
	--The Jargon File 4.3.1
%
ABEND /a'bend/, /*-bend'/, n. 

[ABnormal END] 
1. Abnormal termination (of software); crash; lossage. 
Derives from an error message on the IBM 360; used jokingly by hackers 
but seriously mainly by code grinders. Usually capitalized, but may 
appear as `abend'. Hackers will try to persuade you that ABEND is 
called `abend' because it is what system operators do to the machine 
late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the 
German `Abend' = `Evening'. 
2. [alt.callahans] Absent By Enforced Net Deprivation - used in the 
subject lines of postings warning friends of an imminent loss of 
Internet access. (This can be because of computer downtime, loss of 
provider, moving or illness.) Variants of this also appear: ABVND = 
`Absent By Voluntary Net Deprivation' and ABSEND = `Absent By 
Self-Enforced Net Deprivation' have been sighted.
%
Acme, n. 

[from Greek `akme', highest point of perfection or achievement] 
The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional 
gadgetry - where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists 
who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been 
humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything. 
(In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs 
in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as an "Acme X" either means 
"This is insanely great", or, more likely, "This looks insanely 
great on paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself 
in the foot with it."
[...]
%
airplane rule, n. 

"Complexity increases the possibility of failure; a twin-engine airplane 
has twice as many engine problems as a single-engine airplane." By 
analogy, in both software and electronics, the rule that simplicity 
increases robustness. It is correspondingly argued that the right way to 
build reliable systems is to put all your eggs in one basket, after 
making sure that you've built a really good basket. 
%
Alderson loop, n. 

[Intel] 
A special version of an infinite loop where there is an exit condition 
available, but inaccessible in the current implementation of the code. 
Typically this is created while debugging user interface code. 
An example would be when there is a menu stating, "Select 1-3 or 9 to 
quit" and 9 is not allowed by the function that takes the selection from 
the user. 

This term received its name from a programmer who had coded a modal 
message box in MSAccess with no Ok or Cancel buttons, thereby disabling 
the entire program whenever the box came up. The message box had the 
proper code for dismissal and even was set up so that when the 
non-existent Ok button was pressed the proper code would be called. 
%
all your base are belong to us 

A declaration of victory or superiority. The phrase stems from a 1991 
adaptation of Toaplan's "Zero Wing" shoot-'em-up arcade game for the 
Sega Genesis game console. A brief introduction was added to the opening 
screen, and it has what many consider to be the worst Japanese-to-English 
translation in video game history. The introduction shows the bridge of 
a starship in chaos as a Borg-like figure named CATS materializes and says, 
"How are you gentlemen!! All your base are belong to us." [sic] In 2001, 
this amusing mistranslation spread virally through the internet, bringing 
with it a slew of JPEGs and a movie of hacked photographs, each showing a 
street sign, store front, package label, etc. hacked to read "All your base 
are belong to us" or one of the other dopy lines from the game. When the 
phrase is used properly, the overall effect is both screamingly funny and 
somewhat chilling, reminiscent of the B movie "They Live". 

The original has been generalized to "All your X are belong to us", where 
X is filled in to connote a sinister takeover of some sort. Thus, "When Joe 
signed up for his new job at Yoyodyne, he had to sign a draconian NDA. 
It basically said, `All your code are belong to us.'" Has many of the 
connotations of "Resistance is futile; you will be assimilated". Considered 
silly, and most likely to be used by the type of person that finds Jeff K. 
hilarious. 
%
alpha geek, n. 

[from animal ethologists' `alpha male'] 
The most technically accomplished or skillful person in some implied context.
"Ask Larry, he's the alpha geek here." 
%
Amiga Persecution Complex, n. 

The disorder suffered by a particularly egregious variety of bigot, those who
believe that the marginality of their preferred machine is the result of some
kind of industry-wide conspiracy (for without a conspiracy of some kind, the
eminent superiority of their beloved shining jewel of a platform would 
obviously win over all, market pressures be damned!) Those afflicted are prone
to engaging in flame wars and calling for boycotts and mailbombings. Amiga 
Persecution Complex is by no means limited to Amiga users; NeXT, NeWS, OS/2,
Macintosh, LISP, and GNU users are also common victims. Linux users used to 
display symptoms very frequently before Linux started winning; some still do.
%
angry fruit salad, n. 

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

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

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

A group of large-site administrators who pushed through the Great Renaming and
reined in the chaos of Usenet during most of the 1980s. During most of its 
lifetime, the Cabal (as it was sometimes capitalized) steadfastly denied its
own existence; it was almost obligatory for anyone privy to their secrets to
respond "There is no Cabal" whenever the existence or activities of the group
were speculated on in public. 

The result of this policy was an attractive aura of mystery. Even a decade after 
the cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 following a bitter internal 
catfight, many people believed (or claimed to believe) that it had not actually 
disbanded but only gone deeper underground with its power intact. 

This belief became a model for various paranoid theories about various Cabals 
with dark nefarious objectives beginning with taking over the Usenet or Internet. 
These paranoias were later satirized in ways that took on a life of their own. 
%
Bad and Wrong, adj. 

[Durham, UK] 
Said of something that is both badly designed and wrongly executed. This 
common term is the prototype of, and is used by contrast with, three less 
common terms - Bad and Right (a kludge, something ugly but functional); 
Good and Wrong (an overblown GUI or other attractive nuisance); and (rare praise) 
Good and Right. These terms entered common use at Durham c.1994 and may have been 
imported from elsewhere; they are also in use at Oxford, and the emphatic form 
"Evil and Bad and Wrong" (abbreviated EBW) is reported from there. There are 
standard abbreviations: they start with B&R, a typo for "Bad and Wrong". 
Consequently, B&W is actually "Bad and Right", G&R = "Good and Wrong", and 
G&W = "Good and Right". 
%
baggy pantsing, v. 

[Georgia Tech] 
A "baggy pantsing" is used to reprimand hackers who incautiously leave 
their terminals unlocked. The affected user will come back to find a post 
from them on internal newsgroups discussing exactly how baggy their pants are, 
an accepted stand-in for "unattentive user who left their work unprotected in 
the clusters". A properly-done baggy pantsing is highly mocking and humorous. 
It is considered bad form to post a baggy pantsing to off-campus newsgroups or 
the more technical, serious groups. A particularly nice baggy pantsing may be 
"claimed" by immediately quoting the message in full, followed by your sig; 
this has the added benefit of keeping the embarassed victim from being able to 
delete the post. Interesting baggy-pantsings have been done involving adding 
commands to login scripts to repost the message every time the unlucky user 
logs in; Unix boxes on the residential network, when cracked, oftentimes have 
their homepages replaced (after being politely backedup to another file) with 
a baggy-pants message; .plan files are also occasionally targeted. Usage: 
"Prof. Greenlee fell asleep in the Solaris cluster again; we baggy-pantsed him 
to git.cc.class.2430.flame." 
%
balloonian variable, n. 

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

[uncommon; prob. from the nuclear military] 
An unexpectedly large quantity of something: a unit of measurement. 
"Why is /var/adm taking up so much space?" "The logs have grown to several 
barns." The source of this is clear: when physicists were first studying 
nuclear interactions, the probability was thought to be proportional to 
the cross-sectional area of the nucleus (this probability is still called 
the cross-section). Upon experimenting, they discovered the interactions 
were far more probable than expected; the nuclei were `as big as a barn'. 
The units for cross-sections were christened Barns, (10^-24 cm^2) and the 
book containing cross-sections has a picture of a barn on the cover.
%
batbelt, n. 

Many hackers routinely hang numerous devices such as pagers, cell-phones, 
personal organizers, leatherman multitools, pocket knives, flashlights, 
walkie-talkies, even miniature computers from their belts. When many of 
these devices are worn at once, the hacker's belt somewhat resembles 
Batman's utility belt; hence it is referred to as a batbelt.  
%
Batman factor, n. 

1. An integer number representing the number of items hanging from a batbelt. 
In most settings, a Batman factor of more than 3 is not acceptable without 
odd stares and whispering. This encourages the hacker in question to choose 
items for the batbelt carefully to avoid awkward social situations, usually 
amongst non-hackers. 
2. A somewhat more vaguely defined index of contribution to sense 1. Devices 
that are especially obtrusive, such as large, older model cell phones, "Pocket" 
PC devices and walkie talkies are said to have a high batman factor. Sleeker 
devices such as a later-model Palm or StarTac phone are prized for their low 
batman factor and lessened obtrusiveness and weight. 
%
Berkeley Quality Software, adj. 

(often abbreviated `BQS') Term used in a pejorative sense to refer to software 
that was apparently created by rather spaced-out hackers late at night to solve
some unique problem. It usually has nonexistent, incomplete, or incorrect 
documentation, has been tested on at least two examples, and core dumps when 
anyone else attempts to use it. This term was frequently applied to early 
versions of the dbx(1) debugger. 
%
Big Gray Wall, n. 

What faces a VMS user searching for documentation. A full VMS kit comes on a 
pallet, the documentation taking up around 15 feet of shelf space before the 
addition of layered products such as compilers, databases, multivendor 
networking, and programming tools. Recent (since VMS version 5) documentation 
comes with gray binders; under VMS version 4 the binders were orange (`big 
orange wall'), and under version 3 they were blue. 
%
Big Room, n. 

(Also `Big Blue Room') The extremely large room with the blue ceiling 
and intensely bright light (during the day) or black ceiling with lots 
of tiny night-lights (during the night) found outside all computer 
installations. "He can't come to the phone right now, he's somewhere 
out in the Big Room." 
%
bit rot, n. 

(Also bit decay). Hypothetical disease the existence of which has 
been deduced from the observation that unused programs or features will 
often stop working after sufficient time has passed, even if `nothing has 
changed'. The theory explains that bits decay as if they were radioactive. 
As time passes, the contents of a file or the code in a program will become 
increasingly garbled. 

There actually are physical processes that produce such effects (alpha 
particles generated by trace radionuclides in ceramic chip packages, for 
example, can change the contents of a computer memory unpredictably, and 
various kinds of subtle media failures can corrupt files in mass storage), 
but they are quite rare (and computers are built with error-detecting 
circuitry to compensate for them). The notion long favored among hackers 
that cosmic rays are among the causes of such events turns out to be a myths. 

The term software rot is almost synonymous. Software rot is the effect, bit 
rot the notional cause. 
%
BITNET /bit'net/, n., obs. 

[acronym: Because It's Time NETwork] 
Everybody's least favorite piece of the network - until AOL happened. 
The BITNET hosts were a collection of IBM dinosaurs and VAXen (the 
latter with lobotomized comm hardware) that communicate using 
80-character EBCDIC card images; thus, they tend to mangle the headers 
and text of third-party traffic from the rest of the ASCII/RFC-822 
world with annoying regularity. BITNET was also notorious as the apparent 
home of B1FF. By 1995 it had, much to everyone's relief, been obsolesced 
and absorbed into the Internet. Unfortunately, around this time we also 
got AOL. 
%
blinkenlichten, n.

ACHTUNG! ALLES LOOKENSPEEPERS!

Das computermachine ist nicht fuer gefingerpoken und mittengrabben. Ist easy 
schnappen der springenwerk, blowenfusen und poppencorken mit spitzensparken. 
Ist nicht fuer gewerken bei das dumpkopfen. Das rubbernecken sichtseeren keepen 
das cotten-pickenen hans in das pockets muss; relaxen und watchen das 
blinkenlichten
%
blinkenlichten, n.

ATTENTION

This room is fullfilled mit special electronische equippment. Fingergrabbing and 
pressing the cnoeppkes from the computers is allowed for die experts only! So all 
the "lefthanders" stay away and do not disturben the brainstorming von here 
working intelligencies. Otherwise you will be out thrown and kicked anderswhere! 
Also: please keep still and only watchen astaunished the blinkenlights. 
%
Blue Screen of Death, n. 

This term is closely related to the older Black Screen of Death but much 
more common (many non-hackers have picked it up). Due to the extreme fragility 
and bugginess of Microsoft Windows, misbehaving applications can readily crash 
the OS (and the OS sometimes crashes itself spontaneously). The Blue Screen of 
Death, sometimes decorated with hex error codes, is what you get when this happens. 
(Commonly abbreviated BSOD.) 

The following entry from the Salon Haiku Contest, seems to have predated popular 
use of the term: 

        Windows NT crashed.
        I am the Blue Screen of Death
        No one hears your screams.

%
bob, n. 

At Demon Internet, all tech support personnel are called "Bob". (Female support 
personnel have an option on "Bobette"). This has nothing to do with Bob the divine 
drilling-equipment salesman of the Church of the SubGenius. Nor is it acronymized 
from "Brother Of BOFH", though all parties agree it could have been. Rather, it was 
triggered by an unusually large draft of new tech-support people in 1995. It was 
observed that there would be much duplication of names. To ease the confusion, it 
was decided that all support techs would henceforth be known as "Bob", and identity 
badges were created labelled "Bob 1" and "Bob 2". ("No, we never got any further" 
reports a witness). 

The reason for "Bob" rather than anything else is due to a luser calling and asking 
to speak to "Bob", despite the fact that no "Bob" was currently working for Tech 
Support. Since we all know "the customer is always right", it was decided that there 
had to be at least one "Bob" on duty at all times, just in case. 

