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The Hacker's Dictionary
A Guide to the World of Computer Wizards
Guy L. Steele Jr.
Donald R. Woods
Raphael A. Finkel
Mark R. Crisp
Richard M. Stallman
Geoffrey S. Goodfellow
The Menu
There are many dictionaries of computer buzzwords and jargon. This
book is different. It is a dictionary of slang.
Jargon consists of technical words that are needed for very
precise communication in a specialized subject. Economists, truck
drivers, chemists, and steelworkers all use a specialized vocabulary to
convey technical meanings.
Slang, on the other hand, is used for fun, for human communication
rather than technical communication. Slang is often derived from
jargon. When a bit of technical jargon is used in an extended or
metaphorical way, it becomes slang.
Many "computer" words are making their way into everyday use.
Thanks to the proliferation of home computers, many people have heard
of bytes, RAM, memory banks, terminals, processors, and floppy disks.
You won't find those words defined here. This, we warn you, is
supposed to be a fun book.
These are the words used for fun by the people who use computers
for fun: the hackers. Here you will find almost nothing of those awful
computer languages such as BASIC that can be written but not spoken.
This book is, in fact, a revised version of the famous "jargon file",
a dictionary of slang terms cooperatively maintained by hackers at
advanced computer laboratories at Stanford University, The Mas-
sachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Carnegie-Mellon University
(CMU), and other places such as Yale University, Princeton University,
and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). Some of these words are
fairly new; others have been used for over two decades. Some arose in
the computer laboratory; others were borrowed from other fields.
Our gang of six contributed to this file over the years, and to
this revision for publication. (Steele coordinated the effort and did
most of the polish work. Occasional first-person references in the main
text are his unless otherwise identified). Many other hackers around
the country, too numerous to list, made helpful suggestions; to them we
are grateful. For this edition, pronunciation keys have been added for
all those words that are not ordinary English words, and many cross-
-references, examples, and explanatory notes have been added. We have
tried to keep technical details to a minimum. A word is included only
if it is amusing or unusual, or if it peculiarly illuminates some
aspect if hacker culture.
We hope you enjoy this book.
Confessions of a Happy Hacker By Guy Steele
I was a teen-age hacker.
When I was about twelve or so, a lab secretary at MIT who knew I
was "interested in science" (it might be more accurate to say "a latent
nerd") arranged for one of the computer hackers there to give me an
informal tour. I remember stumbling around racks full of circuit boards
and wires, a screeching cabinet that printed a full page every six
seconds, and rows of blinking lights: the computer room was crammed
full of equipment with no obvious organization. One set of gray
cabinets had some trophies and plaques sitting on it: this was the
PDP-6 computer that, running a program called MacHack, consistently won
prizes by outwitting human players in chess tournaments. This PDP-6 was
also versatile: it had two speakers and a stereo amplifier sitting on
top of it. The hacker typed a couple of commands on a keyboard, and the
PDP-6 burst into a Bach Brandenburg Concerto (no. 6, as I recall).
One part of that tour stands out most clearly in my mind. I was
told to sit down in front of a large, round, glass screen, and given a
box that had some buttons and a stick on the top. My hacker guide typed
a command on the keyboard, and suddenly, green and purple space ships
appeared on the screen! The purple one started shooting little red dots
at the green one, which was soon obliterated in a multicolored shower
of sparkles. The green ship was "mine", and the hacker had expertly
shot it down. This was a color version of Space War, one of the very
first video games.
Remember that this was years before "Apple" and "TRS-80" had
become household words. Back then computers were still rather mys-
terious, hidden away in giant corporations and university laboratories.
Playing Space War was fun, but I learned nothing of programming
then. I had the true fascination of computers revealed to me in
November, 1968, when a chum slipped me the news that our school (Boston
Latin School, of Boston, Massachusetts) had an IBM computer locked up
in the basement. I was dubious. I had earlier narrowly avoided buying
from a senior a ticket to the fourth-floor swimming pool (Boston Latin
has only three stories, and no swimming pool at all), and assumed this
was another scam. So of course I laughed in his face.
