi. Yet another synonym for or . `Fall over hard' equates to . vt. 1. To exit a loop by exhaustion, i.e. by having fulfilled its exit condition rather than via a break or exception condition that exits from the middle of it. This usage appears to be *really* old, as in dating from the '40s and '50s. It may no longer be live slang. 2. To fail a test that would have passed control to a subroutine or other distant portion of code. 2. In C, `fall-through' is said to occur when the flow of execution in a switch statement reaches a `case' label other than by jumping there from the switch header, passing a point where one would normally expect to find a `break'. A trivial example: switch (color) { case GREEN: do_green(); break; case PINK: do_pink(); case RED: do_red(); break; default: do_blue(); break; } The effect of this code is to `do_green()' when color is `GREEN', `do_red()' when color is `RED', `do_blue()' on any other color than PINK, and (this is the important part) `do_pink()' and *then* `do_red()' when color is `PINK'. Fall-through is by some; among those who use it, it is considered good practice to include a comment highlighting the fall through, at the point one would normally expect a break. [UNIX/C hackers, from the Mexican dance] n. In C, a wild pointer that runs out of bounds causing a , or corrupts the `malloc(3)' 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 , , , , , . /ef-ay-kyoo list/ [Usenix] n. Compendium of accumulated lore, posted periodically to high-volume newsgroups in an attempt to forestall Frequently Asked Questions. The jargon file itself serves as a good example of a collection of one kind of lore, although it is far too big for a regular posting. Several extant FAQ lists do (or should) make reference to the jargon file. "How do you pronounce `char'?" and "What's that funny name for the `#' character?" are, for example, both Frequently Asked Questions. [Adelaide University, Australia] n. What the heads of a Winchester are said to do when they plow little furrows in the magnetic media. Associated with a . Typically used as follows: "Oh no, the machine has just crashed, I hope the hard drive hasn't gone again." 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. The variant "fascistic" seems to have been preferred at MIT, poss. by analogy with "touristic" (see ). adj. Non-functional; buggy. Same denotation as , , q.v., but the connotation is much milder. /ef dee leek/ n. A kind of programming bug analogous to a , in which a program fails to close file descriptors (`fd's) after file operations are completed, and thus eventually runs out. See . [from Hunter Thompson] n. State inspired by the prospect of dealing with certain real-world systems and standards which are totally but ubiquitous --- Intel 8086s, or COBOL, or , or any IBM machine except the Rios (aka the RS/6000). "Ack. They want PCs to be able to talk to the AI machine. Fear and loathing time!" See also IBM. n. 1. An intended property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it is good or not is immaterial. 2. A good property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it was intended or not is immaterial. 3. A surprising property or behavior; in particular, one that is purposely inconsistent because it works better that way. For example, in some versions of the text editor, the `transpose characters' command exchanges the two characters on either side of the cursor on the screen, *except* when the cursor is at the end of a line, in which case the two characters before the cursor are exchanged. While this behavior is perhaps surprising, and certainly inconsistent, it has been found through extensive experimentation to be what most users want; the inconsistency is therefore a and not a . 4. A property or behavior that is gratuitous or unnecessary, though perhaps also impressive or cute. For example, one feature of the MACLISP language is the ability to print numbers as Roman numerals. See . 5. A property or behavior that was put in to help someone else but that happens to be in your way. 6. A that has been documented. To call something a feature sometimes means the author of the program did not consider the particular case, and the program responded in a way that was unexpected, but not strictly incorrect. A standard joke is that a can be turned into a simply by documenting it (then theoretically no one can complain about it because it's in the manual), or even by simply declaring it to be good. "That's not a bug, that's a feature!" See also . n. One who loves to add features to designs or programs, perhaps at the expense of coherence, concision, or . See also . /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 .) Reluctant featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external constraint such as code size or execution speed. /feep/ 1. n. The soft bell of a display terminal (except for a VT-52!); a beep (in fact, the microcomputer world seems to prefer ). 2. vi. To cause the display to make a feep sound. TTY's do not have feeps; they have mechanical bells that ring. Alternate forms: , , or just about anything suitably onomatopoeic. (Jeff Macnelly, in his comic strip `Shoe', uses the word `eep' for sounds made by computer terminals and video games; this is perhaps the closest written approximation yet.) The term was sometimes heard at SAIL, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly `soft' (they sound more like the musical equivalent of a raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close approximation, imagine the sound of a Star Trek communicator's beep lasting for five seconds.). The `feeper' on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also . /fee'pr/ n. The device in a terminal or workstation (usually a loudspeaker of some kind) that makes the sound. /fee'ping kree`ch@r-ie'tis/ n. Deliberate spoonerization of , meant to imply that the system or program in question has become a misshapen creature of hacks. This term isn't really well-defined, but it sounds so neat that most hackers have said or heard it. It is probably reinforced by an image of terminals prowling about in the dark making their customary noises. interj. If someone tells you about some new improvement to a program, you might respond, "Feetch, feetch!" The meaning of this depends critically on vocal inflection. With enthusiasm, it means something like, "Boy, that's great! What a great hack!" Grudgingly or with obvious doubt, it means "I don't know; it sounds like just one more unnecessary and complicated thing." With a tone of resignation, it means, "Well, I'd rather keep it simple, but I suppose it has to be done." n. 1. 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.) For example, suppose you have a long list or array of items, and want to process items m through n; how many items are there? The obvious answer is `n - m', but that is off by one; the right answer is `n - m + 1'. A program that used the `obvious' formula would have a fencepost error in it. See also , and note that not all off-by-one errors are fencepost errors. The game of Musical Chairs involves an off-by-one problem where N people try to sit in N-1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. Fencepost errors come from counting things rather than the spaces between them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one should count one or both ends of a row. 2. Occasionally, an error induced by unexpectedly regular spacing of inputs, which can (for instance) screw up your hash table. n. A world-wide hobbyist network of personal computers which exchange mail, discussion groups, and files. Originally consisting only of IBM PCs and compatibles, Fidonet now includes such diverse machines as Apple ][s, Ataris, Amigas, and Unix systems. Fidonet is a sizeable fraction of 's size at some 8000 systems (late 1990), although it is much younger than USENET. [a derogatory pun on `field service'] n. The field service organization of any hardware manufacturer, but especially DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about DEC field circus engineers: Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer with a flat tire? A: He's changing each tire to see which one is flat. Q: How can you recognize a DEC field circus engineer who is out of gas? A: He's changing each tire to see which one is flat. [play on "android"] /fee'ld ser'voyd/ n. Representative of a Field Service organization (see ). [Fidonet] n. Deliberate distortion of , often applied after a flurry of in a particular , especially the SYSOP echo or Fidonews (see <'Snooze>). [Fidonet] 1. n. A file sent along with a mail message from one BBS to another. 2. vt. Sending someone a file by using the File Attach option in the BBS mailer. [Fidonet] 1. n. The equivalent of , in which one BBS system automatically dials another and s one or more files. Files are often announced as being "available for " in the same way that files are announced as being "available for/by " on the . 2. vt. The act of getting a copy of a file by using the File Request option of the BBS mailer. /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. See for an example. [MIT, in parody of TV newscasters], interj. Used in conversation to announce ordinary events, with a sarcastic implication that these events are earth-shattering. " crashes; film at 11." "Bug found in scheduler; film at 11." [orig. UNIX, now also in ] 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 . [WPI] adj. Good, but not good enough to be . The word `fine' is used elsewhere, of course, but without the implicit comparison to the higher level implied by . [SAIL's mutant TOPS-10, via 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. vt. To apply finger to a username. 3. vt. By extension, to check a human's current state by any means. "Foodp?" "T!" "OK, finger Lisa and see if she's idle". 