This sillyness inexorably snowballed. Shift leaders and managers began to refer to 
their groups of "bobs". Whole ranks of support machines were set up (and still exist 
in the DNS as of 1999) as bob1 through bobN. Then came alt.tech-support.recovery, and 
it was filled with Demon support personnel. They all referred to themselves, and to 
others, as `bob', and after a while it caught on. 
%
BOFH //, n. 

[common] Acronym, Bastard Operator From Hell. A system administrator with absolutely 
no tolerance for lusers. "You say you need more filespace? <massive-global-delete> 
Seems to me you have plenty left..." Many BOFHs (and others who would be BOFHs if 
they could get away with it) hang out in the newsgroup alt.sysadmin.recovery, although 
there has also been created a top-level newsgroup hierarchy (bofh.*) of their own. 
%
BogoMIPS /bo'go-mips/, n. 

The number of million times a second a processor can do absolutely nothing. The Linux 
OS measures BogoMIPS at startup in order to calibrate some soft timing loops that will 
be used later on. The name Linus chose, of course, is an ironic comment on the 
uselessness of all other MIPS figures. 
%
Bohr bug /bohr buhg/, n. 

[from quantum physics] A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a 
possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of heisenbug. 
%
Borg, n. 

In "Star Trek: The Next Generation" the Borg is a species of cyborg that 
ruthlessly seeks to incorporate all sentient life into itself; their slogan is 
"You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile." In hacker parlance, the Borg is 
usually Microsoft, which is thought to be trying just as ruthlessly to assimilate 
all computers and the entire Internet to itself (there is a widely circulated 
image of Bill Gates as a Borg). Being forced to use Windows or NT is often 
referred to as being "Borged". Interestingly, the Halloween Documents reveal that 
this jargon is live within Microsoft itself. (Other companies, notably Intel and 
UUNet, have also occasionally been equated to the Borg.) 

In IETF circles, where direct pressure from Microsoft is not a daily reality, the 
Borg is sometimes Cisco. This usage commemmorates their tendency to pay any price 
to hire talent away from their competitors. In fact, at the Spring 1997 IETF, a 
large number of ex-Cisco employees, all former members of Routing Geeks, showed 
up with t-shirts printed with "Recovering Borg". 
%
break-even point, n. 

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

Since this entry was first written, several correspondents have reported that 
there actually was a compiler for a tiny Algol-like language called Foogol 
floating around on various VAXen in the early and mid-1980s. 
%
brochureware, n. 

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

A bug in a public software release that is so embarrassing that the author 
notionally wears a brown paper bag over his head for a while so he won't be 
recognized on the net. Entered popular usage after the early-1999 release of 
the first Linux 2.2, which had one. The phrase was used in Linus Torvalds's 
apology posting. 
%
bug, n.

[...]
[There has been a widespread myth that the original bug was moved to the 
Smithsonian, and an earlier version of this entry so asserted. A correspondent 
who thought to check discovered that the bug was not there. While investigating 
this in late 1990, your editor discovered that the NSWC still had the bug, but 
had unsuccessfully tried to get the Smithsonian to accept it -- and that the 
present curator of their History of American Technology Museum didn't know this 
and agreed that it would make a worthwhile exhibit. It was moved to the 
Smithsonian in mid-1991, but due to space and money constraints was not actually 
exhibited for years afterwards. Thus, the process of investigating the 
original-computer-bug bug fixed it in an entirely unexpected way, by making the 
myth true! --ESR] 
%
bullschildt /bul'shilt/, n. 

[comp.lang.c on USENET] A confident, but incorrect, statement about a 
programming language. This immortalizes a very bad book about C, Herbert 
Schildt's "C - The Complete Reference". One reviewer commented "The naive 
errors in this book would be embarassing even in a programming assignment 
turned in by a computer science college sophomore." 
%
buzzword-compliant 

[also `buzzword-enabled'] Used (disparagingly) of products that seem to have 
been specified to incorporate all of this month's trendy technologies. Key 
buzzwords that often show up in buzzword-compliant specifications as of 2001 
include `XML', `Java', `peer-to-peer', `distributed', and `open'. 
%
can't happen 

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

[...]
A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new at the MIT AI Lab, expressed some annoyance 
at the incessant use of jargon. Over his loud objections, GLS and RMS made a 
point of using as much of it as possible in his presence, and eventually it 
began to sink in. Finally, in one conversation, he used the word `canonical' 
in jargon-like fashion without thinking. Steele: "Aha! We've finally got you 
talking jargon too!" Stallman: "What did he say?" Steele: "Bob just used 
`canonical' in the canonical way." 

Of course, canonicality depends on context, but it is implicitly defined as the 
way hackers normally expect things to be. Thus, a hacker may claim with a 
straight face that `according to religious law' is not the canonical meaning of 
`canonical'. 
%
casting the runes, n. 

What a guru does when you ask him or her to run a particular program and type 
at it because it never works for anyone else; esp. used when nobody can ever 
see what the guru is doing different from what J. Random Luser does.

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

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

[Cambridge] Someone who wastes computer time on number-crunching when you'd far 
rather the machine were doing something more productive, such as working out 
anagrams of your name or printing Snoopy calendars or running life patterns. 
May or may not refer to someone who actually studies chemistry. 
%
choad /chohd/, n. 

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

A mutant offshoot of Discordianism launched in 1981 as a spoof of fundamentalist 
Christianity by the `Reverend' Ivan Stang, a brilliant satirist with a gift for 
promotion. Popular among hackers as a rich source of bizarre imagery and 
references such as "Bob" the divine drilling-equipment salesman, the Benevolent 
Space Xists, and the Stark Fist of Removal. Much SubGenius theory is concerned 
with the acquisition of the mystical substance or quality of slack. 
%
CLM /C-L-M/ 

[Sun: `Career Limiting Move'] 1. n. An action endangering one's future prospects 
of getting plum projects and raises, and possibly one's job: "His Halloween 
costume was a parody of his manager. He won the prize for `best CLM'." 
2. adj. Denotes extreme severity of a bug, discovered by a customer and 
obviously missed earlier because of poor testing: "That's a CLM bug!" 
%
clue-by-four 

[Usenet: portmanteau, clue + two-by-four] The notional stick with which one 
whacks an aggressively clueless person. This term derives from a western 
American folk saying about training a mule "First, you got to hit him with 
a two-by-four. That's to get his attention." The clue-by-four is a close 
relative of the LART (Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool). Syn. `clue stick'. 
This metaphor is commonly elaborated; your editor once heard a hacker say 
"I smite you with the great sword Cluebringer!" 
%
COBOL fingers /koh'bol fing'grz/, n. 

Reported from Sweden, a (hypothetical) disease one might get from coding in 
COBOL. The language requires code verbose beyond all reason; thus it is 
alleged that programming too much in COBOL causes one's fingers to wear down 
to stubs by the endless typing. "I refuse to type in all that source code 
again; it would give me COBOL fingers!" 
%
code grinder, n. 

1. A suit-wearing minion of the sort hired in legion strength by banks and 
insurance companies to implement payroll packages in RPG and other such 
unspeakable horrors. In its native habitat, the code grinder often removes 
the suit jacket to reveal an underplumage consisting of button-down shirt 
(starch optional) and a tie. In times of dire stress, the sleeves (if long) 
may be rolled up and the tie loosened about half an inch. It seldom helps. 
The code grinder's milieu is about as far from hackerdom as one can get and 
still touch a computer; the term connotes pity. 
2. Used of or to a hacker, a really serious slur on the person's creative 
ability; connotes a design style characterized by primitive technique, 
rule-boundedness, brute force, and utter lack of imagination. 
%
code monkey, n 

1. A person only capable of grinding out code, but unable to perform the 
higher-primate tasks of software architecture, analysis, and design. Mildly 
insulting. Often applied to the most junior people on a programming team. 
2. Anyone who writes code for a living; a programmer. 
3. A self-deprecating way of denying responsibility for a management decision, 
or of complaining about having to live with such decisions. As in "Don't ask 
me why we need to write a compiler in COBOL, I'm just a code monkey." 
%
code police, n. 

[by analogy with George Orwell's `thought police'] A mythical team of 
Gestapo-like storm troopers that might burst into one's office and arrest 
one for violating programming style rules. May be used either seriously, 
to underline a claim that a particular style violation is dangerous, or 
ironically, to suggest that the practice under discussion is condemned 
mainly by anal-retentive weenies. "Dike out that goto or the code police 
will get you!" The ironic usage is perhaps more common. 
%
cokebottle /kohk'bot-l/, n. 

Any very unusual character, particularly one you can't type because it 
isn't on your keyboard. MIT people used to complain about the 
`control-meta-cokebottle' commands at SAIL, and SAIL people complained 
right back about the `escape-escape-cokebottle' commands at MIT. After 
the demise of the space-cadet keyboard, `cokebottle' faded away as 
serious usage, but was often invoked humorously to describe an 
(unspecified) weird or non-intuitive keystroke command. It may be due 
for a second inning, however. The OSF/Motif window manager, mwm(1), has 
a reserved keystroke for switching to the default set of keybindings 
and behavior. This keystroke is (believe it or not) `control-meta-bang'. 
Since the exclamation point looks a lot like an upside down Coke bottle, 
Motif hackers have begun referring to this keystroke as `cokebottle'. 
%
COME FROM, n. 

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

[probably came into prominence with the appearance of the KL-10 (one model 
of the PDP-10), none of whose connectors matched anything else] 
The tendency of manufacturers (or, by extension, programmers or purveyors 
of anything) to come up with new products that don't fit together with the 
old stuff, thereby making you buy either all new stuff or expensive interface 
devices. The KL-10 Massbus connector was actually patented by DEC, which 
reputedly refused to license the design and thus effectively locked third 
parties out of competition for the lucrative Massbus peripherals market. 
This policy is a source of never-ending frustration for the diehards who 
maintain older PDP-10 or VAX systems. Their CPUs work fine, but they are 
stuck with dying, obsolescent disk and tape drives with low capacity and 
high power requirements. 

(A closely related phenomenon, with a slightly different intent, is the 
habit manufacturers have of inventing new screw heads so that only Designated 
Persons, possessing the magic screwdrivers, can remove covers and make repairs 
or install options. A good 1990s example is the use of Torx screws for 
cable-TV set-top boxes. Older Apple Macintoshes took this one step further, 
requiring not only a long Torx screwdriver but a specialized case-cracking 
tool to open the box.) 

In these latter days of open-systems computing this term has fallen somewhat 
into disuse, to be replaced by the observation that "Standards are great! 
There are so many of them to choose from!" 
%
considered harmful, adj. 

[very common] Edsger W. Dijkstra's note in the March 1968 "Communications of 
the ACM", "Goto Statement Considered Harmful", fired the first salvo in the 
structured programming wars (text at http://www.acm.org/classics). Amusingly, 
the ACM considered the resulting acrimony sufficiently harmful that it will 
(by policy) no longer print an article taking so assertive a position against 
a coding practice. (Years afterwards, a contrary view was uttered in a CACM 
letter called, inevitably, "`Goto considered harmful' considered harmful'"'. 
In the ensuing decades, a large number of both serious papers and parodies 
have borne titles of the form "X considered Y". The structured-programming 
wars eventually blew over with the realization that both sides were wrong, 
but use of such titles has remained as a persistent minor in-joke (the 
`considered silly' found at various places in this lexicon is related). 
%
Conway's Law, prov. 

The rule that the organization of the software and the organization of the 
software team will be congruent; commonly stated as "If you have four 
groups working on a compiler, you'll get a 4-pass compiler". The original 
statement was more general, "Organizations which design systems are 
constrained to produce designs which are copies of the communication 
structures of these organizations." This first appeared in the April 1968 
issue of Datamation. Compare SNAFU principle. 

The law was named after Melvin Conway, an early proto-hacker who wrote an 
assembler for the Burroughs 220 called SAVE. (The name `SAVE' didn't stand 
for anything; it was just that you lost fewer card decks and listings 
because they all had SAVE written on them.) 

There is also Tom Cheatham's amendment of Conway's Law: "If a group of N 
persons implements a COBOL compiler, there will be N-1 passes. Someone in 
the group has to be the manager." 
%
cookie bear, n. obs. 

Original term, pre-Sesame-Street, for what is now universally called a 
cookie monster. A correspondent observes "In those days, hackers were 
actually getting their yucks from...sit down now...Andy Williams. Yes, 
that Andy Williams. Seems he had a rather hip (by the standards of the 
day) TV variety show. One of the best parts of the show was the recurring 
`cookie bear' sketch. In these sketches, a guy in a bear suit tried all 
sorts of tricks to get a cookie out of Williams. The sketches would always 
end with Williams shrieking (and I don't mean figuratively), `No cookies! 
Not now, not ever...NEVER!!!' And the bear would fall down. Great stuff." 
%
cookie monster, n. 

[from the children's TV program "Sesame Street"] Any of a family of early 
(1970s) hacks reported on TOPS-10, ITS, Multics, and elsewhere that would 
lock up either the victim's terminal (on a time-sharing machine) or the 
console (on a batch mainframe), repeatedly demanding "I WANT A COOKIE". 
The required responses ranged in complexity from "COOKIE" through "HAVE A 
COOKIE" and upward. Folklorist Jan Brunvand (see FOAF) has described these 
programs as urban legends (implying they probably never existed) but they 
existed, all right, in several different versions. 
%
copious free time, n. 