When he persisted, I checked it out. Sure enough, in a locked
basement room was and IBM 1130 computer. If you want all the specs:
4096 words of memory, 16 bits per word, a 15-character-per-second
Selectric ("golf ball") printer, and a card reader (model 1442) that
could read 300 cards per minute. Yes, this was back in the days of
punched cards. Personal computers were completely unheard-of then.
Nominally the computer was for the training of juniors and seniors, but
I cajoled a math teacher into lending me a computer manual and spent
all of Thanksgiving vacation reading it.
I was hooked.
No doubt about it. I was born to be a hacker. Fortunately, I
didn't let my studies suffer (as many young hackers do), but every
spare moment I thought about the computer. It was spellbinding. I
wanted to know all about it: what it could and couldn't do, how its
programs worked, what its circuits looked like. During study halls,
lunch, and after school, I could be found in the computer room,
punching programs onto cards and running them through the computer.
I was not the only one. Very soon there was a small community of
IBM 1130 hackers. We helped to maintain the computer and we tutored our
less fanatical fellow students in the ways of computing. What could
possibly compensate us for these chores? Free rein in the computer
room.
Soon after that, I developed into one of the unauthorized but
tolerated "random people" hanging around the MIT Artificial Intel-
ligence Laboratory much as a groupie is to a rock band: not really
doing useful work, but emotionally involved and contributing to the
ambiance, if nothing else. After a while, I was haunting the computer
rooms at off-hours, talking to people but more often looking for
chances to run programs. Sometimes "randoms" such as I were quite
helpful, operating the computers for no pay and giving advice to
college students who were having trouble. Sometimes, however, we were
quite a nuisance. Once, I was ejected from the Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory by none other than Richard Greenblatt, the very famous
hacker who wrote the MacHack program with which the PDP-6 had won its
chess trophies. He threw me out because I was monopolizing the one
terminal that produced letter-quality copy. (I was using the computer
to write "personalized" form letters to various computer manufacturers,
asking for machine manuals.) I deserved to be tossed out, and gave him
no argument. But when you're hooked, you're hooked, and I was un-
daunted: within a week or two I was back again.
Eventually I got a part-time job as a programmer at MIT's Project
MAC computer laboratory. There I became a full-fledged member of the
hacker community, and ultimately an MIT graduate student.
I was never a lone hacker, but one of many. Despite stories you
may have read about anti-social nerds glued permanently to display
screens, totally addicted to the computer, hackers have (human) friends
too. Often these friendships are formed and maintained through the
computer.
At one time, the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory had one
common telephone number, extension 6765, and a public-address system.
The phone was answered "six-seven-six-five", or sometimes "Fibonacci of
twenty", since, as mathematician know, 6765 is the twentieth Fibonacci
number. Through this number and the public-address system, it was easy
to cal and reach anyone and everyone. In particular, one could easily
ask, "Who wants to go for Chinese food?" and get ten or fifteen people
for an expedition.
"Unfortunately", says MIT hacker Richard Stallman, "most of the
people and terminals have moved to other floors, where the 6765 number
does not reach. The ninth floor, the lab's ancient heart, is becoming
totally filled with machines, leaving no room for people, who must move
to other floors. Now I can't even call up and find out if anyone is
hungry."
Stallman can, however, still call us all up using the computer.
Through timesharing (where many people use one computer) and networking
(where many computers are connected together), the computer makes
possible a new form of human communication, better than the telephone
and the postal system put together. You can send a message by elec-
tronic mail and get a reply within two minutes, or you can just link
two terminals together and have a conversation.
MIT has no monopoly on hackers. In the 1960s and 1970s hackers
congregated around any computer center that made computer time
vailable for "play". (Some of this play turned out to be very
important work, but hacking is done mostly for fun, for its own sake,
for the pure joy of it). Because universities tend to be more flexible
than corporations in this regard, most hackers' dens arose in uni-
versity laboratories. While some of these hackers were unauthorized
"random people" like me, many hackers were paid employees who chose to
stay after hours and work on their own projects -- or even continue
their usual work -- purely for pleasure.