4. Any picture (composed of ASCII characters) depicting `the finger'. Originally a humorous component of one's plan file to deter the curious fingerer (sense #2), it has entered the arsenal of some s. n. All-too-frequent result of bugs, esp. in new or experimental configurations. The hardware vendor points a finger at the software. The software vendor points a finger at the hardware. All the poor users get is the finger. 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. n. The act of throwing lots of manpower and late nights at a project to get it out before deadline. See also ; however, connotes that the effort is going into chasing bugs rather than adding features. 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 a cluster of more loosely administered machines `hidden' behind it from crackers. The typical firewall is an inexpensive micro-based UNIX box kept clean of critical data, with a bunch of modems and public network ports on it but just one carefully watched connection back to the rest of the cluster. The special precautions may include threat monitoring, callback, and even a complete keyable to particular incoming IDs or activity patterns. Syn. , . n. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is performing a operation. 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. [Adelaide University, Australia] n. Another metasyntactic variable. See . Derived originally from the Monty Python skit in the middle of `The Meaning of Life', entitled `Find the fish'. n. A variable or quantity that can take on one of two values; a bit, particularly one that is used to indicate one of two outcomes or is used to control which of two things is to be done. Examples: "This flag controls whether to clear the screen before printing the message." "The program status word contains several flag bits." See also , . 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?" This term has nothing to do with the use of the word to mean a variable that has two values. It came into use when a massive change was made to the timesharing system to convert from the old ASCII code to the new one; this was scheduled for Flag Day, June 14, 1966. adj. (var sp. "flakey") Subject to frequent lossages. See . This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word, to describe a person as eccentric or crazy. A system that is flaky is working, sort of, enough that you are tempted to try to use it, but it fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you start are low. Commonwealth hackish prefers . /flay'm@j/ n. High-noise, low-signal postings to or other electronic fora. Often in the phrase "the usual flamage". 1. vi. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude. When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might tell the participants, "Now you're just flaming" or "Stop all that flamage!" to try to get them to cool down (so to speak). 2. To post an email message intended to insult and provoke. : vi. To continue to flame. See , . The punning reference to Marvel comics's Human Torch has been lost as recent usage completes the circle: "Flame on" now usually means "beginning of flame". A USENETter who was at WPI from 1972 to 1976 adds: I am 99% certain that the use of `flame' originated at WPI. Those who made a nuisance of themselves insisting that they needed to use a TTY for `real work' came to be known as `flaming asshole lusers'. Other, particularly annoying people became `flaming asshole ravers', which shortened to `flaming ravers', and ultimately `flamers'. I remember someone picking up on the Human Torch pun, but I don't think `flame on/off' was ever much used at WPI. See also . The term may have been independent invented at several different places; it is also reported that `flaming' was in use to mean something like `interminably drawn-out semi-serious discussions' (late-night bull-sessions) at Carleton College during 1968-1971. n. A posting intended to trigger a , or one which invites flames in reply. n. Acrimonious dispute, especially when conducted on a public electronic forum such as . Often merged to one word, . n. One who habitually flames others. Said esp. of obnoxious personalities. vt. 1. 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! 2. By extension, to unload any magnetic tape. See , . Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained. adj. Said of a text file wich contains only 7-bit ASCII characters and uses only ASCII-standard control characters (that is, has no embedded codes specific to a particular text formatter or markup language, and no -characters). Syn. . The description is roughly synonymous. adj. A ed representation of some database or tree or network structure, as a single file from which the structure could implicitly be rebuilt, esp. one in form. vt. To remove structural information, esp. to filter something with an implicit tree structure into a simple sequence of leaves. "This code flattens an expression with parentheses into an equivalent form." n. 1. Variety, type, kind. "DDT commands come in two flavors." "These lights come in two flavors, big red ones and small green ones." See . 2. The attribute that causes something to be . Usually used in the phrase "yields additional flavor." "This convention yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-side-up or upside-down." See . This usage is almost certainly influenced by accepted terminology in particle physics, in which quarks (the constituents of e.g. protons) come in six flavors (up, down, strange, charm, top, bottom) and three colors (red, blue, green) --- however, its use at MIT almost certainly predated quark theory. adj. Aesthetically pleasing. See and for antonyms. See also the entries for and . /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. v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous. "All that nonsense has been flushed." Standard ITS terminology for aborting an output operation (but note sense 4 below!); one speaks of the text that would have been printed, but was not, as having been flushed. Under ITS, if you asked to have a file printed on your terminal, it was printed a page at a time; at the end of each page, it asked whether you want to see more, and if you said no, it replied "FLUSHED". (It is speculated that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing the characters away before they can be printed.) 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, or to ignore a person. 4. [UNIX/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an `fflush(3)' call. This is *not* an abort as in sense 1 but a demand for early completion! UNIX hackers find the ITS usage confusing and vice versa. n. See . [USENET] n. Written-only acronym for Friend Of A Friend. The source of an unverified, possibly untrue story. This was not originated by hackers (it is used in Jan Brunvand's books on urban folklore) but is much better recognized on USENET and elsewhere than in the mainstream. v. [Abbreviation for `Finger of Death', originally a spell-name from fantasy gaming] To terminate with extreme prejudice and with no regard for other people. From s where the wizards' command `FOD ' results in the immediate and total death of , usually as punishment for obnoxious behaviour. This migrated to other circumstances, such as "I'm going to fod that process which is burning all the CPU". Compare . n. On USENET, a generated in response to another posting (as opposed to a , which goes by email rather than being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the in their headers; smart news-readers can use this information to present USENET news in `conversation' sequence rather than order-of-arrival. See . /foo/ 1. interj. Term of disgust. 2. Name used for temporary programs, or samples of three-letter names. Other similar words are , (Stanford corruption of ), and rarely RAG. 3. Used very generally as a sample name for absolutely anything. 4. First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used in syntax examples. See also: , , , , , , , , , , , . : See . is the example of a `metasyntactic variable'; a name used in examples and understood to stand for whatever thing is under discussion, or any random member of a class of things under discussion. To avoid confusion, hackers never use `foo' or other words like it as permanent names for anything. The etymology of hackish `foo' is obscure. When used in connection with `bar' it is generally traced to the WWII-era army slang acronym FUBAR (Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition), later expurgated to and then truncated. However, the use of the word `foo' itself has more complicated antecedents, including a long history in comic strips and cartoons. The old `Smokey Stover' comic strips by Bill Holman often included the word `FOO', in particular on license plates of cars; allegedly, `FOO' and `BAR' also occurred in Walt Kelly's `Pogo' strips. In a 1938 cartoon Daffy Duck holds up a sign saying "SILENCE IS FOO!". It is even possible that hacker usage actually springs from the title `FOO, Lampoons and Parody' of a comic book first issued 20 years later, in September 1958; the byline read `C. Crumb' but this may well have been a sort-of pseudonym for noted weird-comix artist Robert Crumb. The title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. Very probably hackish `foo' had no single origin and derives through all these channels from Yiddish `feh', or English `fooey!'. n. Another common metasyntactic variable; see . 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 , . 