[Apple; orig. fr. the intro to Tom Lehrer's song "It Makes A Fellow Proud 
To Be A Soldier"] 
1. [used ironically to indicate the speaker's lack of the quantity in 
question] A mythical schedule slot for accomplishing tasks held to be 
unlikely or impossible. Sometimes used to indicate that the speaker is 
interested in accomplishing the task, but believes that the opportunity 
will not arise. "I'll implement the automatic layout stuff in my copious 
free time." 2. [Archly] Time reserved for bogus or otherwise idiotic tasks, 
such as implementation of chrome, or the stroking of suits. "I'll get back 
to him on that feature in my copious free time." 
%
cosmic rays, n. 

Notionally, the cause of bit rot. However, this is a semi-independent usage 
that may be invoked as a humorous way to handwave away any minor randomness 
that doesn't seem worth the bother of investigating. "Hey, Eric -- I just 
got a burst of garbage on my tube, where did that come from?" "Cosmic rays, 
I guess.". The British seem to prefer the usage `cosmic showers'; `alpha 
particles' is also heard, because stray alpha particles passing through a 
memory chip can cause single-bit errors (this becomes increasingly more 
likely as memory sizes and densities increase). 

Factual note: Alpha particles cause bit rot, cosmic rays do not (except 
occasionally in spaceborne computers). Intel could not explain random bit 
drops in their early chips, and one hypothesis was cosmic rays. So they 
created the World's Largest Lead Safe, using 25 tons of the stuff, and used 
two identical boards for testing. One was placed in the safe, one outside. 
The hypothesis was that if cosmic rays were causing the bit drops, they 
should see a statistically significant difference between the error rates 
on the two boards. They did not observe such a difference. Further 
investigation demonstrated conclusively that the bit drops were due to alpha 
particle emissions from thorium (and to a much lesser degree uranium) in the 
encapsulation material. Since it is impossible to eliminate these radioactives 
(they are uniformly distributed through the earth's crust, with the statistically 
insignificant exception of uranium lodes) it became obvious that one has to 
design memories to withstand these hits. 
%
CPU Wars /C-P-U worz/, n. 

A 1979 large-format comic by Chas Andres chronicling the attempts of the 
brainwashed androids of IPM (Impossible to Program Machines) to conquer and 
destroy the peaceful denizens of HEC (Human Engineered Computers). This rather 
transparent allegory featured many references to ADVENT and the immortal line 
"Eat flaming death, minicomputer mongrels!" (uttered, of course, by an IPM 
stormtrooper).  

It is alleged that the author subsequently received a letter of appreciation 
on IBM company stationery from the head of IBM's Thomas J. Watson Research 
Laboratories (then, as now, one of the few islands of true hackerdom in the 
IBM archipelago). The lower loop of the B in the IBM logo, it is said, had 
been carefully whited out. 
%
crayon, n. 

1. Someone who works on Cray supercomputers. More specifically, it implies a 
programmer, probably of the CDC ilk, probably male, and almost certainly 
wearing a tie (irrespective of gender). Systems types who have a Unix 
background tend not to be described as crayons. 
2. Formerly, anyone who worked for Cray Research; since the buyout by SGI, 
anyone they inherited from Cray. Nowadays, often applied to any SGI employee 
who either works at one of the former Cray Research facilities (i.e. Eagan 
Minnesota and Chippewa Falls Wisconsin) or works primarily in vector computing 
aspects of the business. Sometimes considered mildly offensive by those to 
whom it is applied, particularly those whose work has nothing to do with vector 
computing. 
3. A computron that participates only in number-crunching. 
4. A unit of computational power equal to that of a single Cray-1. There is a 
standard joke about this usage that derives from an old Crayola crayon promotional 
gimmick: When you buy 64 crayons you get a free sharpener. 
%
creationism, n. 

The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be completely 
specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the 
normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience 
has shown repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory 
interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able 
designer(s) and an active user population -- and that the first try at a big new 
idea is always wrong. Unfortunately, because these truths don't fit the planning 
models beloved of management, they are generally ignored. 
%
creeping featurism /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/, n. 


1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more chrome and features onto systems 
at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally 
designed. See also feeping creaturism. "You know, the main problem with BSD Unix 
has always been creeping featurism." 
2. More generally, the tendency for anything complicated to become even more 
complicated because people keep saying "Gee, it would be even better if it had 
this feature too". The result is usually a patchwork because it grew one ad-hoc 
step at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but it's 
easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone ... and then another 
... and another.... When creeping featurism gets out of hand, it's like a cancer. 
The GNU hello program, intended to illustrate GNU command-line switch and coding 
conventions, is also a wonderful parody of creeping featurism; the distribution 
changelog is particulary funny. Usually this term is used to describe computer 
programs, but it could also be said of the federal government, the IRS 1040 form, 
and new cars. A similar phenomenon sometimes afflicts conscious redesigns.
%
cretin /kret'in/ or /kree'tn/, n. 

Congenital loser; an obnoxious person; someone who can't do anything right. 
It has been observed that many American hackers tend to favor the British 
pronunciation /kret'in/ over standard American /kree'tn/; it is thought this 
may be due to the insidious phonetic influence of Monty Python's Flying Circus. 
%
crippleware, n. 

1. [common] Software that has some important functionality deliberately removed, 
so as to entice potential users to pay for a working version. 
2. [Cambridge] Variety of guiltware that exhorts you to donate to some charity 
3. Hardware deliberately crippled, which can be upgraded to a more expensive 
model by a trivial change (e.g., cutting a jumper). 

An excellent example of crippleware (sense 3) is Intel's 486SX chip, which is a 
standard 486DX chip with the co-processor diked out (in some early versions it 
was present but disabled). To upgrade, you buy a complete 486DX chip with working 
co-processor (its identity thinly veiled by a different pinout) and plug it into 
the board's expansion socket. It then disables the SX, which becomes a fancy 
power sink. Don't you love Intel? 
%
critical mass, n. 

In physics, the minimum amount of fissionable material required to sustain a 
chain reaction. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software 
such that fixing one bug introduces one plus epsilon bugs. (This malady has 
many causes: creeping featurism, ports to too many disparate environments, 
poor initial design, etc.) When software achieves critical mass, it can never 
be fixed; it can only be discarded and rewritten. 
%
D. C. Power Lab, n. 

The former site of SAIL. Hackers thought this was very funny because the obvious 
connection to electrical engineering was nonexistent -- the lab was named for a 
Donald C. Power. 
%
dancing frog, n. 

[Vancouver area] A problem that occurs on a computer that will not reappear 
while anyone else is watching. From the classic Warner Brothers cartoon 
"One Froggy Evening", featuring a dancing and singing Michigan J. Frog that 
just croaks when anyone else is around (now the WB network mascot). 
%
DAU /dow/, n. 

[German FidoNet] German acronym for Dmmster Anzunehmender User (stupidest 
imaginable user). From the engineering-slang GAU for Grsster Anzunehmender 
Unfall, worst assumable accident, esp. of a LNG tank farm plant or something 
with similarly disastrous consequences. In popular German, GAU is used only 
to refer to worst-case nuclear accidents such as a core meltdown. 
%
Death Star, n. 

[from the movie "Star Wars"] 
1. The AT&T corporate logo, which appears on computers sold by AT&T and bears 
an uncanny resemblance to the Death Star in the movie. This usage is 
particularly common among partisans of BSD Unix, who tend to regard the AT&T 
versions as inferior and AT&T as a bad guy. Copies still circulate of a poster 
printed by Mt. Xinu showing a starscape with a space fighter labeled 4.2 BSD 
streaking away from a broken AT&T logo wreathed in flames. 
2. AT&T's internal magazine, "Focus", uses `death star' to describe an 
incorrectly done AT&T logo in which the inner circle in the top left is dark 
instead of light -- a frequent result of dark-on-light logo images. 
%
deep magic, n. 

[poss. from C. S. Lewis's "Narnia" books] 
An awesomely arcane technique central to a program or system, esp. one 
neither generally published nor available to hackers at large; one that 
could only have been composed by a true wizard. Compiler optimization 
techniques and many aspects of OS design used to be deep magic; many 
techniques in cryptography, signal processing, graphics, and AI still are.
%
deflicted 

[portmanteau of "defective" and "afflicted"; common among PC repair 
technicians, and probably originated among hardware techs outside the 
hacker community proper] 
Term used of hardware that is broken due to poor design or shoddy 
manufacturing or (especially) both; less frequently used of software and 
rarely of people. This term is normally employed in a tone of weary 
contempt by technicians who have seen the specific failure in the trouble 
report before and are cynically confident they'll see it again. 
%
demigod, n. 

A hacker with years of experience, a world-wide reputation, and a major role 
in the development of at least one design, tool, or game used by or known to 
more than half of the hacker community. To qualify as a genuine demigod, the 
person must recognizably identify with the hacker community and have helped 
shape it. Major demigods include Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie 
(co-inventors of Unix and C), Richard M. Stallman (inventor of EMACS), Larry 
Wall (inventor of Perl), Linus Torvalds (inventor of Linux), and most recently 
James Gosling (inventor of Java, NeWS, and GOSMACS) and Guido van Rossum 
(inventor of Python). 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. 
%
dike, vt. 

To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire from a computer or a 
subroutine from a program. A standard slogan is "When in doubt, dike it out". 
(The implication is that it is usually more effective to attack software 
problems by reducing complexity than by increasing it.) The word `dikes' 
is widely used among mechanics and engineers to mean `diagonal cutters', esp. 
the heavy-duty metal-cutting version; it also refers to a kind of wire-
cutters used by electronics techs. To `dike something out' means to use such 
cutters to remove something. Indeed, the TMRC Dictionary defined dike as "to 
attack with dikes". Among hackers this term has been metaphorically extended 
to informational objects such as sections of code. 
%
Discordianism /dis-kor'di-*n-ism/, n. 

The veneration of Eris, a.k.a. Discordia; widely popular among hackers. 
Discordianism was popularized by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson's 
novel "Illuminatus!" as a sort of self-subverting Dada-Zen for Westerners 
-- it should on no account be taken seriously but is far more serious 
than most jokes. Consider, for example, the Fifth Commandment of the 
Pentabarf, from "Principia Discordia": "A Discordian is Prohibited of 
Believing What he Reads." Discordianism is usually connected with an 
elaborate conspiracy theory/joke involving millennia-long warfare between 
the anarcho-surrealist partisans of Eris and a malevolent, authoritarian 
secret society called the Illuminati. 
%
documentation, n. 

The multiple kilograms of macerated, pounded, steamed, bleached, and pressed 
trees that accompany most modern software or hardware products. Hackers seldom 
read paper documentation and (too) often resist writing it; they prefer theirs 
to be terse and on-line. A common comment on this predilection is "You can't 
grep dead trees". 
%
dogwash /dog'wosh/ 

[From a quip in the `urgency' field of a very optional software change request, 
ca. 1982. It was something like "Urgency: Wash your dog first".] 
1. n. A project of minimal priority, undertaken as an escape from more serious work. 
2. v. To engage in such a project. Many games and much freeware get written this way. 
%
Don't do that then!, imp. 

[from an old doctor's office joke about a patient with a trivial complaint] 
Stock response to a user complaint. "When I type control-S, the whole system 
comes to a halt for thirty seconds." "Don't do that, then!" (or "So don't do that!"). 

Here's a classic example of "Don't do that then!" from Neal Stephenson's 
"In The Beginning Was The Command Line". A friend of his built a network with 
a load of Macs and a few high-powered database servers. He found that from 
time to time the whole network would lock up for no apparent reason. The 
problem was eventually tracked down to MacOS's cooperative multitasking: when 
a user held down the mouse button for too long, the network stack wouldn't get 
a chance to run... 
%
double bucky, adj.

[...]
			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)
[...]
%
Dr. Fred Mbogo /*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/, n. 

[Stanford] The archetypal man you don't want to see about a problem, esp. 
an incompetent professional; a shyster. "Do you know a good eye doctor?" 
"Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and Professional Dry Cleaning." The name comes 
from synergy between bogus and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who 
was Gomez Addams' physician on the old "Addams Family" TV show. 
Interestingly enough, it turns out that under the rules for Swahili noun 
classes, `m-' is the characteristic prefix of "nouns referring to human 
beings". As such, "mbogo" is quite plausible as a Swahili coinage for a 
person having the nature of a bogon. Actually, "mbogo" is indeed a 
Ki-Swahili word referring to the African Cape Buffalo, Syncerus caffer. 
It is one of the "big five" dangerous African game animals, and many 
people with bush experience believe it to be the most dangerous of them. 
%
dread high-bit disease, n. 

A condition endemic to some now-obsolete computers and peripherals 
(including ASR-33 teletypes and PRIME minicomputers) that results in all 
characters having their high (0x80) bit forced on. This of course makes 
transporting files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention the 
problems these machines have talking with true 8-bit devices. 