The hacker community became still larger and more closely knit in
the early 1970s, when the government funded a project to see whether it
would be useful to let the computers at dozens of universities and
other sites "talk" to each other. The project succeeded and produced
the famous ARPANET, a network that now links hundreds of computers
across the country. Through the ARPANET, researchers can share
programs, trade research results, and send electronic mail -- both to
individuals and to massive mailing lists. Best of all, it allowed
once-isolated hackers to talk to each other via computer.
The result is a nation-wide hackers' community, now one decade
old. In some ways the community serves as a geographically dispersed
think tank. When Rubik's Cube became popular, one hacker created an
electronic mailing list of "Cube hackers". (Such mailing lists are
routinely created for new topics of interest). The network buzzed, and
continues to buzz, with exposition of some very deep mathematics in
efforts to solve various puzzles about the Cube. What, for example, is
the smallest number of twists required to solve the Cube? This question
is still unanswered; but some progress has been make, and hackers
across the country continue to discuss and to fret over its solution
via computer.
Hackers do more than talk, however; they hack. Although no two
people are alike, there are certain traits that are typical of hacker.
The cardinal qualification is that hackers like to use computers. The
word CYCLE, as used by hackers, refers to the fundamental unit of work
done by a computer, so we say that hackers crave cycles. The more
cycles available, the more a hacker gets out of the computer.
As a direct result of this craving, a hacker will frequently wake
up at dinner time and go to bed after breakfast, or perhaps get up at
noon and sack out a 4:00 A.M. (See the terms PHASE and NIGHT MODE for
more information on hackers' sleeping schedules.) Hackers do this
because the computer has its own circadian rhythms to which hackers
willingly adjust themselves. These rhythms in turn grow out of the
heavier demands for the computer during the day than at night. Hackers
will therefore work late into the evening or night, when other computer
users aren't competing for cycles. It's more fun, after all, to use the
computer when it's responding at split-second speeds.
Most such hackers are single. Hackers do get married, but the res-
ponsibilities of family life don't always mix well with typical hacker
life style. When I was at MIT, I would sometimes work nights for a
month at a time. Now that I am married, I find that I can hack only in
spurts, one or two days a week. This book, by the way, is a hack of
sorts. The manuscript was prepared using a computer, and nearly all of
the work was done after midnight.
The truly dedicated hacker does little else but eat, sleep, and
hack. Of these activities, eating is the only social activity, so
rather than eat at home alone, a hacker will usually go out to eat with
his hacker friends. While hackers may sleep according to different
schedules, most arrange to be awake and at the laboratory around 6:00
P.M., at which time one or more dinner expeditions usually head out.
For some reason, Chinese food is particularly favored by most
hackers. You will find several references to Chinese Szechuan and Hunan
cuisine in this dictionary. Other spicy cuisines, such as Mexican and
Indian, are also enjoyed by hackers, but Chinese is the definite
favorite.
Many shorthand expressions have developed for discussing food and
local restaurants. At MIT one might hear:
"Foodp?"; "Smallp?"; "T."; "T!"
Translated, this means roughly:
"Do you want to eat now?"
"Maybe; what do would you think of going to Joyce Chen's Small
Eating Place?"
"Okay by me."
"Then I'll join you!"
When you walk up to the terminal of a time-shared computer, the
first thing you must do is to "log in", that is, tell the computer who
you are. To do this, you type your "computer i.d." or "login name".
Different computers have different ideas of what a login name should
be. Some use numbers or other codes (see the entry for PPN), some use
your last name, some use your initials. Many computers limit login
names to either three or six characters, so full names or last names
can't be used in general.
As a result everyone acquires a login name, which you need to know
to communicate with other hacker via computer. A login name serves in
much the same way as a CB "handle". I have friends whom I know only by
login name; I have no idea what their real names are. Once, at a
wedding, I ran into a good hacker friend who was also a guest there. I
recalled his login name instantly, but was embarrassed that I couldn't
immediately remember his real name in order to introduce him to a third
person. It was SWAPPED OUT.
Login names are often used as nicknames, pronounces if possible
and spelled if necessary. My wife and I met at MIT, and she still calls
me "Gliss", because my login name was GLS. "Guy" sounds very weird to
her. Some hackers (including Richard Stallman) actually prefer to be
called by their login name.