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"). [from the Mac slogan "The computer for the rest of us"] adj. Used to describe a product whose affordability shames other comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe , but very overpriced products. [UNIX] adj.,vt. On a time-sharing system, a task executing in foreground is one able to accept input from and return output to the user; oppose . Normally, there is only one foreground task per terminal (or terminal window); having multiple processes simultaneously reading the keyboard is a good way to . By extension, to "foreground a task" is to bring it to the top of one's for immediate processing, and in this sense hackers often use it for non-computer tasks. [UNIX] adj. Terminally slow, or dead. Originated when the system slowed to incredibly bad speeds due to a process recursively spawning copies of itself (using the Unix system call `fork(2)') and taking up all the process table entries. [UNIX] n. A random quote, item of trivia, joke or maxim printed to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at logout time. Items from this jargon file have often been used as fortune cookies. 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-addressable architectures. See . 2. More restrictively, a feature with past but no present utility. Example: the force-all-caps (LCASE) bits in the V7 and tty driver, designed for use with monocase terminals. In a perversion of the usual backwards compatibility goal, this functionality has actually been expanded and renamed in some later releases as the IUCLC and OLCUC bits. 3. FOSSIL (Fido/Opus/Seadog Standard Interface Level) specification for serial-port access to replace the routines in the IBM PC ROMs. Fossils are used by most MSDOS software in lieu of programming the of the serial ports, as the ROM routines do not support interrupt-driven operation or setting speeds above 9600. Since the FOSSIL specification allows additional functionality to be hooked in, drivers which use the but do not provide serial-port access themselves are named with a modifier, as in `video fossil'. n. The personal name most frequently used as a metasyntactic variable (see ). Allegedly popular because it's easy to type on a standard QWERTY keyboard. It is alternatively alleged to be an acronym for `Flipping Ridiculous Electronic Device' (other f-verbs may be substituted for "flipping") n. Used to refer to some and uncommon protocol encountered on a network. "We're implementing bridging in our router to solve the frednet problem." n. Free software, often written by enthusiasts and usually distributed by electronic mail, local bulletin boards, , or other electronic media. See . [Fidonet] written-only abbreviation for . adj. 1. Non-working due to hardware failure; burnt out. Especially used of hardware brought down by a "power glitch" (see ), , a short, or other electrical event. (Sometimes this literally happens to electronic circuits! In particular, resistors can burn out and transformers can melt down, emitting terribly-smelling smoke. However, this term is also used metaphorically.) 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/ 1. n. [MIT] The official Tech Model Railroad Club definition was `FROB = protruding arm or trunnion', and by metaphoric extension any somewhat small thing; an object that you can comfortably hold in one hand; something you can frob. See . 2. vt. Abbreviated form of . 3. [from the world] To request privileges on the `professional courtesy' grounds that one is a wizard elsewhere. /frob'ni-kayt/ vt. [Poss. derived from , and usually abbreviated to , but is recognized as the official full form.] To manipulate or adjust, to tweak. One frquently frobs bits or other two-state devices. Thus: "Please frob the light switch." (That is, flip it), but also "Stop frobbing that clasp; you'll break it." One also sees the construction `to frob a frob'. See and . Usage: , , and sometimes connote points along a continuum. connotes aimless manipulation; connotes gross manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; connotes fine-tuning. If someone is turning a knob on an oscilloscope, then if he's carefully adjusting it he is probably tweaking it; if he is just turning it but looking at the screen he is probably twiddling it; but if he's just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it. The variant "frobnosticate" has been recently reported. /frob'nits/, pl. (frob'nit-zm) 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 . Also used are "frobnule" and "frobule". Starting perhaps in 1979, "frobozz" /fruh-bahz'/, plural "frobbotzim" /fruh-bot'z@m/ has also become very popular, largely due to its exposure as a name via . These can also be applied to nonphysical objects, such as data structures. alt. "phrog" 1. interj. Term of disgust (we seem to have a lot of them). 2. Used as a name for just about anything. See . 3. n. Of things, a crock. Of people, somewhere inbetween a turkey and a toad. 4. : adj. Similar to , but milder. "This froggy program is taking forever to run!" n. 1. A subsidiary computer that doesn't do much. 2. What you're talking to when you have a conversation with someone who is making replies without paying attention. "Look at the dancing elephants!" "Uh-huh." "Do you know what I just said?" "Sorry, you were talking to the front end". 3. Software which provides an interface to another program `behind' it, which may not be as user-friendly. Probably from analogy with hardware front-ends (see sense #1) which interfaced with mainframes. /frotz/ 1. n. See . 2. : An interjection of very mild disgust. /frotzt/ adj. due to hardware problems. 1. vi. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures. More generally, to become non-working. Usage: never said of software, only of hardware and humans. See , . 2. vt. To cause to fail; to , or a piece of hardware (never used of software or humans). /ef-tee-pee/, *not* /fit'ip/ 1. n. The File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between systems on the Internet. 2. vt. To transfer a file using the File Transfer Protocol. 3. Sometimes used as a generic even for file transfers not using . "Lemme get this copy of Wuthering Heights FTP'd from uunet." excl. Sometimes uttered in response to egregious misbehavior, esp. in software, and esp. of those which seem unfairly persistent (as though designed in by the imp of the perverse). Often theatrically elaborated: "Aiighhh! Fuck me with a piledriver and sixteen feet of curare-tipped wrought-iron fence *and no lubricants!*" The phrase is sometimes heard abbreviated FMH in polite company. /fuhd 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. The FUD acronym comes originally from IBM mainframe land, where it was said that IBM marketing was designed to strike Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt into the minds of the customers, so they would go with safe IBM gear rather than with competitors' equipment. This was traditionally done by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but Dark Shadows loomed over the future of the competitors' equipment or software. See . 1. vt. To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable way, particularly with respect to the writing of a program. "I didn't feel like going through that pain and suffering, so I fudged it." 2. n. The resulting code. 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. A good example is the typically needed in floating-point calculations: two numbers being compared for equality must be allowed to differ by a small amount; if that amount is too small, a computation may never terminate, while if it is too large, results will be needlessly inaccurate. Fudge factors are frequently adjusted incorrectly by programmers who don't fully understand their import. See also . vi. To eat or drink hurriedly in order to get back to hacking. "Food-p?" "Yeah, let's fuel up." "Time for a !". See also . /fuhg'lee/ adj. Emphatic form of ; funky + ugly (or possibly a contraction of "fuckin' 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- code in that printer driver is *fuggly*." See also . 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. 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 . n. 1. Notional `dollar' units of computing time and/or storage handed to students at the beginning of a computer course by professors; also called "play money" or "purple money" (in implicit opposition to real or "green" money). When your funny money ran out, your account froze and you needed to go to a professor to get more. Formerly a common practice, this has now been made sufficiently rare by the plunging cost of timesharing cycles that it has become folklore. The amounts allocated were almost invariably too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by with minimum work. In extreme cases the practice led to small-scale black markets in bootlegged computer accounts. 2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind used as a resource-allocation hack within a system. 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. See . [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. {= G =} /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". vi. Equivalent to , but connotes more disgust. "Hey, this is Fortran code. No wonder the C compiler gagged." See also . n. The use of large numbers of loosely-coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge a great many features into a product in a short time. While there have been memorable gang bangs (e.g. that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in Steven Levy's `Hackers'), most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet deadlines and produce enormous buggy masses of code entirely lacking in orthogonality (see ). When market-driven managers make a list of all the features the competition have and assign one programmer to implement each, they often miss the importance of maintaining strong invariants, like relational integrity. vi., (also "garbage collection", n.) See . /gar'plee/ n. [Stanford] Another meta-syntactic variable (see ) popular among SAIL hackers. [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. vt. . "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. He was eventually found not guilty by reason of insanity. /jee-see/ [from LISP terminology; "Garbage Collect"] 1. vt. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll the top of my desk today." When said of files, this is equivalent to . 2. vt. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use. 3. n. An instantiation of the garbage collector process. "Garbage collection" is computer science jargon for a particular class of strategies for dynamically reallocating computer memory. One such strategy involves periodically scanning all the data in memory and determining what is no longer useful; useless data items are then discarded so that the memory they occupy can be recycled and used for another purpose. Implementations of the LISP language usually use garbage collection. In slang, the full phrase is sometimes heard but the acronym is more frequently used because it's shorter. Note that there is an ambiguity in usage that has to be resolved by context: "I'm going to garbage-collect my desk" usually means to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to throw away or recycle the desk itself. Warning: in X programming, a `GC' may be a graphics context. This technical term has nothing to do with the jargon ! n. A quick and dirty of System/360 DOS that emerged from GE about 1970; originally called GECOS (the General Electric Comprehensive Operating System) and later kluged to support primitive timesharing and transaction processing. After the buyout of GE's computer division by Honeywell the name was changed to General Comprehensive Operating System (GCOS). Other OS groups at Honeywell began referring to it as `God's Chosen Operating System', allegedly in reaction to the GCOS crowd's uninformed and snotty attitude about the superiority of their product. All this might be of zero interest, except for two facts: 1. the GCOS people won the political war, resulting in the orphaning and eventual death of Honeywell , and 2. GECOS/GCOS left one permanent mark on UNIX. Some early UNIX systems at Bell Labs were used as front ends to GCOS machines; the field added to /etc/passwd to carry GCOS ID information was called the "GECOS field" and survives today as the pw_gecos member used for the user's full name and other human-id information. GCOS later played a major role in keeping Honeywell a dismal also-ran in the mainframe market, and was itself ditched for UNIX in the late 1980s when Honeywell retired its aging designs. n. See GCOS /g@-dahn'kn/ adj. Wild-eyed; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested. "Gedanken" is a German word for "thought". A thought experiment is one you carry out in your head. In physics, the term "gedanken experiment" is used to refer to an experiment that is impractical to carry out, but useful to consider because you can reason about it theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity theory involves thinking about a man flying through space in an elevator.) Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but you have to be careful. It was a gedanken experiment that led Aristotle to conclude that heavy things always fall faster than light things (he thought about a rock and a feather); this was accepted until Galileo proved otherwise. Among hackers, however, the word has a pejorative connotation. It is said of a project, especially one in artificial intelligence research, which is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D. thesis) without ever being implemented to any great extent. Such a project is usually perpetrated by people who aren't very good hackers or find programming distasteful or are just in a hurry. A gedanken thesis is usually marked by an obvious lack of intuition about what is programmable and what is not, and about what does and does not constitute a clear specification of an algorithm. vi. To temporarily enter techno-nerd mode while in a non-hackish context, for example at parties held near computer equipment. Especially used when you need to do something highly technical and don't have time to explain: "Pardon me while I geek out for a moment." /jen/ n.,v. Short for , used frequently in both spoken and written contexts. n., also "gender bender", "gender blender", "sex changer" and even "homosexual adaptor"; there appears to be some confusion as to whether a `male homosexual adapter' has pins on both sides (is male) or sockets on both sides (connects two males). A cable connector shell with either two male or two female connectors on it, used to correct the mismatches that result when some didn't understand the RS232C specification and the distinction between DTE and DCE. Used esp. for RS-232C parts in either the original D-25 or the IBM PC's bogus D-9 format. n. Pejorative name for some versions of the project or General Public License (GPL), which requires that any tools or s incorporating copylefted code must be source-distributed on the same counter-commercial terms as GNU stuff. Thus it is alleged that the copyleft `infects' software generated with GNU tools, which may in turn infect other software that reuses any of its code. The Free Software Foundation's official position as of January 1991 is that copyright law limits the scope of the GPL to "programs textually incorporating significant amounts of GNU code", and that the `infection' is not passed on to third parties unless actual GNU source is transmitted (as in, for example, use of the Bison parser skeleton). Nevertheless, widespread suspicion that the language is `boobytrapped' has caused many developers to avoid using GNU tools and the GPL license. vt. To produce something according to an algorithm or program or set of rules, or as a (possibly unintended) side effect of the execution of an algorithm or program. The opposite of . This term retains its mechanistic connotations (though often humorously) when used of human behavior. "The guy is rational most of the time, but mention nuclear energy around him and he'll generate flamage." imp. Hacker-standard way of suggesting that the person to whom you are speaking has succumbed to terminal geekdom (see ). Often heard on . This exhortation was originally uttered by William Shatner on a Saturday Night Live episode in a speech which ended "Get a *life*!". 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 an address space smaller than 4 megabytes. 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 a few years. See and . /jee eff ar/ vt. [acronym, ITS] From "Grim File Reaper", an ITS utility. To remove a file or files according to some program-automated or semi-automatic manual procedure, especially one designed to reclaim mass storage space or reduce namespace clutter. Often generalized to pieces of data below file level. "I used to have his phone number but I guess I ed it." See also , . /jig/ or /gig/ n. Short for "gigabyte" (1024 megabytes); esp. used in describing amounts of or mass storage. "My machine just got upgraded to a quarter-gig". See also . /ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/ pref. Multiplier, 10 ^ 9 or 2 ^ 30. See . /gie'goh/ [acronym] 1. 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. 2. Garbage In, Gospel Out --- this more recent expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in "computerized" data. /jill'y@n/ n. 10 ^ 9. [From , following construction of mega/million and notional tera/trillion] Same as an American billion or a British `milliard'. /glark/ vt. To figure something out from context. "The System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from context". Interestingly, the word was originally `glork'; the context was "This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic] from context." by David Moser, quoted by Douglas Hofstadter in his `Metamagical Themas' column in the January 1981 Scientific American. It is conjectured that hackish usage mutated the verb to `glark' because was already an established jargon term. [IBM] n. Synonym for . /glas tee-tee-wie/ or /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, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early `dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM-3 (without cursor control). See , . See Appendix A for an interesting true story about glass ttys. /glich/ [from German "glitschen" to slip, via Yiddish "glitshen", to slide or skid] 1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in electric service is specifically called a "power glitch". This is of grave concern because it usually crashes all the computers. More common in slang, though, a hacker who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he or she intended to complete it might say, "Sorry, I just glitched". 2. vi. To commit a glitch. See . 3. vt. [Stanford] To scroll a display screen several lines at a time. This derives from some oddities in the terminal behavior under the mutant TOPS-10 formerly used at SAIL. 4. (obs.) Same as , sense #2. /glob/, *not* /glohb/ [UNIX, from `glob', the name of a subprogram that translated wildcards in archaic Bourne Shell versions] vt.,n. To expand special characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called "globbing"). The UNIX conventions for filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers use some of them in written English, especially in email or news on technical topics. Those commonly encountered include: * wildcard for any string (see UN*X). ? wildcard for any character (generally only read this way at the beginning or in the middle of a word). [] wildcard matching one character from a specified set. {} alternation of comma-separated alternatives. Thus, `foo{bar,baz}' would be read as `foobar' or `foobaz'. Some examples: "He said his name was [KC]arl" (expresses ambiguity). "That got posted to talk.politics.