This term was originally used specifically of PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME) minicomputers. 
Folklore has it that PRIME adopted the reversed-8-bit convention in order to save 
25 cents per serial line per machine; PRIME old-timers, on the other hand, claim 
they inherited the disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's compatibility 
requirements and struggled heroically to cure it. Whoever was responsible, this 
probably qualifies as one of the most cretinous design tradeoffs ever made. 
%
drool-proof paper, n.

Documentation that has been obsessively dumbed down, to the point where only 
a cretin could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the `drool-proof 
paper syndrome' or to have been `written on drool-proof paper'. For example, 
this is an actual quote from Apple's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your 
LaserWriter to open fire or flame." The SGI Indy manual included the line 
"[Do not] dangle the mouse by the cord or throw it at coworkers." 
%
drum adj, n. 

Ancient techspeak term referring to slow, cylindrical magnetic media that were 
once state-of-the-art storage devices. Under some versions of BSD Unix the disk 
partition used for swapping is still called /dev/drum; this has led to 
considerable humor and not a few straight-faced but utterly bogus `explanations' 
getting foisted on newbies.
%
drunk mouse syndrome, n. 

(also `mouse on drugs') A malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some 
computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in 
random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse. Can 
usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and plugging it back again. Another 
recommended fix for optical mice is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees. 

At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, most people kept a can of copier cleaner (isopropyl 
alcohol) at their desks. When the steel ball on the mouse had picked up enough 
cruft to be unreliable, the mouse was doused in cleaner, which restored it for 
a while. However, this operation left a fine residue that accelerated the 
accumulation of cruft, so the dousings became more and more frequent. Finally, 
the mouse was declared `alcoholic' and sent to the clinic to be dried out in a 
CFC ultrasonic bath. 
%
Duff's device, n. 

The most dramatic use yet seen of fall through in C, invented by Tom Duff 
when he was at Lucasfilm. Trying to bum all the instructions he could out 
of an inner loop that copied data serially onto an output port, he decided 
to unroll it. He then realized that the unrolled version could be 
implemented by interlacing the structures of a switch and a loop: 

   register n = (count + 7) / 8;      /* count > 0 assumed */

   switch (count % 8)
   {
   case 0:        do {  *to = *from++;
   case 7:              *to = *from++;
   case 6:              *to = *from++;
   case 5:              *to = *from++;
   case 4:              *to = *from++;
   case 3:              *to = *from++;
   case 2:              *to = *from++;
   case 1:              *to = *from++;
                      } while (--n > 0);
   }

Shocking though it appears to all who encounter it for the first time, the 
device is actually perfectly valid, legal C. C's default fall through in case 
statements has long been its most controversial single feature; Duff observed 
that "This code forms some sort of argument in that debate, but I'm not sure 
whether it's for or against." [...] 
%
dumbed down, adj. 

Simplified, with a strong connotation of oversimplified. Often, a marketroid 
will insist that the interfaces and documentation of software be dumbed down 
after the designer has burned untold gallons of midnight oil making it smart. 
This creates friction. 
%
dusty deck, n. 

Old software (especially applications) which one is obliged to remain compatible 
with, or to maintain (DP types call this `legacy code', a term hackers consider 
smarmy and excessively reverent). The term implies that the software in question 
is a holdover from card-punch days. Used esp. when referring to old scientific 
and number-crunching software, much of which was written in FORTRAN and very 
poorly documented but is believed to be too expensive to replace. 
%
earthquake, n. 

[IBM] The ultimate real-world shock test for computer hardware. Hackish sources 
at IBM deny the rumor that the Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by the 
company to test quality-assurance procedures at its California plants. 
%
eat flaming death, imp. 

A construction popularized among hackers by the infamous CPU Wars comic; 
supposedly derived from a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi 
propaganda comic that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or 
something of the sort (however, it is also reported that on the Firesign 
Theatre's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own" a character 
won the right to scream "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs" in the 
middle of Oscar night on a game show; this may have been an influence). 
Used in humorously overblown expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, 
EBCDIC users!" 
%
EBCDIC /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see`dik/, or /eb'k*-dik/, n. 


[abbrev, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] 
An alleged character set used on IBM dinosaurs. It exists in at least six 
mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such delights as non-contiguous 
letter sequences and the absence of several ASCII punctuation characters 
fairly important for modern computer languages (exactly which characters are 
absent varies according to which version of EBCDIC you're looking at). IBM 
adapted EBCDIC from punched card code in the early 1960s and promulgated it 
as a customer-control tactic, spurning the already established ASCII standard. 
Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own description of 
the EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them is still internally 
classified top-secret, burn-before-reading. Hackers blanch at the very name of 
EBCDIC and consider it a manifestation of purest evil. 
%
ed, n. 

"ed is the standard text editor." Line taken from original the Unix manual 
page on ed, an ancient line-oriented editor that is by now used only by a 
few Real Programmers, and even then only for batch operations. The original 
line is sometimes uttered near the beginning of an emacs vs. vi holy war on 
Usenet, with the (vain) hope to quench the discussion before it really takes 
off. Often followed by a standard text describing the many virtues of ed 
(such as the small memory footprint on a Timex Sinclair, and the consistent 
(because nearly non-existent) user interface). 
%
eighty-column mind, n. 

[IBM] The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the transition from 
punched card to tape was traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks 
yet). It is said that these people, including (according to an old joke) 
the founder of IBM, will be buried `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge 
being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 
and 1622 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called 
"The Last Bug", the climactic lines of which are as follows: 

   He died at the console
   Of hunger and thirst.
   Next day he was buried,
   Face down, 9-edge first.

The eighty-column mind was thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer 
base and its thinking. This only began to change in the mid-1990s when IBM 
began to reinvent itself after the triumph of the killer micro. 
%
El Camino Bignum /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ n. 

The road mundanely called El Camino Real, running along San Francisco 
peninsula. It originally extended all the way down to Mexico City; many 
portions of the old road are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco 
peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical 
north and south even though it isn't really north-south in many places. 
El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University and so is familiar to 
hackers. 

When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long 
road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on `real', he started calling it 
`El Camino Double Precision' -- but when the hacker was told that the road 
was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it `El Camino Bignum', and that name 
has stuck.

[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was in fact himself --ESR] 

In recent years, the synonym `El Camino Virtual' has been reported as an 
alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley. Mathematically literate 
hackers in the Valley have also been heard to refer to some major cross-street 
intersecting El Camino Real as "El Camino Imaginary". One popular theory is 
that the intersection is located near Moffett Field - where they keep all 
those complex planes. 
%
elegant, adj. 

[common; from mathematical usage] Combining simplicity, power, and a certain 
ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than `clever', `winning', or even cuspy. 

The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de Saint-Exupry, probably 
best known for his classic children's book "The Little Prince", was also an 
aircraft designer. He gave us perhaps the best definition of engineering elegance 
when he said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is 
nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away." 
%
elevator controller, n. 

An archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like toaster (which superseded 
it). During one period (1983-84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C 
standardization committee) this was the canonical example of a really stupid, 
memory-limited computation environment. "You can't require printf(3) to be part 
of the default runtime library -- what if you're targeting an elevator 
controller?" Elevator controllers became important rhetorical weapons on both 
sides of several holy wars. 
%
enhancement, n. 

Common marketroid-speak for a bug fix. This abuse of language is a popular and 
time-tested way to turn incompetence into increased revenue. A hacker being 
ironic would instead call the fix a feature -- or perhaps save some effort by 
declaring the bug itself to be a feature. 
%
EOU /E-O-U/, n. 

The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control character (End Of User) that would 
make an ASR-33 Teletype explode on receipt. This construction parodies the 
numerous obscure delimiter and control characters left in ASCII from the days 
when it was associated more with wire-service teletypes than computers (e.g., 
FS, GS, RS, US, EM, SUB, ETX, and esp. EOT). It is worth remembering that 
ASR-33s were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a lot of clattering parts; the 
notion that one might explode was nowhere near as ridiculous as it might seem 
to someone sitting in front of a tube or flatscreen today. 
%
epoch, n.

[...]
Microsoft Windows, on the other hand, has an epoch problem every 49.7 days - 
but this is seldom noticed as Windows is almost incapable of staying up 
continuously for that long. 
%
Eric Conspiracy, n. 

A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a 
sinister conspiracy by an infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1987; this was 
doubtless influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre. 
There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom 
than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless they are 
correlated in some arcane way. Well-known examples include Eric Allman (he of 
the `Allman style' described under indent style) and Erik Fair (co-author of 
NNTP); your editor has heard from more than a hundred others by email, and the 
organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly 
from more than one site. 
%
Eris /e'ris/, n. 

The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord, Confusion, and Things You Know Not Of; 
her name was latinized to Discordia and she was worshiped by that name in Rome. 
Not a very friendly deity in the Classical original, she was reinvented as a 
more benign personification of creative anarchy starting in 1959 by the adherents 
of Discordianism and has since been a semi-serious subject of veneration in 
several `fringe' cultures, including hackerdom. 
%
error 33 [XEROX PARC], n. 

1. Predicating one research effort upon the success of another. 
2. Allowing your own research effort to be placed on the critical path of some 
other project (be it a research effort or not). 
%
exercise, left as an, adj. 

[from technical books] Used to complete a proof when one doesn't mind a handwave, 
or to avoid one entirely. The complete phrase is: "The proof [or `the rest'] is 
left as an exercise for the reader." This comment has occasionally been attached 
to unsolved research problems by authors possessed of either an evil sense of 
humor or a vast faith in the capabilities of their audiences
%
Exploder, n. 

Used within Microsoft to refer to the Windows Explorer, the interface 
component of Windows 95 and WinNT 4. Our spies report that most of 
the heavy guns at MS came from a Unix background and use command line 
utilities; even they are scornful of the over-gingerbreaded WIMP 
environments that they have been called upon to create. 
%
fairings /fer'ingz/, n. 

[FreeBSD; orig. a typo for `fairness'] A term thrown out in discussion whenever 
a completely and transparently nonsensical argument in one's favor(?) seems called 
for, e,g. at the end of a really long thread for which the outcome is no longer 
even cared about since everyone is now so sick of it; or in rebuttal to another 
nonsensical argument ("Change the loader to look for /kernel.pl? What about 
fairings?") 
%
fat electrons, n. 

Old-time hacker David Cargill's theory on the causation of computer glitches. 
Your typical electric utility draws its line current out of the big generators 
with a pair of coil taps located near the top of the dynamo. When the normal 
tap brushes get dirty, they take them off line to clean them up, and use special 
auxiliary taps on the bottom of the coil. Now, this is a problem, because when 
they do that they get not ordinary or `thin' electrons, but the fat'n'sloppy 
electrons that are heavier and so settle to the bottom of the generator. These 
flow down ordinary wires just fine, but when they have to turn a sharp corner 
(as in an integrated-circuit via), they're apt to get stuck. This is what causes 
computer glitches. [Fascinating. Obviously, fat electrons must gain mass by 
bogon absorption --ESR] 
%
featurectomy /fee`ch*r-ek't*-mee/, n. 

The act of removing a feature from a program. Featurectomies come in two flavors, 
the `righteous' and the `reluctant'. Righteous featurectomies are performed 
because the remover believes the program would be more elegant without the 
feature, or there is already an equivalent and better way to achieve the same 
end. (Doing so is not quite the same thing as removing a misfeature.) Reluctant 
featurectomies are performed to satisfy some external constraint such as code 
size or execution speed. 
%
feetch feetch /feech feech/, interj. 

If someone tells you about some new improvement to a program, you might respond: 
"Feetch, feetch!" The meaning of this depends critically on vocal inflection. 
With enthusiasm, it means something like "Boy, that's great! What a great hack!" 
Grudgingly or with obvious doubt, it means "I don't know; it sounds like just 
one more unnecessary and complicated thing". With a tone of resignation, it 
means, "Well, I'd rather keep it simple, but I suppose it has to be done". 
%
field circus, n.

[a derogatory pun on `field service'] 
The field service organization of any hardware manufacturer, but originally 
DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about field circus engineers: 

Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
   with a flat tire?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer
   who is out of gas?
A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
A: The spare is flat, too.
%
Finagle's Law, n. 

The generalized or `folk' version of Murphy's Law, fully named "Finagle's Law 
of Dynamic Negatives" and usually rendered "Anything that can go wrong, will". 
May have been first published by Francis P. Chisholm in his 1963 essay "The 
Chisholm Effect", later reprinted in the classic anthology "A Stress Analysis 
Of A Strapless Evening Gown: And Other Essays For A Scientific Eye" (Robert 
Baker ed, Prentice-Hall, ISBN 0-13-852608-7). 

The label `Finagle's Law' was popularized by SF author Larry Niven in several 
stories depicting a frontier culture of asteroid miners; this `Belter' culture 
professed a religion and/or running joke involving the worship of the dread god 
Finagle and his mad prophet Murphy. Some technical and scientific cultures (e.g., 
paleontologists) know it under the name `Sod's Law'; this usage may be more 
common in Great Britain. 

One variant favored among hackers is "The perversity of the Universe tends 
towards a maximum"; Niven specifically referred to this as O'Toole's Corollary 
of Finagle's Law. 
%
finger-pointing syndrome, n. 