Because of the design and use of computers depend on other
branches of science, a hacker has to have some knowledge of ma-
thematics, physics, electronics, and other disciplines. Hackers
typically have many other interests as well: science fiction, music,
and chess are particularly popular.
The common them, however, is the love of the computer. Hackers
discuss science fiction through computerized mailing lists. A hacker is
less likely to listen to music than to program a computer to play
music. A hacker who can play only a middling game of chess can write a
program that wins chess tournaments. Such are the compensations of a
life at the keyboard.
Happy hacking!
A Hackish Note on How to Use This Book
By Raphael Finkel and Don Woods
While hackers necessarily design and use unspeakable languages to
control computers, they also have an unusual spoken language. Just as
strange language had first attracted many of us to computers, we were
struck by the queer vocabulary hackers would use to describe not only
computer-related things but the wide world as well. Finkel decided to
build a lexicon of the strange words and expressions that set this
community apart, and the rest of us added to it over the years.
A lot of our slang can be figured out from context. Don Woods once
told a waitress, "I think we're ready to go, MODULO paying the check".
And there's the time he asked a flight attendant to "please SNARF me a
magazine". Neither of them batted an eye. It is the most commonly used
jargon words -- the ones loaded with subtle connotations accumulated
over the years -- that are the hardest to define.
This book is arranged as a dictionary, and you may skip around
reading individual definitions if you please. However, definitions
occurring later in the book purposely build on earlier ones, and we
think you will get more fun out of it if you read the book straight
through in alphabetical order.
We want to warn the reader that not all the expressions you will
find here are in common use. Many are regional; some are obsolete. Some
are used every day, and others are heard only occasionally. To give you
an idea, here is a list of out favorite and perhaps most frequently
used words:
BAR BOGOSITY CRUFTY
BARF BOGUS FEATURE
BAZ BUG FLAME
BELLS AND WHISTLES CANONICAL FLAVOR
FLUSH LOSER PHASE OF THE MOON
FOO MAGIC RANDOM
FOOBAR MOBY THE REAL WORLD
FROB MODULO SNARF
HACK MUMBLE VANILLA
KLUDGE PHASE WIZARD
By and large, computer people have an enormous range of in-
tellectual interests; you will see this fact reflected in the lexicon.
While they use slang for fun, most computer people are highly literate,
highly articulate, and sticklers for grammar. Don't expect to impress
people by overusing the words you find here. They are the spice, not
the bread and butter, of everyday conversation.
Grokking Hacker Grammar
For the most part, hackerese fits within the framework of ordinary
English speech. There are but a few rules, however, that are unusual in
everyday English but are very commonly used in hackerese. (These extra
rules of grammar reflect the fact that hackers enjoy playing with
language. Most are quite aware of when they are breaking the rules of
standard English).
Verb doubling
A standard construction in English is to double a verb and use it
as an exclamation, such as "bang, bang!" or "quack, quack!". Most of
these are names for noises. Hackers also double verbs as a concise,
sometimes sarcastic, comment on what the implied subject does. Also, a
doubled verb is often used to terminate a conversation -- in the
process, remarking on the current state of affairs or what the speaker
intends to do next. Verbs frequently doubled include WIN, HACK, FLAME,
BARF, and CHOMP. Typical examples of usage:
"The disk heads just crashed. Lose, lose."
"Mostly he just talked about his latest crock. Flame, flame."
"I think I'll go fix that bug now. Hack, hack!"
Standard doublings with subtle connotations are listed individually in
the lexicon.
Sound-alike Slang
In the manner of cockney rhyming slang, hackers will often make
rhymes or puns in order to convert an ordinary word of phrase into
something more interesting. It is particularly FLAVORFUL if the phrase
is bent so as to include some other slang word; thus, the computer
hobbyist magazine Dr. Dobb's Journal is almost always referred to among
hackers as Dr. Frob's Journal. Terms of this kind in fairly wide use
include names for newspapers:
Boston Herald American becomes Horrid (or Harried) American.
Boston Globe becomes Boston Glob.
San Francisco Chronicle becomes the Crocknicle.