*" (all the talk.politics subgroups on ). Other examples are given under the entry for . /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 . 3. vt. Similar to , but usually used reflexively. "My program just glorked itself." n. Generic term for any interface logic or protocol that connects between two monolithic component blocks. For example, the is IBM's SNA protocol, and hardware designers call anything used to connect large VLSI's or circuit blocks "glue logic". adj. Both and 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. /gnoo/, *not* /noo/ 1. [acronym for "GNU's Not UNIX!"] A UNIX-workalike development effort of the Free Software Foundation headed by Richard Stallman (rms@prep.ai.mit.edu). GNU EMACS and the GNU C compiler, two tools designed for this project, have become very popular in hackerdom. The GNU project was designed partly to prosyletize for RMS's position that information is community property and all software source should be shared (one of its slogans is "Help stamp out software hoarding!"). Though this remains controversial (because it implicitly denies any right of designers to own and assign the results of their labors), many hackers who disagree with him have nevertheless cooperated to produce large amounts of high-quality software available for free redistribution under the Free Software Foundation imprimatur. See , , . 2. Noted UNIX hacker John Gilmore (gnu@toad.com), founder of USENET's anarchic alt.* hierarchy. /gnoo'maks/ [contraction of `Gnu Emacs'] Often-heard abbreviated name for the project's flagship tool, . Used esp. in contrast with . [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] vi., also adjectival . 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. vt. To consume or to obtain. The phrase tends to imply `consume', while tends to imply `obtain'. "The output spy gobbles characters out of a output buffer." "I guess I'll gobble down a copy of the documentation tomorrow." See also . /gonk/ vt.,n. 1. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition. It is alleged that in German the term is (fictively) "gonken", in Spanish the verb becomes "gonkar". "You're gonking me. That story you just told me is a bunch of gonk." In German, for example, "Du gonkst mir" (You're pulling my leg). See also . 2. [British] To grab some sleep at an odd time. /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 . /gon'zo/ [from Hunter S. Thompson] adj. Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. used of collections of source code, source files or individual functions. Has some of the connotations of and . adj. Often capitalized; always pronounced as if capitalized. 1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice: "The Trailblazer's 19.2Kbaud PEP mode with on-the-fly Lempel-Ziv compression is a Good Thing for sites relaying netnews." 2. Something 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 . 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 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?" /gorp/ [CMU, perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old Raisins And Peanuts] Another metasyntactic variable, like and . /goz'maks/ [contraction of `Gosling Emacs'] n. The first -in-C implementation, predating but now largely eclipsed by . Originally freeware; a commercial version is now modestly popular as `UniPress Emacs'. The author (James Gosling) went on to invent NeWS. /gos'p@r-iz-m/ A hack, invention, or saying by arch-hacker R. William (Bill) Gosper. This notion merits its own term because there are so many of them. Many of the entries in are Gosperisms; see also . /grawlt/ n. Yet another meta-syntactic variable, invented by Mike Gallaher and propagated by the documentation. See . n. A hypothetical substance composed of 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 the simplest of the disaster scenarios and is easily refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental abundances. n. The on which all of the groups on the had their names changed from the net.* format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. [from SF fandom] vi.,n. A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style and shared. There is a common heuristic about the amount of food to order expressed as "For N people, get N - 1 entrees.". See , , . n. 1. One of the three standard PostScript references (`PostScript Language Program Design', Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley 1988 QA76.73.P67P66 ISBN 0-201-14396-8); see also , ). 2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on PostScript: `Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice', Glenn Krasner, Addison-Wesley 1983, QA76.8.S635S58, ISBN 0-201-11669-3 (this is also associated with blue and red books). 3. The `X/Open Compatibility Guide'. Defines an international standard environment that is a proper superset of POSIX/SVID; also includes descriptions of a standard utility toolkit, systems administrations features, and the like. This grimoire is taken with particular seriousness in Europe. See . 4. The IEEE 1003.1 POSIX Operating Systems Interface standard has been dubbed "The Ugly Green Book". 5. Any of the 1992 standards which will be issued by the CCITT 10th plenary assembly. Until now, these have changed color each review cycle (1984 was , 1988 ); however, it is rumored that this convention is going to be dropped befor 1992. These include, among other things, the X.400 email spec and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See also , , , , , , , , . n. 1. Meta-information imbedded in a file such as the length of the file or its name; as opposed to keeping such information in a separate description file or record. Name comes from an IBM user's group meeting where these two approaches were being debated and the diagram of the file on the blackboard had the `green bytes' drawn in green. 2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing format. "A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes describing the packing method for the image." n. [after the IBM System/360 Reference Data card] This is used for any summary of assembly language, even if the color is not green. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of assembly language. "I'll go get my green card so I can check the addressing mode for that instruction." [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. [proposed] Any bug perverted into an alleged feature by adroit rationalization or marketing. E.g. "Motorola calls the CISC cruft in the 88000 architecture `compatibility logic', but I call it green lightning". /grep/ [from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p , where re stands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it) via `grep(1)'] vt. 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?" vt. 1. [MIT and Berkeley] To format code, especially LISP code, by indenting lines so that it looks pretty. This usage was associated with the MACLISP community and is now rare; was and is the generic term for such operations. 2. [UNIX] To generate the formatted version of a document from the nroff, troff, TeX or Scribe source. The BSD program `vgrind' grinds code for printing on a Versatec bitmapped printer. 3. To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar to or . Grinding has a connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a disk, network, etc. See also . 4. To make the whole system slow, e.g. "Troff really makes things grind to a halt on a PDP-11". 5. excl. Roughly, "Isn't the machine slow today!" 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 , and . Historical note: At least one real machine actually had a grind crank --- the R1, a research machine built towards the the end of the days of the great vacuum tube computers in 1959. R1 (also known as `The Rice Institute Computer' - TRIC, and later as `The Rice University Computer' - TRUC) had a single step/free run switch for use when debugging programs. Since single stepping through a large program was rather tedious, there was also a crank with a cam and gear arrangement that repeatedly pushed the single step button. This allowed one to `crank' through a lot of code, then slow down to single step a bit when you got near the code of interest, poke at some registers using the console typewriter, and then keep on cranking. /grich/ 1. n. A complaint (often caused by a ). 2. vi. To complain. Often verb-doubled: "Gritch gritch". 3. A synonym for (as verb or noun). /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"] vt. 1. To understand, usually in a global sense. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. Contrast , similar supernal understanding as a single brief flash. 2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding, e.g., "Almost all C compilers grok void these days." /gronk/ [popularized by the cartoon strip `B.C.' by Johnny Hart, but the word apparently predates that] vt. 1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More severe than "to ". 2. To break. "The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the system down." 3. : adj. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired or sick. Oppose , which means about the same as used of hardware but connotes depression or mental/emotional problems in people. 4. : vi. To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep. "I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow." vi. 1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used transitively with `over' or `through'. "The file scavenger has been grovelling through the file directories for ten minutes now." Compare and . Emphatic form: . 