All-too-frequent result of bugs, esp. in new or experimental configurations. The 
hardware vendor points a finger at the software. The software vendor points a 
finger at the hardware. All the poor users get is the finger. 
%
finn, v. 

[IRC] To pull rank on somebody based on the amount of time one has spent on IRC. 
The term derives from the fact that IRC was originally written in Finland in 1987. 
There may be some influence from the `Finn' character in William Gibson's seminal 
cyberpunk novel "Count Zero", who at one point says to another (much younger) 
character "I have a pair of shoes older than you are, so shut up!" 
%
firewall code, n. 

1. The code you put in a system (say, a telephone switch) to make sure that the 
users can't do any damage. Since users always want to be able to do everything 
but never want to suffer for any mistakes, the construction of a firewall is a 
question not only of defensive coding but also of interface presentation, so 
that users don't even get curious about those corners of a system where they can 
burn themselves. 
2. Any sanity check inserted to catch a can't happen error. Wise programmers often 
change code to fix a bug twice: once to fix the bug, and once to insert a firewall 
which would have arrested the bug before it did quite as much damage. 
%
fireworks mode, n. 

1. The mode a machine is sometimes said to be in when it is performing a crash and 
burn operation. 
2. There is (or was) a more specific meaning of this term in the Amiga community. 
The word fireworks described the effects of a particularly serious crash which 
prevented the video pointer(s) from getting reset at the start of the vertical 
blank. This caused the DAC to scroll through the entire contents of CHIP (video or 
video+CPU) memory. Since each bit plane would scroll separately this was quite a 
spectacular effect. 
%
FITNR //, adj. 

[Thinking Machines, Inc.] Fixed In The Next Release. A written-only notation 
attached to bug reports. Often wishful thinking. 
%
fix, n.,v. 

What one does when a problem has been reported too many times to be ignored. 
%
flap, vt. 

1. [obs.] To unload a DECtape (so it goes flap, flap, flap...). Old-time hackers 
at MIT tell of the days when the disk was device 0 and DEC 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. 
Modern cartridge tapes no longer actually flap, but the usage has remained. (The 
term could well be re-applied to DEC's TK50 cartridge tape drive, a spectacularly 
misengineered contraption which makes a loud flapping sound, almost like an old 
reel-type lawnmower, in one of its many tape-eating failure modes.) 
%
flowchart, n. 

[techspeak] An archaic form of visual control-flow specification employing arrows 
and `speech balloons' of various shapes. Hackers never use flowcharts, consider 
them extremely silly, and associate them with COBOL programmers, card wallopers, 
and other lower forms of life. This attitude follows from the observations that 
flowcharts (at least from a hacker's point of view) are no easier to read than 
code, are less precise, and tend to fall out of sync with the code (so that they 
either obfuscate it rather than explaining it, or require extra maintenance effort 
that doesn't improve the code). 
%
fnord n. 

[from the "Illuminatus Trilogy"] 1. A word used in email and news postings to tag 
utterances as surrealist mind-play or humor, esp. in connection with Discordianism 
and elaborate conspiracy theories. "I heard that David Koresh is sharing an 
apartment in Argentina with Hitler. (Fnord.)" "Where can I fnord get the Principia 
Discordia from?" 2. A metasyntactic variable, commonly used by hackers with ties 
to Discordianism or the Church of the SubGenius. 
%
fool, n. 

As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually reasons 
from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot be persuaded 
by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in its other senses, 
i.e., to describe a person with a native incapacity to reason correctly, 
or a clown. Indeed, in hackish experience many fools are capable of 
reasoning all too effectively in executing their errors. 

The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the character 
string "F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as a floating point 
number it caused a crash, and as an integer or a character string it was 
very recognizable in a dump. Sadly, one day a very senior professor at 
Nottingham University wrote a program that called him a fool. He proceeded 
to demonstrate the correctness of this assertion by lobbying the university 
(not quite successfully) to forbid the use of Algol on its computers. 
%
for values of 

[MIT] A common rhetorical maneuver at MIT is to use any of the canonical random 
numbers as placeholders for variables. "The max function takes 42 arguments, 
for arbitrary values of 42." "There are 69 ways to leave your lover, for 
69 = 50." This is especially likely when the speaker has uttered a random number 
and realizes that it was not recognized as such, but even `non-random' numbers 
are occasionally used in this fashion. A related joke is that pi equals 3 -- for 
small values of pi and large values of 3. 

Historical note: at MIT this usage has traditionally been traced to the 
programming language MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder), an Algol-58-like language 
that was the most common choice among mainstream (non-hacker) users at MIT in 
the mid-60s. It inherited from Algol-58 a control structure FOR VALUES OF X = 3, 
7, 99 DO ... that would repeat the indicated instructions for each value in the 
list (unlike the usual FOR that only works for arithmetic sequences of values). 
MAD is long extinct, but similar for-constructs still flourish (e.g., in Unix's 
shell languages). 
%
fortune cookie, n. 

[WAITS, via Unix; common] A random quote, item of trivia, joke, or maxim printed 
to the user's tty at login time or (less commonly) at logout time. Items from 
this lexicon have often been used as fortune cookies.

[one could also add, that you're looking at one right now --kalle] 
%
four-color glossies, n. 

1. Literature created by marketroids that allegedly contains technical specs but 
which is in fact as superficial as possible without being totally content-free. 
"Forget the four-color glossies, give me the tech ref manuals." Often applied as 
an indication of superficiality even when the material is printed on ordinary 
paper in black and white. Four-color-glossy manuals are never useful for solving 
a problem. 2. [rare] Applied by extension to manual pages that don't contain 
enough information to diagnose why the program doesn't produce the expected or 
desired output. 
%
Frankenputer, n. 

1. A mostly-working computer thrown together from the spare parts of several 
machines out of which the magic smoke had been let. Most shops have a closet 
full of nonworking machines. When a new machine is needed immediately (for 
testing, for example) and there is no time (or budget) to requisition a new 
box, someone (often an intern) is tasked with building a Frankenputer. 
2. Also used in referring to a machine that once was a name-brand computer, 
but has been upgraded long beyond its useful life, to the point at which the 
nameplate violates truth-in-advertising laws (e.g., a Pentium II-class 
machine inexplicably living in a case marked "Gateway 486/66"). 
%
frink /frink/, v. 

The unknown ur-verb, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on the Usenet 
newsgroup alt.fan.lemurs, where it is said that the lemurs know what `frink' 
means, but they aren't telling. 
%
FUBAR, n. 

The Failed UniBus Address Register in a VAX. A good example of how jargon can 
occasionally be snuck past the suits. 
%
FUD /fuhd/, n. 

Defined by Gene Amdahl after he left IBM to found his own company: "FUD is the 
fear, uncertainty, and doubt that IBM sales people instill in the minds of 
potential customers who might be considering [Amdahl] products." The idea, of 
course, was to persuade them to go with safe IBM gear rather than with 
competitors' equipment. This implicit coercion was traditionally accomplished 
by promising that Good Things would happen to people who stuck with IBM, but 
Dark Shadows loomed over the future of competitors' equipment or software.
After 1990 the term FUD was associated increasingly frequently with Microsoft, 
and has become generalized to refer to any kind of disinformation used as a 
competitive weapon. 
%
functino, n. 

[uncommon, U.K.; originally a serendipitous typo in 1994] A pointer to a 
function in C and C++. By association with sub-atomic particles such as the 
neutrino, it accurately conveys an impression of smallness (one pointer is 
four bytes on most systems) and speed (hackers can and do use arrays of 
functinos to replace a switch() statement). 
%
funny money, n. 

1. Notional `dollar' units of computing time and/or storage handed to students 
at the beginning of a computer course; also called `play money' or `purple 
money' (in implicit opposition to real or `green' money). In New Zealand and 
Germany the odd usage `paper money' has been recorded; in Germany, the 
particularly amusing synonym `transfer ruble' commemmorates the funny money 
used for trade between COMECON countries back when the Soviet Bloc still 
existed. When your funny money ran out, your account froze and you needed to 
go to a professor to get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing 
cycles has made this less common. The amounts allocated were almost invariably 
too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by with minimum work. 
In extreme cases, the practice led to small-scale black markets in bootlegged 
computer accounts. 2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any 
kind used as a resource-allocation hack within a system. Antonym: `real money'. 
%
fuzzball, n. 

[TCP/IP hackers] A DEC LSI-11 running a particular suite of homebrewed software 
written by Dave Mills and assorted co-conspirators, used in the early 1980s for 
Internet protocol testbedding and experimentation. These were used as NSFnet 
backbone sites in its early 56kb-line days; a few were still active on the 
Internet as late as mid-1993, doing odd jobs such as network time service. 
%
gabriel /gay'bree-*l/, n. 

[for Dick Gabriel, SAIL LISP hacker and volleyball fanatic] An unnecessary 
(in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic, e.g., tying one's shoelaces 
or combing one's hair repeatedly, asking the time, etc. Also used to refer to 
the perpetrator of such tactics. Also, `pulling a Gabriel', `Gabriel mode'. 
%
gang bang, n. 

The use of large numbers of loosely coupled programmers in an attempt to wedge 
a great many features into a product in a short time. Though there have been 
memorable gang bangs (e.g., that over-the-weekend assembler port mentioned in 
Steven Levy's "Hackers"), and large numbers of loosely-coupled programmers 
operating in bazaar mode can do very useful work when they're not on a 
deadline, most are perpetrated by large companies trying to meet unrealistic 
deadlines; the inevitable result is enormous buggy masses of code entirely 
lacking in orthogonality. When market-driven managers make a list of all the 
features the competition has and assign one programmer to implement each, the 
probability of maintaining a coherent (or even functional) design goes to 
epsilon. 
%
Gates's Law 

"The speed of software halves every 18 months." This oft-cited law is an 
ironic comment on the tendency of software bloat to outpace the 
every-18-month doubling in hardware caopacity per dollar predicted by 
Moore's Law. The reference is to Bill Gates; Microsoft is widely considered 
among the worst if not the worst of the perpetrators of bloat. 
%
Genius From Mars Technique, n. 

[TMRC] A visionary quality which enables one to ignore the standard approach 
and come up with a totally unexpected new algorithm. An attack on a problem 
from an offbeat angle that no one has ever thought of before, but that in 
retrospect makes total sense. 
%
GIGO /gi:'goh/, [acronym] 

1. `Garbage In, Garbage Out' -- usually said in response to lusers who complain 
that a program didn't "do the right thing" when given imperfect input or 
otherwise mistreated in some way. Also commonly used to describe failures in 
human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data. 
2. `Garbage In, Gospel Out': this more recent expansion is a sardonic comment 
on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in `computerized' data. 
%
gilley, n. 

[Usenet] The unit of analogical bogosity. According to its originator, the standard 
for one gilley was "the act of bogotoficiously comparing the shutting down of 1000 
machines for a day with the killing of one person". The milligilley has been found 
to suffice for most normal conversational exchanges. 
%
Godwin's Law, prov. 

[Usenet] "As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison 
involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one." There is a tradition in many groups 
that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis 
has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress. Godwin's Law thus 
practically guarantees the existence of an upper bound on thread length in 
those groups. However there is also a widely- recognized codicil that any 
intentional triggering of Godwin's Law in order to invoke its thread-ending 
effects will be unsuccessful. 
%
gonkulator /gon'kyoo-lay-tr/, n. 

[common; from the 1960s "Hogan's Heroes" TV series] A pretentious piece of 
equipment that actually serves no useful purpose. Usually used to describe 
one's least favorite piece of computer hardware. 
%
gorets /gor'ets/, n. 

The unknown ur-noun, fill in your own meaning. Found esp. on the Usenet 
newsgroup alt.gorets, which seems to be a running contest to redefine the 
word by implication in the funniest and most peculiar way, with the 
understanding that no definition is ever final. [A correspondent from the 
former Soviet Union informs me that `gorets' is Russian for `mountain 
dweller'. Another from France informs me that `goret' is archaic French 
for a young pig --ESR] 
%
gorilla arm, n. 

The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology 
despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all 
those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed 
to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more 
than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and 
oversized -- the operator looks like a gorilla while using the touch screen 
and feels like one afterwards. This is now considered a classic cautionary 
tale to human-factors designers; "Remember the gorilla arm!" is shorthand 
for "How is this going to fly in real use?". 
%
gotcha, n. 

A misfeature of a system, especially a programming language or environment, 
that tends to breed bugs or mistakes because it is both enticingly easy to 
invoke and completely unexpected and/or unreasonable in its outcome. For 
example, a classic gotcha in C is the fact that if (a=b) {code;} is 
syntactically valid and sometimes even correct. It puts the value of b into 
a and then executes code if a is non-zero. What the programmer probably 
meant was if (a==b) {code;}, which executes code if a and b are equal. 
%
Great Runes, n. 

Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still 
emit these. 

There is a widespread legend (repeated by earlier versions of this entry, 
though tagged as folklore) that the uppercase-only support of various old 
character codes and I/O equipment was chosen by a religious person in a 
position of power at the Teletype Company because supporting both upper 
and lower cases was too expensive and supporting lower case only would have 
made it impossible to spell `God' correctly. Not true; the upper-case 
interpretation of teleprinter codes was well established by 1870, long 
before Teletype was even founded.
%
green card, n. 