New York Times becomes New York Slime
Other standard terms include:
"For historical reasons" becomes "for hysterical raisins"
"Margaret Hacks Hall" (a building at Stanford) becomes "Marginal
Hacks Hall".
"Government property -- do not duplicate" (seen on keys at MIT) is
usually quoted as "Government duplicity -- do not propagate"
The -P Convention
This rule is unique, used by no one but hackers. A word or phrase
is turned onto a yes/no question by appending the letter P, which is
pronounced as a separate syllable when spoken. This rule is derived
from a convention of LISP programming language, where the letter P at
the end of a name denotes a "predicate" -- that is, a function that
returns "true" or "false" as its result.
For example, the question "Foodp?" (pronounced "food'pee", with
the voice rising as for any question) means "Do you want to eat now?"
The question "Colleen's-p?" is more specific: "Do you want to go eat at
Colleen's Chinese cuisine (a favorite restaurant near MIT)?" "Lose-p?"
means "Are you LOSING?" or "Is it LOSING?". And so on.
As a special case, the question "State-of-the-world-p?" means
"What's going on?" or "What are you doing (or about to do)?" The -P
convention is used for this even though it isn't a yes/no question. A
typical answer might be "The SYSTEM just CRASHED" or "I'm about to
GRONK OUT". If the responder is feeling silly or obstinate, however, he
will insist on interpreting it as a yes/no question after all, and
respond with "Yes, the world has a state."
The -P convention is often applied to new words at the spur of the
moment. The best of these is a GOSPERISM (that is, invented by R.
William Gosper). When we were at a Chinese restaurant, he wanted to
know whether someone would like to share with him a two-person-sized
bowl of soup. His inquiry was "Split-p soup?" and everyone instantly
knew what he meant. (After all, split pea soup was not on the menu).
Overgeneralisation
Hackers love to take advantage of the inconsistencies of English
by extending a general rule to cases where it doesn't apply. Children
routinely do this when they say "teached" for "taught" or "He goed
there" for "He went there". Hackers do this quite intentionally for
more complicated words. One example:
"Generous" becomes "generosity".
"Porous" becomes "porosity".
"Curious" becomes "curiosity".
Therefore:
"Mysterious" becomes "mysteriosity".
"Obvious" becomes "obviosity".
"Dubious" becomes "dubiosity".
Less clearly:
"Bogus" becomes "bogosity".
And, perhaps:
"Ferrous" becomes "ferocity"!
Other examples: winnitude, disustitude, hackitude, hackification.
Spoken Inarticulations
Words such a "mumble", "sigh", and "groan" are spoken in places
where their referent might more naturally be used. It has been
suggested that this usage derives from the impossibility of re-
presenting such noises in conversation by computer (see COM MODE); one
gets so used to typing "Sigh!" to indicate a sigh that one soon
develops the vocal habit of saying the word instead of actually
sighing. Another expression sometimes heard is "complain!" (meaning not
"You, complain!" but "I have a complaint!")
How to Make Hacker Noises
Many of the words in this dictionary are ordinary English words
that have acquired new meanings. Some appear to be English words but
are pronounced differently, and many are new words. To keep things
simple, we have included pronunciations only in the unusual cases. If
no pronunciation is given for a word, it should be pronounced as an
ordinary English word.
Also for simplicity, we do not use the complicated alphabets and
pronunciation marks used in most dictionaries. These alphabets, such as
the International Phonetic Alphabet, allow a very precise description
of pronunciation but are hard to read if you're not familiar with them.
We use the following simplified system: Syllables are separated by
hyphens, except that an apostrophe follows an accented syllable.
Consonants are pronounced as they usually are in English. The letter g
is always hard, as in "got" rather than in "giant"; ch is always soft,
as in "child" rather than "chemist". The letter s is always as in
"pass", never a z sound as in "has"; but to prevent confusion, ss is
sometimes used at the end of a syllable to emphasize this. Other
consonants are also occasionally doubled for the same reason. The
letter h always contains the leading d sound as used twice in "judge".