2. To examine minutely or in complete detail. "The compiler grovels over the entire source program before beginning to translate it." "I grovelled through all the documentation, but I still couldn't find the command I wanted." [Cambridge] n. Code which is `dead' (can never be accessed) due to changes in other parts of the program. The preferred term in North America is , /gruhn'jee/ adj. Incredibly dirty, greasy, 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. /guh'bish/ [a portmanteau of "garbage" and "rubbish"?] n. Garbage; crap; nonsense. "What is all this gubbish?" The opposite portmanteau "rubbage" is also reported. n. decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on this program and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money. /guhm'bee/ [from a class of Monty Python characters, poss. themselves named after a '60s claymation character] n. An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in "gumby maneuver" or "pull a gumby". [from the :GUN command on ITS] vt. To forcibly terminate a program or job (computer, not career). "Some idiot left a background process running soaking up half the cycles, so I gunned it." Compare . /ger'fl/ interj. An expression of shocked disbelief. "He said we have to recode this thing in FORTRAN by next week. Gurfle!" Compare . n. 1. [UNIX] An expert. Implies not only 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'. 2. Amiga equivalent of "panic" in UNIX. When the system crashes a cryptic message "GURU MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY" appears, indicating what the problem was. An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. Generally a event must be followed by a . {= H =} [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 benchmark names, i.e. Whetstone, Dhrystone, Rhealstone, etc; this is prob. patterning on the original Whetstone name but influenced by the fannish/counterculture H infix. [from SF fandom, orig. as mutation of HHOK, "Ha Ha Only Kidding"] A phrase that aptly captures the flavor of much hacker discourse (often 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, a or in . For further enlightenment on this subject, consult any Zen master. See also and . 1. n. Originally a quick job that produces what is needed, but not well. 2. n. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of work that produces exactly what is needed. 4. n. The result of a hack (sense 1 or 2); 3. "neat hack": n., 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 (see Appendix A). 5. : A crock (occasionally affectionate). vt. 6. With `together', to throw something together so it will work. 7. vt. To bear emotionally or physically. "I can't hack this heat!" 8. vt. 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 major interest (or project)". "I hack solid-state physics." 9. vt. To pull a prank on. See definition 3 and (def #6). 10. vi. To waste time (as opposed to ). "Watcha up to?" "Oh, just hacking." 11. "hack up", "hack on": vt., To hack, but generally implies that the result is meanings 1-2. 12. [UNIX] n. A dungeon game similar to but more elaborate, distributed in C source over and very popular at UNIX sites and on PC-class machines. Recent versions are called `nethack'. 13. n. Short for , which see. Constructions on this term abound. They include: "happy hacking": A farewell. : A friendly greeting among hackers. "hack hack": A somewhat pointless but friendly comment, often used as a temporary farewell. For more on the meaning of see Appendix A. [poss by analogy with `Big Mac Attack'] n. Nearly synonymous with though the latter implies an all-nighter more strongly. n. Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, MacLISP has features for reading and printing roman numerals, which was installed purely for hack value. As a musician once said of jazz, if you don't understand hack value there is no way it can be explained. n. 1. To play a or go mudding, especially with the intention of for pleasure. 2. To undertake an all-night programming/hacking session, interspersed with stints of mudding to alleviate boredom. This term arose on the British academic network amongst students who worked nights and logged onto Essex University's MUDs during public-access hours (2am -> 7am). Usually more mudding than work was done in these sessions. [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 (even obsessively), or who enjoys programming rather than just theorizing about programming. 3. A person capable of appreciating . 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. An expert of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for example. 7. (deprecated) A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover information by poking around. Hence "password hacker", "network hacker". See . 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 . Sometimes amplified as "deep hack mode". Being yanked out of hack mode (see ) 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. See also (sense #2). [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 ). /hak'ish/ adj. (also n.) 1. Being or involving a hack. 2. Of or pertaining to hackers or the hacker subculture. See also . It is better to be described as hackish by others than to describe oneself that way. Hackers consider themselves somewhat of an elite, though one to which new members are gladly welcome. It is a meritocracy based on ability. There is a certain self-satisfaction in identifying yourself as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you'll quickly be labelled ). n. The quality of being or involving a hack. (The word is considered silly; the standard term is .) [back-formation from ] n. The complications which make something hairy. "Decoding commands requires a certain amount of hair." Often seen in the phrase , which connotes extreme complexity. Also in (tending to promote hair growth): "GNU elisp encourages lusers to write complex editing modes." "Yeah, it's pretty hairiferous all right." (or just: "Hair squared!") adj. 1. Overly complicated. " is incredibly hairy." 2. Incomprehensible. " 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." /hak'mem/ n. MIT AI Memo 239 (February 1972). A legendary collection of neat mathematical and programming hacks contributed by many people at MIT and elsewhere. (The title of the memo really is "HAKMEM", which is an acronym of sorts for `hacks memo'.) Some of them are very useful techniques or powerful theorems, but most fall into the category of mathematical and computer trivia. A sampling of the entries (with authors), slightly paraphrased: Item 41 (Gene Salamin) There are exactly 23,000 prime numbers less than 2 ^ 18. Item 46 (Rich Schroeppel) The most *probable* suit distribution in bridge hands is 4-4-3-2, as compared to 4-3-3-3, which is the most *evenly* distributed. This is because the world likes to have unequal numbers: a thermodynamic effect saying things will not be in the state of lowest energy, but in the state of lowest disordered energy. Problem 81 (Rich Schroeppel) Count the magic squares of order 5 (that is, all the 5-by-5 arrangements of the numbers from 1 to 25 such that all rows, columns, and diagonals add up to the same number). There are about 320 million, not counting those that differ only by rotation and reflection. Item 174 (Bill Gosper and Stuart Nelson) 21963283741 is the only number such that if you represent it on the as both an integer and a floating-point number, the bit patterns of the two representations are identical. HAKMEM also contains some rather more complicated mathematical and technical items, but these examples show some of its fun flavor. /hak'speek/ n. Generally used term to describe a method of spelling to be found on many British academic bulletin boards and talker systems. Syllables and whole words in a sentence are replaced by single ASCII characters which are phonetically similar or equivalent, whilst multiple letters are usually dropped. Hence `for' becomes `4', `two', `too' and `to' become `2', `ck' becomes `k'. "Before I see you tomorrow" becomes "b4 i c u 2moro". First appeared in London about 1986, and was probably caused by the slow speed of available talker systems, which operated on archaic machines with outdated operating systems, and no standard methods of communication. Has become rarer nowadays. See also . n. A particularly slick little piece of code that does one thing well; a small, self-contained hack. The image is of a hamster happily spinning its exercise wheel. n. 1. The practice of translating s from an 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 , ; syn. with v. . 2. More generally, manual construction or patching of data sets that would normally be ground out by a translation utility and interpreted by another program, and aren't really designed to be read or modified by humans. [poss. fr. gestures characteristic of stage magicians] 1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic. If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It is self-evident that...", you can be sure he is about to handwave. The theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right moment, the listener may be sufficiently distracted to not notice that what you have said is . Alternatively, if a listener does object, you might try to dismiss the objection with a wave of your hand. 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; if a speaker makes an outrageous unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this way, as an accusation more eloquent than words could express that his logic is faulty. v. 1. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something happens. "The program displays a menu and then hangs until you type a character." 