[after the "IBM System/360 Reference Data" card] A summary of an assembly 
language, even if the color is not green and not a card. 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." 

The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was 
introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An anecdote from IBM refers to a scene 
that took place in a programmers' terminal room at Yorktown in 1978. A luser 
overheard one of the programmers ask another "Do you have a green card?" The 
other grunted and passed the first a thick yellow booklet. At this point the 
luser turned a delicate shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never to 
return. 

In fall 2000 it was reported from Electronic Data Systems that the green card 
for 370 machines has been a blue-green booklet since 1989. 
%
green lightning, n. 

[IBM] 1. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals 
while a new symbol set is being downloaded. This hardware bug was left 
deliberately unfixed, as some genius within IBM suggested it would let the 
user know that `something is happening'. That, it certainly does. Later 
microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were actually programmed 
to produce green lightning! 2. [proposed] Any bug perverted into an alleged 
feature by adroit rationalization or marketing. "Motorola calls the CISC 
cruft in the 88000 architecture `compatibility logic', but I call it green 
lightning". 
%
grilf //, n. 

Girlfriend. Like newsfroup and filk, a typo reincarnated as a new word. 
Seems to have originated sometime in 1992 on Usenet. [A friend tells me 
there was a Lloyd Biggle SF novel "Watchers Of The Dark", in which alien 
species after species goes insane and begins to chant "Grilf! Grilf!". 
A human detective eventually determines that the word means "Liar!" I hope 
this has nothing to do with the popularity of the Usenet term. --ESR] 
%
grind crank, n.

A mythical accessory to a terminal. A crank on the side of a monitor, 
which when operated makes a zizzing noise and causes the computer to 
run faster. Usually one does not refer to a grind crank out loud, but 
merely makes the appropriate gesture and noise. 

Historical note: At least one real machine actually had a grind crank 
-- the R1, a research machine built toward the end of the days of the 
great vacuum tube computers, in 1959. R1 (also known as `The Rice 
Institute Computer' (TRIC) and later as `The Rice University Computer' 
(TRUC)) had a single-step/free-run switch for use when debugging programs. 
Since single-stepping through a large program was rather tedious, there 
was also a crank with a cam and gear arrangement that repeatedly pushed 
the single-step button. This allowed one to `crank' through a lot of code, 
then slow down to single-step for a bit when you got near the code of 
interest, poke at some registers using the console typewriter, and then 
keep on cranking. 
%
gripenet, n. 

[IBM] A wry (and thoroughly unofficial) name for IBM's internal VNET 
system, deriving from its common use by IBMers to voice pointed criticism 
of IBM management that would be taboo in more formal channels. 
%
grue, n. 

[from archaic English verb for `shudder', as with fear] The grue was 
originated in the game Zork (Dave Lebling took the name from Jack Vance's 
"Dying Earth" fantasies) and used in several other Infocom games as a 
hint that you should perhaps look for a lamp, torch or some type of light 
source. Wandering into a dark area would cause the game to prompt you, 
"It is very dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue." 
If you failed to locate a light source within the next couple of moves 
this would indeed be the case. 

The grue, according to scholars of the Great Underground Empire, is a 
sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite 
diet is either adventurers or enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is 
tempered by its extreme fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by 
the light of day, and only a few have been observed in their underground 
lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few have survived their fearsome 
jaws to tell the tale. Grues have sharp claws and fangs, and an 
uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle. They are certainly the most 
evil-tempered of all creatures; to say they are touchy is a dangerous 
understatement. "Sour as a grue" is a common expression, even among 
grues themselves. 

All this folklore is widely known among hackers. 
%
gumby /guhm'bee/, n. 

[from a class of Monty Python characters, poss. with some influence from 
the 1960s claymation character] 
1. An act of minor but conspicuous stupidity, often in `gumby maneuver' 
or `pull a gumby'. 
2. [NRL] n. A bureaucrat, or other technical incompetent who impedes the 
progress of real work. 
3. adj. Relating to things typically associated with people in sense 2. 
(e.g. "Ran would be writing code, but Richard gave him gumby work that's 
due on Friday", or, "Dammit! Travel screwed up my plane tickets. I have 
to go out on gumby patrol.") 
%
guru meditation, n. 

Amiga equivalent of `panic' in Unix (sometimes just called a `guru' or 
`guru event'). When the system crashes, a cryptic message of the form 
"GURU MEDITATION #XXXXXXXX.YYYYYYYY" may appear, indicating what the 
problem was. An Amiga guru can figure things out from the numbers. 
Sometimes a guru event must be followed by a Vulcan nerve pinch. 

This term is (no surprise) an in-joke from the earliest days of the Amiga. 
An earlier product of the Amiga corporation was a device called a 
`Joyboard' which was basically a plastic board built onto a joystick-like 
device; it was sold with a skiing game cartridge for the Atari game machine. 
It is said that whenever the prototype OS crashed, the system programmer 
responsible would calm down by concentrating on a solution while sitting 
cross-legged on a Joyboard trying to keep the board in balance. This 
position resembled that of a meditating guru. Sadly, the joke was removed 
fairly early on (but there's a well-known patch to restore it in more 
recent versions). 
%
hack value, n. 

Often adduced as the reason or motivation for expending effort toward a 
seemingly useless goal, the point being that the accomplished goal is a 
hack. For example, MacLISP had features for reading and printing Roman 
numerals, which were installed purely for hack value. This cannot really 
be explained, only experienced. As Louis Armstrong once said when asked 
to explain jazz: "Man, if you gotta ask you'll never know." (Feminists 
please note Fats Waller's explanation of rhythm: "Lady, if you got to 
ask, you ain't got it.") 
%
Hacking X for Y, n. 

[ITS] Ritual phrasing of part of the information which ITS made publicly 
available about each user. This information (the INQUIR record) was a sort 
of form in which the user could fill out various fields. On display, two 
of these fields were always combined into a project description of the form 
"Hacking X for Y" (e.g., "Hacking perceptrons for Minsky"). This form of 
description became traditional and has since been carried over to other 
systems with more general facilities for self-advertisement (such as Unix 
plan files). 
%
handwave 

[poss. from gestures characteristic of stage magicians] 
1. v. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to support a 
(possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic. 
2. n. The act of handwaving. "Boy, what a handwave!" 

If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It 
is self-evident that...", it is a good bet he is about to handwave 
(alternatively, use of these constructions in a sarcastic tone before a 
paraphrase of someone else's argument suggests that it is a handwave). 
The theory behind this term is that if you wave your hands at the right 
moment, the listener may be sufficiently distracted to not notice that 
what you have said is bogus. Failing that, if a listener does object, 
you might try to dismiss the objection with a wave of your hand. 

The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures: both hands up, 
palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at the 
elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the handwave); 
alternatively, holding the forearms in one position while rotating the 
hands at the wrist to make them flutter. In context, the gestures alone 
can suffice as a remark; if a speaker makes an outrageously unsupported 
assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this way, as an accusation, 
far more eloquent than words could express, that his logic is faulty. 
%
Hanlon's Razor, prov. 

A corollary of Finagle's Law, similar to Occam's Razor, that reads "Never 
attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." 
The derivation of the Hanlon eponym is not definitely known, but a very 
similar remark ("You have attributed conditions to villainy that simply 
result from stupidity.") appears in "Logic of Empire", a classic 1941 SF 
story by Robert A. Heinlein, who calls it the `devil theory' of sociology. 
Heinlein's popularity in the hacker culture makes plausible the supposition 
that `Hanlon' is derived from `Heinlein' by phonetic corruption. A similar 
epigram has been attributed to William James, but Heinlein more probably got 
the idea from Alfred Korzybski and other practitioners of General Semantics. 
Quoted here because it seems to be a particular favorite of hackers, often 
showing up in sig blocks, fortune cookie files and the login banners of BBS 
systems and commercial networks. This probably reflects the hacker's daily 
experience of environments created by well-intentioned but short-sighted 
people. 
%
HCF /H-C-F/, n. 

Mnemonic for `Halt and Catch Fire', any of several undocumented and 
semi-mythical machine instructions with destructive side-effects, supposedly 
included for test purposes on several well-known architectures going as far 
back as the IBM 360. The MC6800 microprocessor was the first for which an 
HCF opcode became widely known. This instruction caused the processor to 
toggle a subset of the bus lines as rapidly as it could; in some configurations 
this could actually cause lines to burn up. 
%
heatseeker, n. 

[IBM] A customer who can be relied upon to buy, without fail, the latest 
version of an existing product (not quite the same as a member of the 
lunatic fringe). A 1993 example of a heatseeker was someone who, owning 
a 286 PC and Windows 3.0, went out and bought Windows 3.1 (which offers 
no worthwhile benefits unless you have a 386). If all customers were 
heatseekers, vast amounts of money could be made by just fixing some of 
the bugs in each release (n) and selling it to them as release (n+1). 
Microsoft in fact seems to have mastered this technique. 
%
heisenbug /hi:'zen-buhg/, n. 

[from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics] A bug that 
disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it. 
(This usage is not even particularly fanciful; the use of a debugger sometimes 
alters a program's operating environment significantly enough that buggy code, 
such as that which relies on the values of uninitialized memory, behaves quite 
differently.) Antonym of Bohr bug. In C, nine out of ten heisenbugs result from 
uninitialized auto variables, fandango on core phenomena (esp. lossage related 
to corruption of the malloc arena) or errors that smash the stack. 
%
hello sailor!, interj. 

Occasional West Coast equivalent of hello world; seems to have originated at 
SAIL, later associated with the game Zork (which also included "hello, aviator" 
and "hello, implementor"). Originally from the traditional hooker's greeting 
to a swabbie fresh off the boat, of course. The standard response is "Nothing 
happens here."; of all the Zork/Dungeon games, only in Infocom's Zork 3 is 
"Hello, Sailor" actually useful (excluding the unique situation where _knowing_ 
this fact is important in Dungeon...). 
%
hex, n. 

1. Short for hexadecimal, base 16. 
2. A 6-pack of anything. Neither usage has anything to do with magic or black 
art, though the pun is appreciated and occasionally used by hackers. True story: 
As a joke, some hackers once offered some surplus ICs for sale to be worn as 
protective amulets against hostile magic. The chips were, of course, hex inverters. 
%
hexadecimal, n. 

Base 16. Coined in the early 1950s to replace earlier `sexadecimal', which 
was too racy and amusing for stuffy IBM, and later adopted by the rest of 
the industry. 

Actually, neither term is etymologically pure. If we take `binary' to be 
paradigmatic, the most etymologically correct term for base 10, for example, 
is `denary', which comes from `deni' (ten at a time, ten each), a Latin 
`distributive' number; the corresponding term for base-16 would be something 
like `sendenary'. "Decimal" comes from the combining root of `decem', Latin 
for 10. If wish to create a truly analogous word for base 16, we should start 
with `sedecim', Latin for 16. Ergo, `sedecimal' is the word that would have 
been created by a Latin scholar. The `sexa-' prefix is Latin but incorrect in 
this context, and `hexa-' is Greek. The word `octal' is similarly incorrect; 
a correct form would be `octaval' (to go with decimal), or `octonary' (to go 
with binary). If anyone ever implements a base-3 computer, computer scientists 
will be faced with the unprecedented dilemma of a choice between two correct 
forms; both `ternary' and `trinary' have a claim to this throne. 
%
hexit /hek'sit/, n. 

A hexadecimal digit (0-9, and A-F or a-f). Used by people who claim that 
there are only ten digits, dammit; sixteen-fingered human beings are rather 
rare, despite what some keyboard designs might seem to imply. 
%
high moby /hi:' mohb'ee/, n. 

The high half of a 512K PDP-10's physical address space; the other half was 
of course the low moby. This usage has been generalized in a way that has 
outlasted the PDP-10; for example, at the 1990 Washington D.C. Area Science 
Fiction Conclave (Disclave), when a miscommunication resulted in two separate 
wakes being held in commemoration of the shutdown of MIT's last ITS machines, 
the one on the upper floor was dubbed the `high moby' and the other the 
`low moby'. All parties involved grokked this instantly. 
%
hired gun, n. 

A contract programmer, as opposed to a full-time staff member. All the 
connotations of this term suggested by innumerable spaghetti Westerns 
are intentional. 
%
hollised /hol'ist/, adj. 

[Usenet: sci.space] To be hollised is to have been ordered by one's employer 
not to post any even remotely job-related material to Usenet (or, by extension, 
to other Internet media). The original and most notorious case of this involved 
one Ken Hollis, a Lockheed employee and space-program enthusiast who posted 
publicly available material on access to Space Shuttle launches to sci.space. 
He was gagged under threat of being fired in 1994 at the behest of NASA 
public-relations officers. The result was, of course, a huge publicity black 
eye for NASA. Nevertheless several other NASA contractor employees were 
subsequently hollised for similar activities. Use of this term carries the 
strong connotation that the persons doing the gagging are bureaucratic idiots 
blinded to their own best interests by territorial reflexes. 
%
house wizard, n. 