Vowel sounds are represented as shown in the following table:
a back, that
ay bake, rain
ah cot, father
aw flaw, caught
e less, men
ee easy, ski
i trip, hit
ie life, sky
ow out, how
oh flow, sew
oy boy, coin
uh but, some
u put, foot
oo loot, through
y yet
yoo few
A colon -- ":" -- is used for the "schwa" sound that is often
written as an upside-down e. For example, the pronunciation of "kitten"
would be kit':n, and of "magical" would be maj'i-k:l.
Some Overflow in PDL
Various abbreviations are used throughout these definitions. Most
refer to computer hardware and software. For example, one of the
favorite computer languages in our hacker community is LISP. The two
poles of the hacker's network that compiled this dictionary are the
artificial intelligence laboratories at Stanford and MIT, and LISP has
always been one language of choice for artificial intelligence
research. A particular computer, the Digital Equipment Corporation
(DEC) PDP-6, and its successors (the PDP-10 and DECSYSTEM-20) have
until recently been the computers of choice for running LISP. The
consequence is that technical words from the LISP language and the
PDP-10 computer will occasionally appear in this dictionary. The EMACS
text editor, also referred to, was one of the first "display editors"
to be widely distributed. It is used as a standard against which new
text editors for personal computers are measured. We have tried to keep
such words to a minimum throughout.
AOS (owss [East coast], ay'ahss [West coast]) verb.
1. To add one to a number. Example: "Every time the computer finds
a bad file it aoses the bad-file counter".
2. More generally, to increase the amount of something. Example:
"Aos the campfire" means "Add more wood to the campfire". Silly.
Antonym: SOS
This word is the name of a PDP-10 instruction that takes any
memory location in the computer and adds one to it. AOS means "Add One
and do not Skip". Why, you may ask, does the S stand for "Do not Skip"
rather than "Skip"? Ah, here is a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore.
There are eight such instructions: AOSE adds One and then Skips the
next instruction if the result is Equal to zero; AOSG adds One and then
Skips if the result is Greater than zero; AOSN adds One and then Skips
if the result is Not zero; AOSA adds One and then Skips Always; and so
on. Just plain AOS doesn't say when to skip, so it never skips. For
similar reasons, AOJ means "Add One and do not Jump". Even more
bizarre, SKIP means "Do not SKIP"! If you want to skip the next
instruction, you must say "SKIPA". Likewise, JUMP means "Do not JUMP".
ARG (ahrg) noun.
An argument, in the mathematical sense only: a quantity accepted
by a function or procedure. Example: "The sine function takes one arg,
but the arc-tangent function can take either one or two args".
This is an abbreviation that has become a new word in its own
right, just as "telephone" and "pianoforte" have become "phone" and
"piano". Arguments to mathematical functions and computational
procedures are discussed so frequently by hackers that this ab-
breviation saves a lot of time.
AUTOMAGICALLY (aw'toh-maj'i-k:l-lee, aw'toh-maj'i-klee) adverb.
Automatically, but in a way which, for some reason (typically
because it is too complicated, or too ugly, or perhaps even too
trivial), the speaker doesn't feel like explaining. Example: "File that
have a name ending in 'TMP' are automagically deleted when you log
out". (This means "When you say good-bye to the computer, files with
names ending in 'TMP' are deleted. How this happens is complicated and
I don't want to get into it just now. Trust me, it works.")
See MAGIC
BAGBITER (bag'bie-t:r) noun.
1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work
or that works in a remarkably clumsy manner. Example: "This text editor
won't let me make a file with a line longer than eighty characters!
What a bagbiter!"
2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or
otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly.
Synonyms: LOSER, CRETIN, CHOMPER.
BAGBITING adjective. Having the quality of a bagbiter. "This
bagbiting system won't let me compute the greatest common divisor of
two negative numbers."
Synonyms: LOSING, CRETINOUS, BLETCHEROUS, BARFUCIOUS, CHOMPING.
BITE THE BAG verb. To fail in some manner. Example: "The computer
keeps CRASHING every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really
biting the bag." The original meaning of this term was almost un-
doubtedly obscene, probably referring to the scrotum. In its current
usage it has become almost completely sanitized.
BANG noun.
The character "!" (exclamation point). Synonyms: EXCL, SHRIEK. See
CHARACTERS. This term is more popular at CMU than at MIT or Stanford.