2. More commonly, to wait for an event that will never occur. "The system is hanging because it can't read from the crashed drive". See , . n. A `murphyism' parallel to Occam's Razor that reads "Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity". The derivation of the common title Hanlon's Razor is unknown; a similar epigram has been attributed to William James. Quoted here because it seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often showing up in 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. adj. 1. Data inserted directly into a program, where it cannot be easily modified, as opposed to data in some por environment variable that a or hacker can easily modify. 2. In C, this is esp. applied to use of a literal instead of a preprocessor #define (see ). /hard-weir'i-lee/ adv. In a way pertaining to hardware. "The system is hardwarily unreliable." The adjective `hardwary' is *not* used. See . adj. 1. Syn. for . Technically, this term only applies to hardware, but hackers use it for software as well. 2. By extension, anything that is not modifiable, especially in the sense of customizable to one's particular needs or tastes. [seems to derive from Zen Buddhist koans of the form "Does an X have the Buddha-nature?"] adj. Common hacker construction for `is an X', used for humorous emphasis. "Anyone who can't even use a program with on-screen help embedded in it truly has the nature!" [from the technical usage] n. When used of people, signifies a confusion in associative memory or imagination, especially a persistent one (see ). 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." The variant "hash clash" is also reported. /aych-see-eff/ n. Mnemonic for "Halt and Catch Fire", any of several undocumented and semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far back as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which the HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused 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. [Sun] adj. Concentrating, usually so heavily and for so long that everything outside the focus area is missed. See also , although it's not confined to fledgeling hackers. n. 1. The signal emitted by a Level 2 Ethernet transceiver at the end of every packet to show that the collision-detection circuit is still connected. 2. A periodic synchronization signal used by software or hardware, such as a bus clock or a periodic interrupt. 2. The `natural' oscillation frequency of a computer's clock crystal, before frequency division down to the machine's clock rate. 3. A signal emitted at regular intervals by software to demonstrate that it's still alive. Sometimes hardware is designed to reboot the machine if it stops hearing a heartbeat. See also . [Cambridge] n. Syn. . n. Code or designs which trade on a particularly intimate knowledge or experience of a particular operating system or language or complex application interface. Distinguished from , which trades more on arcane *theoretical* knowledge. Writing device drivers is heavy wizardry; so is interfacing to X (sense #2) without a toolkit. Esp. found in comments of the form "Heavy wizardry begins here...". Compare . adj. High-overhead; ; code-intensive; featureful, but costly. Esp. used of communication protocols, language designs, and any sort of implementation in which maximum generality has been pushed at the expense of mundane considerations like speed, memory utilization, and start-up time. is a heavyweight editor; is an "extremely" heavyweight window system. This term isn't pejorative, but one man's heavyweight is another's and a third's . Oppose "lightweight". /hie'zen-buhg/ [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] n. A bug which disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. Antonym of . In C, 9 out of 10 heisenbugs result from either phenomena (esp. lossage related to corruption of the malloc ) or errors which . n. State of a hardware or software system which is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e. accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other excursion into . (Unfair to the real Helen Keller, whose success at learning speech was triumphant.) See also . interj. Occasional West Coast equivalent of ; seems to have originated at SAIL, later associated with the game (which also included "hello aviator" and "hello implementor"). Originally from the from traditional hooker's greeting to to a swabbie fresh off the boat, of course. excl. See . 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 standard output (and indeed it is the first example program in ). Environments that generate an unreasonably large executable for this trivial test or which require a compiler-linker invocation to generate it are considered to . 2. Greeting uttered by a hacker making an entrance or requesting information from anyone present. "Hello, world! Is the back up yet?" [scientific computation] n. A extra option added to a routine without changing the calling sequence. For example, instead of adding an explicit input variable to instruct a routine to give extra diagnostic output, the programmer might just add a test for some otherwise meaningless feature of the existing inputs, such as a negative mass. Liberal use of hidden flags can make a program very hard to debug and understand. [poss. fr. `high order bit'] n. 1. See . Also meaning most significant part of something other than a data byte, e.g. "Spare me the whole saga, just give me the high bit." /hie mohb'ee/ n. The high half of a stock 's address space; the other half was of course the low moby. This usage has been generalized in a way that has outlasted the ; for example, at the 1990 Washington D.C Area Science Fiction Conclave (DISCLAVE) when a miscommunication resulted in two separate wakes being held in commemoration of the shutdown of MIT's last machines, the one on the upper floor was dubbed the high moby and the other the low moby. All parties involved grokked this instantly. See . [scientific computation] adv. The preferred modifier for overstating an understatement. As in: , the worst possible way to do something; , either impossible or requiring a major research project; , completely erratic and unpredictable; , drivel written for s, oversimplified to the point of being misleading or incorrect (compare ). In other computing cultures, postfixing of might be preferred. adj. Occasionally used humorously as a synonym for . /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 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 . n.,vt. Favored term to describe programs or hardware 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 ). More often than not encountered in qualified forms, e.g. "memory hog", "core hog", "hog the processor", "hog the disk". Example: "A controller that never gives up the I/O bus gets killed after the bus hog timer expires." [from , but may predate it] n. s over . The 1981 paper by Danny Cohen that popularized the terms and in connection with the LSB-first/MSB-first controversy was entitled `On Holy Wars and a Plea for Peace'. Other perennial Holy Wars have included: vs. , my personal computer vs. everyone else's personal computer, vs. , vs. , UNIX vs. UNIX, C vs. Pascal, etc. etc. etc. The characteristic that distinguishes from normal technical disputes is that (regardless of the technical merits of the case on either side) most participants spend their time trying to pass off personal value choices and cultural attachments as objective technical evaluations. n. An extraneous piece of software or hardware included in order to simplify later additions or changes by a user. For instance, a PDP-10 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. As another example, a simple program that prints numbers might always print them in base ten, but a more flexible version would let a variable determine what base to use; setting the variable to 5 would make the program print numbers in base five. The variable is a simple hook. An even more flexible program might examine the variable, and treat a value of 16 or less as the base to use, but treat any other number as the address of a user-supplied routine for printing a number. This is a very powerful hook; one can then write a routine to print numbers as roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew characters, and plug it into the program through the hook. Often the difference between a good program and a superb one is that the latter has useful hooks in judiciously chosen places. Both may do the original job about equally well, but the one with the hooks is much more flexible for future expansion of capabilities. n. A hacker's personal machine, especially one he or she owns. "Yeah? Well, *my* home box runs a full 4.2BSD, so there!" 1. vt. To make non-functional or greatly degraded in performance, as in "That big ray-tracing program really hoses the system." See . 2. n. A narrow channel through which data flows under pressure. Generally denotes data paths in a system that represent performance bottlenecks. 3. n. Cabling, especially thick Ethernet cable. This is sometimes called "bit hose" or "hosery" (play on `hosiery') or "etherhose". See also . adj. Same as . Used primarily by UNIX hackers. Humorous: also implies a condition thought to be relatively easy to reverse. Probably derived from the Canadian slang `hoser' popularized by the Bob and Doug skits on SCTV. See . It is aso widely used of people in the mainstream sense of `in an extremely unfortunate situation'. There is a story that a Cray which had been experiencing periodic difficulties once crashed, and it was announced to have been . It was discovered that the crash was due to the disconnection of some coolant hoses. The problem was corrected, and users were then assured that everything was OK because the system had been rehosed. [This is an excellent example of hackish wordplay --- ESR]. n. 1. [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 micro-optimization or . 