[prob. from ad-agency tradetalk, `house freak'] A hacker occupying a 
technical-specialist, R&D, or systems position at a commercial shop. A really 
effective house wizard can have influence out of all proportion to his/her 
ostensible rank and still not have to wear a suit. Used esp. of Unix wizards. 
The term `house guru' is equivalent. 
%
HP-SUX /H-P suhks/, n. 

Unflattering hackerism for HP-UX, Hewlett-Packard's Unix port, which features 
some truly unique bogosities in the filesystem internals and elsewhere (these 
occasionally create portability problems). HP-UX is often referred to as 
`hockey-pux' inside HP, and one respondent claims that the proper pronunciation 
is /H-P ukkkhhhh/ as though one were about to spit. Another such alternate 
spelling and pronunciation is "H-PUX" /H-puhks/. Hackers at HP/Apollo (the 
former Apollo Computers which was swallowed by HP in 1989) have been heard to 
complain that Mr. Packard should have pushed to have his name first, if for no 
other reason than the greater eloquence of the resulting acronym. 
%
I didn't change anything!, Interj. 

An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression test. 
The canonical reply to this assertion is "Then it works just the same 
as it did before, doesn't it?" See also one-line fix. This is also heard 
from applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications 
problem on an unrelated systems software change, for example a 
divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added to a network. Usually, their 
statement is found to be false. Upon close questioning, they will admit 
some major restructuring of the program that shouldn't have broken 
anything, in their opinion, but which actually hosed the code completely. 
%
I see no X here. 

Hackers (and the interactive computer games they write) traditionally favor 
this slightly marked usage over other possible equivalents such as "There's 
no X here!" or "X is missing." or "Where's the X?". This goes back to the 
original PDP-10 ADVENT, which would respond in this wise if you asked it to 
do something involving an object not present at your location in the game. 
%
IBM discount, n. 

A price increase. Outside IBM, this derives from the common perception that 
IBM products are generally overpriced; inside, it is said to spring from a 
belief that large numbers of IBM employees living in an area cause prices to rise. 
%
ID10T error /I-D-ten-T er'*r/ 

Synonym for PEBKAC ("Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair"), e.g. 
"The user is being an idiot". Tech-support people passing a problem 
report to someone higher up the food chain (and presumably better equipped 
to deal with idiots) may ask the user to convey that there seems to be an 
I-D-ten-T error. Users never twig. 
%
If you want X, you know where to find it. 

There is a legend that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of C, once responded to 
demands for features resembling those of what at the time was a much more 
popular language by observing "If you want PL/I, you know where to find it." 
Ever since, this has been hackish standard form for fending off requests to 
alter a new design to mimic some older (and, by implication, inferior and 
baroque) one. The case X = Pascal manifests semi-regularly on Usenet's 
comp.lang.c newsgroup. Indeed, the case X = X has been reported in discussions 
of graphics software. 
%
ill-behaved, adj. 

1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method that tends 
to blow up because of accumulated roundoff error or poor convergence properties. 
2. Software that bypasses the defined OS interfaces to do things (like screen, 
keyboard, and disk I/O) itself, often in a way that depends on the hardware of 
the machine it is running on or which is nonportable or incompatible with other 
pieces of software. In the IBM PC/MS-DOS world, there is a folk theorem (nearly 
true) to the effect that (owing to gross inadequacies and performance penalties 
in the OS interface) all interesting applications are ill-behaved. 
%
incantation, n. 

Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter at a system 
to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other explicit security 
features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly documented that they 
must be learned from a wizard. "This compiler normally locates initialized 
data in the data segment, but if you mutter the right incantation they will be 
forced into text space." 
%
infinite loop, n. 

One that never terminates (that is, the machine spins or buzzes forever 
and goes catatonic). There is a standard joke that has been made about 
each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast machine: "The Cray-3 is so 
fast it can execute an infinite loop in under 2 seconds!" 
%
interesting, adj. 

In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of `annoying', or 
`difficult', or both. Hackers relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all 
the irony possible out of the ancient Chinese curse "May you live in 
interesting times". 
%
ISO standard cup of tea, n. 

[South Africa] A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the 
milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no 
sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on. This may derive from 
the "NATO standard" cup of coffee and tea (milk and two sugars), military 
slang going back to the late 1950s and parodying NATO's relentless bureacratic 
drive to standardize parts across European and U.S. militaries.
[...]
[2000 update: There is now, in fact, an ISO standard 3103: `Method for 
preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests.', alleged to be 
equivalent to British Standard BS6008: `How to make a standard cup of tea.' 
- ESR] 
%
ITS /I-T-S/, n. 

1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though highly idiosyncratic 
operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT 
AI Lab. Much AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been `an 
ITS hacker' qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort. 
ITS pioneered many important innovations, including transparent file sharing 
between machines and terminal-independent I/O. After about 1982, most actual 
work was shifted to newer machines, with the remaining ITS boxes run essentially 
as a hobby and service to the hacker community. The shutdown of the lab's last 
ITS machine in May 1990 marked the end of an era and sent old-time hackers into 
mourning nationwide. 
2. A mythical image of operating-system perfection worshiped by a bizarre, fervent 
retro-cult of old-time hackers and ex-users. ITS worshipers manage somehow to 
continue believing that an OS maintained by assembly-language hand-hacking that 
supported only monocase 6-character filenames in one directory per account remains 
superior to today's state of commercial art (their venom against Unix is 
particularly intense). 
%
JCL /J-C-L/, n. 

1. IBM's supremely rude Job Control Language. JCL is the script language used 
to control the execution of programs in IBM's batch systems. JCL has a very 
fascist syntax, and some versions will, for example, barf if two spaces appear 
where it expects one. Most programmers confronted with JCL simply copy a 
working file (or card deck), changing the file names. Someone who actually 
understands and generates unique JCL is regarded with the mixed respect one 
gives to someone who memorizes the phone book. It is reported that hackers at 
IBM itself sometimes sing "Who's the breeder of the crud that mangles you and 
me? I-B-M, J-C-L, M-o-u-s-e" to the tune of the "Mickey Mouse Club" theme to 
express their opinion of the beast. 
2. A comparative for any very rude software that a hacker is expected to use. 
"That's as bad as JCL." As with COBOL, JCL is often used as an archetype of 
ugliness even by those who haven't experienced it. 
%
job security, n. 

When some piece of code is written in a particularly obscure fashion, and no 
good reason (such as time or space optimization) can be discovered, it is 
often said that the programmer was attempting to increase his job security 
(i.e., by making himself indispensable for maintenance). This sour joke seldom 
has to be said in full; if two hackers are looking over some code together and 
one points at a section and says "job security", the other one may just nod. 
%
ken /ken/, n. 

1. [Unix] Ken Thompson, principal inventor of Unix. In the early days he used 
to hand-cut distribution tapes, often with a note that read "Love, ken". 
Old-timers still use his first name (sometimes uncapitalized, because it's a 
login name and mail address) in third-person reference; it is widely 
understood (on Usenet, in particular) that without a last name `Ken' refers 
only to Ken Thompson. Similarly, Dennis without last name means Dennis Ritchie 
(and he is often known as dmr).
2. A flaming user. This was originated by the Software Support group at 
Symbolics because the two greatest flamers in the user community were both 
named Ken. 
%
killer poke, n. 

A recipe for inducing hardware damage on a machine via insertion of invalid 
values into a memory-mapped control register; used esp. of various fairly 
well-known tricks on bitty boxes without hardware memory management (such as 
the IBM PC and Commodore PET) that can overload and trash analog electronics 
in the monitor. 
%
KISS Principle /kis' prin'si-pl/, n. 

"Keep It Simple, Stupid". A maxim often invoked when discussing design to 
fend off creeping featurism and control development complexity. Possibly 
related to the marketroid maxim on sales presentations, "Keep It Short 
and Simple". 
%
Knights of the Lambda Calculus, n. 

A semi-mythical organization of wizardly LISP and Scheme hackers. The name 
refers to a mathematical formalism invented by Alonzo Church, with which 
LISP is intimately connected. There is no enrollment list and the criteria 
for induction are unclear, but one well-known LISPer has been known to give 
out buttons and, in general, the members know who they are.... 
%
Kool Aid, to drink the 

[from a kid's sugar-enriched drink in fruity flavors] When someone who should 
know better succumbs to marketing influences and actually begins to believe 
the propaganda being dished out by a vendor. Usually the decortication process 
is slow and almost unnoticeable until one day the victim emerges as a True 
Believer and begins spreading the faith himself. The term originates in the 
suicide of 914 followers of Jim Jones's People's Temple cult in Guyana in 1978. 
What they actually drank was cyanide-laced Flavor-Aid, a cheap knockoff rather 
than Kool-Aid itself. 
%
LART // 

Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool. 1. n. In the collective mythos of scary devil 
monastery, this is an essential item in the toolkit of every BOFH. The LART 
classic is a 2x4 or other large billet of wood usable as a club, to be applied 
upside the head of spammers and other people who cause sysadmins more grief than 
just naturally goes with the job. Perennial debates rage on alt.sysadmin.recovery 
over what constitutes the truly effective LART; knobkerries, semiautomatic 
weapons, flamethrowers, and tactical nukes all have their partisans.
2. v. To use a LART. Some would add "in malice", but some sysadmins do prefer 
to gently lart their users as a first (and sometimes final) warning. 
3. interj. Calling for one's LART, much as a surgeon might call "Scalpel!". 
4. interj. [rare] Used in flames as a rebuke. "LART! LART! LART!" 
%
Life is hard

[XEROX PARC] 
This phrase has two possible interpretations: 

   (1) "While your suggestion may have some merit, I will behave 
        as though I hadn't heard it." 
   (2) "While your suggestion has obvious merit, equally obvious 
        circumstances prevent it from being seriously considered." 

The charm of the phrase lies precisely in this subtle but 
important ambiguity. 
%
line 666 [from Christian eschatological myth], n. 

The notional line of source at which a program fails for obscure reasons, 
implying either that somebody is out to get it (when you are the programmer), 
or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not). "It works when 
I trace through it, but seems to crash on line 666 when I run it." "What 
happens is that whenever a large batch comes through, mmdf dies on the Line 
of the Beast. Probably some twit hardcoded a buffer size." 
%
lion food, n. 

[IBM] Middle management or HQ staff (or, by extension, administrative drones 
in general). From an old joke about two lions who, escaping from the zoo, 
split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When 
they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: 
"How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army 
to chase me -- guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to 
eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, I hid near an 
IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!" 
%
lithium lick, n. 

[NeXT] Steve Jobs. Employees who have gotten too much attention from 
their esteemed founder are said to have `lithium lick' when they begin 
to show signs of Jobsian fervor and repeat the most recent catch 
phrases in normal conversation -- for example, "It just works, right 
out of the box!" 
%
Lubarsky's Law of Cybernetic Entomology, prov. 

"There is always one more bug." 
%
mandelbug /man'del-buhg/, n. 

[from the Mandelbrot set] A bug whose underlying causes are so complex 
and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. 
This term implies that the speaker thinks it is a Bohr bug, rather than 
a heisenbug. 
%
MicroDroid, n. 

[Usenet] A Microsoft employee, esp. one who posts to various operating-
system advocacy newsgroups. MicroDroids post follow-ups to any messages 
critical of Microsoft's operating systems, and often end up sounding 
like visiting fundamentalist missionaries. 
%
MS-DOS /M-S-dos/, n.

[MicroSoft Disk Operating System] 
A clone of CP/M for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim 
Paterson at Seattle Computer Products, who called the original QDOS 
(Quick and Dirty Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever 
since. Microsoft licensed QDOS in order to have something to demo for 
IBM on time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including 
vaguely Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O 
redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and 
subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible 
versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree on 
basic things like what character to use as an option switch or whether 
to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now the 
highest-unit-volume OS in history. 
%
one-banana problem, n 

At mainframe shops, where the computers have operators for routine 
administrivia, the programmers and hardware people tend to look down on 
the operators and claim that a trained monkey could do their job. It is 
frequently observed that the incentives that would be offered said 
monkeys can be used as a scale to describe the difficulty of a task. A 
one-banana problem is simple; hence, "It's only a one-banana job at the 
most; what's taking them so long?" 

At IBM, folklore divides the world into one-, two-, and three-banana 
problems. Other cultures have different hierarchies and may divide them 
more finely; at ICL, for example, five grapes (a bunch) equals a banana. 
Their upper limit for the in-house sysapes is said to be two bananas and 
three grapes (another source claims it's three bananas and one grape, 
but observes "However, this is subject to local variations, cosmic rays 
and ISO"). At a complication level any higher than that, one asks the 
manufacturers to send someone around to check things. 
%
optimism, n. 

What a programmer is full of after fixing the last bug and before 
discovering the next last bug. Fred Brooks's book "The Mythical 
Man-Month" contains the following paragraph that describes this 
extremely well: 

   All programmers are optimists. Perhaps this modern sorcery 
   especially attracts those who believe in happy endings and fairy 
   godmothers. Perhaps the hundreds of nitty frustrations drive away 
   all but those who habitually focus on the end goal. Perhaps it is 
   merely that computers are young, programmers are younger, and the 
   young are always optimists. But however the selection process works, 
   the result is indisputable: "This time it will surely run," or "I 
   just found the last bug.". 
%
pencil and paper, n.