It is used to describe the character "!" itself rather than to replace
it. For example, one would not say, "Congratulations bang." On the
other hand, if I wanted you to write "FOO!" -- those exact four
characters, on a piece of paper -- I would tell you, "Write eff, oh,
oh, bang."
BAR
The second metasyntactic variable, after FOO. If a hacker needs to
invent exactly two names for things, he almost always picks the names
"foo" and "bar". Example: "Suppose we have two functions, say, foo and
bar. Now suppose foo calls bar..."
See FOO, FOOBAR.
BARF
1. interjection. Term of disgust or frustration. See BLETCH.
2. verb. To say "Barf!" or a similar term of disgust (because one
is annoyed or offended).
3. To fail to work because of unacceptable input; sometimes, to
print an error message. Examples: "The division operation barfs if you
try to divide by zero." (Division by zero fails in some unspecified
spectacular way) "The text editor barfs if you try to read in a new
file before writing out the old one."
BARFULOUS, BARFUCIOUS adjective. So ugly or offensive as to make
someone barf.
These meanings are derived form the common slang meaning of
"barf", namely, "to vomit".
BAZ (baz)
1. The third metasyntactic variable, after FOO and BAR.
2. interjection. Term of mild annoyance. In this usage the pro-
nunciation is often drawn out for two or three seconds, sometimes
sounding like the bleating of a sheep: "Baaaaaaaaaaz!"
BELLS AND WHISTLES noun.
Unnecessary (but often useful, convenient, or amusing) features of
a program or other object. Example: "Now that we've got the basic
program working, let's go back and add some bells and whistles."
On an automobile, things like power windows and quadrophonic sound
would be bells and whistles.
This term is widely used, and not just in the hacker community. To
understand it, think of a plain box that does a job well but is awfully
boring to look at. Who will buy it? Now you add a few bells and
whistles. They don't do anything useful, but they make the product more
interesting. Nobody seems to know what distinguishes a bell from a
whistle.
BIGNUM (big'num) noun.
1. A multiple-precision computer representation for very large
integer.
2. More generally, any very large number. "Have you ever looked at
the United States Budget? There's bignums for you!"
3. When playing backgammon, large numbers on the dice, especially
a roll of double fives or double sixes.
See EL CAMINO BIGNUM.
Most computer languages provide a kind of data called "integers",
but such computer integers are usually very limited in size; usually
they must be smaller than 215 (32768) or 231 (2147483648). If you want
to work with numbers larger than that, you have to use floating-point
numbers, which are usually only accurate to six or seven decimal
places.
Computer languages that provide bignums can perform exact
calculation on very large numbers such as 21000 or 1000! (the factorial
of 1000, which is 1000 times 999 times 998 times ... times 2 times 1)
exactly. For example, this value for 1000! was computed by the MACLISP
system using bignums:
40238726007709377354370243392300398571937486421071
46325437999104299385123986290205920442084869694048
00479988610197196058631666872994808558901323829669
94459099742450408707375991882362772718873251977950
59509952761208749754624970436014182780946464962910
56393887437886487337119181045825783647849977012476
63288983595573543251318532395846307555740911426241
74743493475534286465766116677973966688202912073791
43853719588249808126867838374559731746136085379534
52422158659320192809087829730843139284440328123155
86110369768013573042161687476096758713483120254785
89320767169132448426236131412508780208000261683151
02734182797770478463586817016436502415369139828126
48102130927612448963599287051149649754199093422215
66832572080821333186116811553615836546984046708975
60290095053761647584772842188967964624494516076535
34081989013854424879849599533191017233555566021394
50399736280750137837615307127761926849034352625200
01588853514733161170210396817592151090778801939317
81141945452572238655414610628921879602238389714760
88506276862967146674697562911234082439208160153780
88989396451826324367161676217916890977991190375403
12746222899880051954444142820121873617459926429565
81746628302955570299024324153181617210465832036786
90611726015878352075151628422554026517048330422614
39742869330616908979684825901254583271682264580665
26769958652682272807075781391858178889652208164348
34482599326604336766017699961283186078838615027946
59551311565520360939881806121385586003014356945272
24206344631797460594682573103790084024432438465657
24501440282188525247093519062092902313649327349756
55139587205596542287497740114133469627154228458623
77387538230483865688976461927383814900140767310446
64025989949022222176590433990188601856652648506179
97023561938970178600408118897299183110211712298459
01641921068884387121855646124960798722908519296819
37238864261483965738229112312502418664935314397013
74285319266498753372189406942814341185201580141233
44828015051399694290153483077644569099073152433278
28826986460278986432113908350621709500259738986355
42771967428222487575867657523442202075736305694988
25087968928162753848863396909959826280956121450994
87170124451646126037902930912088908694202851064018
21543994571568059418727489980942547421735824010636
77404595741785160829230135358081840096996372524230
56085590370062427124341690900415369010593398383577
79394109700277534720000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
00000000000000000
The MACLISP language was not the first computer system to
calculate very large integers, but it was MACLISP that provided the
name "bignum".