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 , , . 2. The active location of a cursor on a bit-map display. "Put the mouse's hot spot on the `ON' widget and click the left button." [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 is equivalent. /aych pee suhx/ n. Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's UNIX port. Features some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and elsewhere that occasionally create portability problems. HP-UX is often referred to as "hockey-pux" inside HP, and one outside correspondent claims that the proper pronunciation is /aych-pee ukkkhhhh/ as though one were spitting. Another such alternate spelling and pronunciation is "H-PUX" /aych-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo (the former Apollo Computer that was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard to complain that Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name first, if for no other reason than the resulting more accurate form for this acronym. See also , , . excl. A filler word used on various `chat' and `talk' programs when you had nothing to say but felt that it was important to say something. The word apparently originated (at least with this definition) on the MECC Timeshare System (MTS) a now-defunct educational time-sharing system running in Minnesota during the 1970s and early '80s, but was later sighted on early UNIX systems. /hyoo-muhng'g@s/ alt. (hyoo-mohng'g@s) See . n. A distinctive style of shared intellectual humor found among hackers, having the following marked characteristics: 1) Fascination with form-vs.-content jokes, paradoxes, and humor having to do with confusion of metalevels (see ). 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 specifications (see ), standards documents, language descriptions (see ) and even entire scientific theories (see , ). 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 , , , , . See also ; ; and Appendix B. 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 . [from "hung up"] adj. Equivalent to . but more common at UNIX/C sites. Not generally used of people. Syn. with , ; compare . See also . A hung state is distinguished from `crashed' or , where the program or system is also unusable but because it is not running rather than because it is waiting for something. However, the recovery from both situations is often the same. /huhng'g@s/ [perhaps related to current slang `humungous'; 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." (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, usually inaccessible because it is not even mapped in. "Another core dump... looks like the program jumped off to hyperspace somehow." This usage is from the SF notion of a spaceship jumping "into hyperspace", that is, taking a shortcut through higher-dimensional space --- in other words, leaving this universe. {= I =} /ie bee em/ Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near- number of even less complimentary expansions, including `International Business Machines'. See . These abbreviations illustrate the considerable antipathy most hackers have long felt for the `industry leader' (see ). 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 and you can't *fix* them --- source code is locked up tight and programming tools are expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found them. With the release of the UNIX-based RIOS family this may have begun to change --- but then, we thought that when the PC-RT came out, too. In the spirit of universal peace and brotherhood, this lexicon now includes a number of entries marked `IBM'; these derive from a rampantly unofficial jargon list circulated among IBM's own beleaguered hacker underground. [from William Gibson's cyberpunk SF: notionally, `Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics'] Security software (in Gibson's original, software that responds to intrusion by attempting to literally kill the intruder). Also, : 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. adj. 1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method that tends to blow up due to accumulated roundoff error or poor convergence properties. 2. Software which bypasses the defined interfaces to do things (like screen, keyboard and disk I/O) itself, often in a way that depends on the hardware of the machine it is running on or which is nonportable or incompatible with other pieces of software. In the IBM PC/MS-DOS world, there is a folk theorem (nearly true) to the effect that (due to gross inadequacies and performance penalties in the OS interface) all interesting applications are ill-behaved. Oppose , compare . See . [from SF fandom via USENET] Written acronym for In My Humble Opinion. Example: "IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as mistyping something in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect errors --- and they look too Pascalish anyhow." Also seen in variant forms such as IMNSHO (In My Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO (In My Arrogant Opinion). adj. A preferred emphasizing suffix for many hackish terms. See for example under , and compare . n. Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that must be muttered at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented they must be learned from a . E.g. "This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation they will be forced into text space". See . vt. [USENET] 1. To duplicate a portion (or whole) of another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in a reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response. 2. A directive; to explicitly command the preprocessor to include a file. 3. Derived from C: #include has appeared in s to denote a `standard' disclaimer file. n. Excessive multi-leveled including within a discussion , which tends to annoy readers. In a forum such as USENET, with high traffic newsgroups, this can lead to s and the urge to start a . adj. Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very loosely as in: "This program produces infinite garbage." "He is an infinite loser." This is an abuse of the word's mathematical meaning. The term "semi-infinite" denoting an immoderately large amount of some resource is also heard. "This compiler is taking a semi-infinite amount of time to optimize my program". See also . n. 1. The largest value that can be represented in a particular type of variable (register, memory location, data type, whatever). 2. The smallest such value. Note that this is different from
)] 1. vt. to solve the by swapping bytes in a file. 2. Also, the program in V7 UNIX used to perform this action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also , , . n. Storage space, especially temporary storage space used during a move or reconfiguration. "I'm just using that corner of the machine room for swap space". adj. From the older (per-task) method of using secondary storage devices to implement support for multitasking. Something which is is available for immediate use in main memory, and otherwise is . Often used metaphorically to refer to people's memories ("I read the Scheme Report every few months to keep the information swapped in.") or to their own availability ("I'll swap you in as soon as I finish looking at this other problem."). Compare , . v. To convert external names or references within a data structure into direct pointers when the data structure is brought into main memory from external storage; also called "pointer swizzling"; the converse operation is sometimes termed . /sink/ [UNIX] n.,vi. 1. To force all pending I/O to the disk. 2. More generally, to force a number of competing processes or agents to a state that would be `safe' if the system were to crash; thus, to checkpoint. See . [coined by Peter Landin] n. Features added to a language or formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans, that do not affect the expressiveness of the formalism (compare ). Used esp. when there is an obvious and trivial translation of the `sugar' feature into other constructs already present in the notation. Example: C's `a[i]' notation is syntactic sugar for `*(a + i)'. "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the semicolon." --- Alan Perlis. [the PLATO system] n. Playful hackish variant of `sysprog' which is in turn short for `systems-programmer'. n. [BBS] The operator (and usually owner) of a bulletin-board system. A common neophyte mistake on is to address a message to `sysop' in an international , thus sending it to hundreds of sysops world-wide. n. 1. The supervisor program or OS on a computer. 2. n. The entire computer system, including input/output devices, the supervisor program or OS, and possibly other software. 3. Any large-scale program. 4. Any method or algorithm. 5. The way things are usually done. Usage: a fairly ambiguous word. "You can't beat the system." : one who hacks the system (in sense 1 only; for sense 2 one mentions the particular program: e.g., "lisp hacker") n. Humorous synonym for "system programmer"; compare . Refers specifically to a systems programmer in charge of administration, software maintainence, and updates at some site. {= T =} /tee/ 1. [from LISP terminology for `true'] Yes. Usage: used in reply to a question, particularly one asked using the `-P' convention). See . In LISP, the name T means "true", among other things. Some hackers use `T' and `NIL' instead of `Yes' and `No' almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. When a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he may well respond "T", meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be brought a cup of tea instead. As it happens, most hackers like tea at least as well as coffee, particularly those who frequent Chinese restaurants, so it's not that big a problem. 2. See