An archaic information storage and transmission device that works by 
depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp. More recent 
developments in paper-based technology include improved `write-once' 
update devices which use tiny rolling heads similar to mouse balls to 
deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled 
at so-called `handwriting' technique. These technologies are ubiquitous 
outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers had 
terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of keyboarding tend to 
have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers 
deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any 
but the most trivial contexts. 
%
progasm /proh'gaz-m/, n. 

[University of Wisconsin] The euphoria experienced upon the completion 
of a program or other computer-related project. 
%
program, n.

1. A magic spell cast over a computer allowing it to turn one's input 
   into error messages. 
2. An exercise in experimental epistemology. 
3. A form of art, ostensibly intended for the instruction of computers, 
   which is nevertheless almost inevitably a failure if other programmers 
   can't understand it. 
%
programming, n.

1. The art of debugging a blank sheet of paper (or, in these days of 
   on-line editing, the art of debugging an empty file). "Bloody 
   instructions which, being taught, return to plague their inventor" 
   ("Macbeth", Act 1, Scene 7) 
2. A pastime similar to banging one's head against a wall, but with fewer 
   opportunities for reward. 
3. The most fun you can have with your clothes on. 
4. The least fun you can have with your clothes off. 
%
quadruple bucky, n. obs.

1. On an MIT space-cadet keyboard, use of all four of the shifting keys 
(control, meta, hyper, and super) while typing a character key. 
2. On a Stanford or MIT keyboard in raw mode, use of four shift keys while 
typing a fifth character, where the four shift keys are the control and 
meta keys on both sides of the keyboard. This was very difficult to do! 
One accepted technique was to press the left-control and left-meta keys 
with your left hand, the right-control and right-meta keys with your 
right hand, and the fifth key with your nose. 
%
randomness, n. 

1. An inexplicable misfeature; gratuitous inelegance. 
2. A hack or crock that depends on a complex combination of coincidences 
(or, possibly, the combination upon which the crock depends for its 
accidental failure to malfunction). "This hack can output characters 
40-57 by putting the character in the four-bit accumulator field of an 
XCT and then extracting six bits -- the low 2 bits of the XCT opcode are 
the right thing." "What randomness!" 
3. Of people, synonymous with `flakiness'. The connotation is that the 
person so described is behaving weirdly, incompetently, or inappropriately 
for reasons which are (a) too tiresome to bother inquiring into, (b) are 
probably as inscrutable as quantum phenomena anyway, and (c) are likely to 
pass with time. "Maybe he has a real complaint, or maybe it's just 
randomness. See if he calls back." 
%
rat dance, n. 

[From the Dilbert comic strip of November 14, 1995] A hacking run that 
produces results which, while superficially coherent, have little or nothing 
to do with its original objectives. There are strong connotations that the 
coding process and the objectives themselves were pretty random. (In the 
original comic strip, the Ratbert is invited to dance on Dilbert's keyboard 
in order to produce bugs for him to fix, and authors a Web browser instead.) 
%
Real World, n. 

1. Those institutions at which `programming' may be used in the same sentence 
as `FORTRAN', `COBOL', `RPG', `IBM', `DBASE', etc. Places where programs do 
such commercially necessary but intellectually uninspiring things as 
generating payroll checks and invoices. 
2. The location of non-programmers and activities not related to programming. 
3. A bizarre dimension in which the standard dress is shirt and tie and in 
which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5. 
4. Anywhere outside a university. "Poor fellow, he's left MIT and gone into 
the Real World." Used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In 
conversation, talking of someone who has entered the Real World is not unlike 
speaking of a deceased person. It is also noteworthy that on the campus of 
Cambridge University in England, there is a gaily-painted lamp-post which 
bears the label `REALITY CHECKPOINT'. It marks the boundary between university 
and the Real World; check your notions of reality before passing. This joke is 
funnier because the Cambridge `campus' is actually coextensive with the center 
of Cambridge town. 
%
recompile the world 

The surprisingly large amount of work that needs to be done as the result of 
any small but globally visible program change. "The world" may mean the 
entirety of some huge program, or may in theory refer to every program of a 
certain class in the entire known universe. For instance, "Add one #define 
to stdio.h, and you have to recompile the world." This means that any minor 
change to the standard-I/O header file theoretically mandates recompiling 
every C program in existence, even if only to verify that the change didn't 
screw something else up. In practice, you may not actually have to recompile 
the world, but the implication is that some human cleverness is required to 
figure out what parts can be safely left out. 
%
recursion, n. 

See recursion. See also tail recursion. 

-----------------------------------------------------

tail recursion, n. 

If you aren't sick of it already, see tail recursion. 
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red wire, n. 

[IBM] Patch wires installed by programmers who have no business mucking with 
the hardware. It is said that the only thing more dangerous than a hardware 
guy with a code patch is a softy with a soldering iron...
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religious issues, n

Questions which seemingly cannot be raised without touching off holy 
wars, such as "What is the best operating system (or editor, language, 
architecture, shell, mail reader, news reader)?", "What about that 
Heinlein guy, eh?", "What should we add to the new Jargon File?"
[...]
The most constructive thing one can do when one stumbles into the 
crossfire is mumble Get a life! and leave -- unless, of course, one's 
own unassailably rational and obviously correct choices are being 
slammed. 
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rotary debugger, n. 

[Commodore] Essential equipment for those late-night or early-morning 
debugging sessions. Mainly used as sustenance for the hacker. Comes 
in many decorator colors, such as Sausage, Pepperoni, and Garbage. 
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salescritter /sayls'kri`tr/, n. 

Pejorative hackerism for a computer salesperson. Hackers tell the 
following joke: 

Q. What's the difference between a used-car dealer and a
   computer salesman?
A. The used-car dealer knows he's lying.  [Some versions add:
   ...and probably knows how to drive.]

This reflects the widespread hacker belief that salescritters are 
self-selected for stupidity (after all, if they had brains and the 
inclination to use them, they'd be in programming). 
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SCSI voodoo /skuz'ee voo'doo/ 

[common among Mac users] SCSI interface hardware is notoriously fickle 
of temperament. Often, the SCSI bus will fail to work unless the cable 
order of devices is re-arranged, SCSI termination is added or removed 
(sometimes double-termination or no termination will fix the problem), 
or particular devices are given particular SCSI IDs. The skills needed 
to trick the naturally skittish demons of SCSI into working are 
collectively known as SCSI voodoo. 

While ordinary mortals frequently experience near-terminal frustration 
when attempting to configure SCSI device chains, it is said that a true 
master of this arcane art can (through rituals involving chicken blood, 
ground rhino horn, hairs of a virgin, eye of newt, etc.) hook up your 
personal computer with three scanners, a Zip drive, an IDE hard drive, 
a home weather station, a Smith-Corona typewriter, and the neighbor's 
garage door. 
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self-reference, n. 

See self-reference. 
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September that never ended 

All time since September 1993. One of the seasonal rhythms of the Usenet 
used to be the annual September influx of clueless newbies who, lacking 
any sense of netiquette, made a general nuisance of themselves. This 
coincided with people starting college, getting their first internet 
accounts, and plunging in without bothering to learn what was acceptable. 
These relatively small drafts of newbies could be assimilated within a 
few months. But in September 1993, AOL users became able to post to Usenet, 
nearly overwhelming the old-timers' capacity to acculturate them; to those 
who nostalgically recall the period before hand, this triggered an 
inexorable decline in the quality of discussions on newsgroups. 
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schroedinbug /shroh'din-buhg/, n. 

[MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics] 
A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until 
someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that 
it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops 
working for everybody until fixed. Though (like bit rot) this sounds 
impossible, it happens; some programs have harbored latent schroedinbugs 
for years. 
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sidecar, n. 

[...]
2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted onto the side of an 
Amiga. Designed and produced by Commodore, it broke all of the company's 
own design rules. If it worked with any other peripherals, it was by magic. 
[...]
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stealth manager, n. 

[Corporate DP] A manager that appears out of nowhere, promises undeliverable 
software to unknown end users, and vanishes before the programming staff 
realizes what has happened. 
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support, n. 

After-sale handholding; something many software vendors promise but few 
deliver. To hackers, most support people are useless -- because by the 
time a hacker calls support he or she will usually know the software 
and the relevant manuals better than the support people (sadly, this is 
not a joke or exaggeration). A hacker's idea of `support' is a 
tte--tte with the software's designer. 
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Suzie COBOL /soo'zee koh'bol/ 

1. [IBM: prob. from Frank Zappa's `Suzy Creamcheese'] n. 
A coder straight out of training school who knows everything except the 
value of comments in plain English. Also (fashionable among personkind 
wishing to avoid accusations of sexism) `Sammy Cobol' or (in some 
non-IBM circles) `Cobol Charlie'. 
2. [proposed] Meta-name for any code grinder, analogous to J. Random Hacker. 
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tenured graduate student, n. 

One who has been in graduate school for 10 years (the usual maximum is 5 
or 6): a `ten-yeared' student (get it?). Actually, this term may be used 
of any grad student beginning in his seventh year. Students don't really 
get tenure, of course, the way professors do, but a tenth-year graduate 
student has probably been around the university longer than any untenured 
professor. 
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teraflop club /te'r*-flop kluhb/, n. 

[FLOP = Floating Point Operation] A mythical association of people who 
consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few 
simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. 
Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder. 
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That's not a bug, that's a feature! 

The canonical first parry in a debate about a purported bug. The 
complainant, if unconvinced, is likely to retort that the bug is 
then at best a misfeature.
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the X that can be Y is not the true X 

Yet another instance of hackerdom's peculiar attraction to mystical 
references -- a common humorous way of making exclusive statements 
about a class of things. The template is from the "Tao te Ching": 
"The Tao which can be spoken of is not the true Tao." The implication 
is often that the X is a mystery accessible only to the enlightened. 
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This time, for sure!, excl. 

Ritual affirmation frequently uttered during protracted debugging 
sessions involving numerous small obstacles (e.g., attempts to bring 
up a UUCP connection). For the proper effect, this must be uttered 
in a fruity imitation of Bullwinkle J. Moose. Also heard: "Hey, 
Rocky! Watch me pull a rabbit out of my hat!" The canonical response 
is, of course, "But that trick never works!" 
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tick-list features, n. 

[Acorn Computers] Features in software or hardware that customers 
insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort 
of thing). The American equivalent would be `checklist features', 
but this jargon sense of the phrase has not been reported. 
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troglodyte mode, n. 

[Rice University] Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, 
and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you've been up for so 
many days straight that your eyes hurt. Loud music blaring from a stereo 
stacked in the corner is optional but recommended. 
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Turing tar-pit, n. 

1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical. 
Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that 
all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive 
set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations 
they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in 
speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers. 
However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has 
ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it 
would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A `Turing tar-pit' is 
any computer language or other tool that shares this property. That is, 
it's theoretically universal -- but in practice, the harder you struggle to 
get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. 
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voodoo programming, n. 

[from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] 
1. The use by guess or cookbook of an obscure or hairy system, feature, or 
algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the 
technique may not work, and if it doesn't, one will never know why. Almost 
synonymous with black magic, except that black magic typically isn't 
documented and nobody understands it. 
2. Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, 
and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything. 
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walking drives n. 

An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when 
they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosaur parts carried 
terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn 
bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to 
`walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of 
millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to 
the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut 
a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by 
certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the 
disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of 
old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that 
would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races. 
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whack, v. 

According to arch-hacker James Gosling (designer of NeWS, GOSMACS and Java), 
to "...modify a program with no idea whatsoever how it works." It is actually 
possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if the change is small and 
well-defined and you are very good at glarking things from context. As a 
trivial example, it is relatively easy to change all stderr writes to stdout 
writes in a piece of C filter code which remains otherwise mysterious. 
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What's a spline? 

[XEROX PARC] 
This phrase expands to: "You have just used a term that I've heard for 
a year and a half, and I feel I should know, but don't. My curiosity 
has finally overcome my guilt." The PARC lexicon adds "Moral: don't 
hesitate to ask questions, even if they seem obvious." 
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write-only memory 

The obvious antonym to `read-only memory'. Out of frustration with the 
long and seemingly useless chain of approvals required of component 
specifications, during which no actual checking seemed to occur, an 
engineer at Signetics once created a specification for a write-only 
memory and included it with a bunch of other specifications to be 
approved. This inclusion came to the attention of Signetics management 
only when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing 
information. 
[...]
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You know you've been hacking too long when 

The set-up line for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about 
themselves. These include the following: 

   * not only do you check your email more often than your paper mail, 
     but you remember your network address faster than your postal one. 
   * your SO kisses you on the neck and the first thing you think is 
     "Uh, oh, priority interrupt." 
   * you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're doing it 
     in octal. 
   * your computers have a higher street value than your car. 
   * in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10. 
   * more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in some 
     programming language. 
   * you realize you have never seen half of your best friends. 
[...]
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Zawinski's Law 

"Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs 
which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." Coined by Jamie 
Zawinski (who called it the "Law of Software Envelopment") to express his 
belief that all truly useful programs experience pressure to evolve into 
toolkits and application platforms (the mailer thing, he says, is just a 
side effect of that). It is commonly cited, though with widely varying 
degrees of accuracy. 
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