BIT noun.
1. The unit of information: the amount of information obtained by
asking a yes-no question.
2. A computational quantity that can take on one of two values,
such as true and false, or 0 and 1.
3. A mental flag: a reminder that something should be done
eventually. Example: "I have a bit set for you." (I haven't seen you
for a while, and I'm supposed to tell or ask you something).
A bit is said to be "set" if its value is true or 1, and "reset" or
"clear" if its value is false or 0. One speaks of setting and clearing
bits. To TOGGLE a bit is to change it, either from 0 to 1 or from 1 to
0. BITS. Information. Example: "I need some bits about file formats."
("I need to know about file formats").
THE SOURCE OF ALL GOOD BITS noun. A person from whom (or a place
from which) information may be obtained. If you need to know about a
program, a WIZARD might be the source of all good bits. The title is
often applied to a particularly competent secretary.
BITBLT (bit'blit)
1. verb. To copy a large array of bits from on part of a com-
puter's memory to another part, particularly when the memory is being
used to determine what is shown on a display screen.
2. More generally, to perform some operation (such as TOGGLING) on
a large array of bits while moving them.
3. noun. The operation of bitblting.
See BLT.
BIT BUCKET noun.
1. The mythical receptacle used to catch bits when they fall off
the end of a register during a shift instruction.
2. More generally, the place where information goes when it is
lost or destroyed. Example: "Oh, no! All my files just went into the
bit bucket!"
3. The physical device used to implement output to the NULL
DEVICE.
This term is used purely in jest. It's based on the fanciful
notion that bits are objects that are not destroyed, only misplaced.
BIT DECAY noun.
A fanciful theory to explain SOFTWARE ROT, the phenomenon that
unused programs or features will eventually stop working 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 these effects.
Alpha particles, such as those found in cosmic rays, can change the
contents of a computer memory unpredictably. Fortunately, the pro-
bability of this can be kept fairly low. In any case, when you can't
figure out why something stopped working, it is often convenient to
blame it on bit decay.
BLETCH (bletch) interjection.
Term of disgust.
BLETCHEROUS adjective. Disgusting in design of function, aes-
thetically unappealing. (This word is seldom used of people.) Example:
"This keyboard is bletcherous!" (Perhaps the keys don't work very well
or are poorly arranged.) Slightly comic.
"Bletcherous" applies to the aesthetics of the thing so described;
similarly for CRETINOUS. By contrast, something that is LOSING or
BAGBITING may be failing to meet objective criteria.
See BOGUS and RANDOM, which have richer and wider shades of
meaning than any of the others.
BLT (blit, belt) verb.
To copy or transfer a large contiguous package of information from
one place to another. "The storage allocator picks through the table
and copies the good parts up into high memory, and at the end, blt's it
all back down again."
THE BIG BLT noun. A massive memory-shuffling operation frequently
performed by some time-sharing systems on the PDP-10 computer.
This comes from the name of a PDP-10 instruction that copies a block of
memory form one place to another; the name "BLT" stands for "Block
Transfer". Nowadays, BLT almost always means "Branch if Less Than
zero", so the slang meanings above are rather like antiques or
dinosaurs.
BOGUS (boh'gus) adjective.
1. Nonfunctional. Example: "Your fix for that BUG was bogus".
2. Useless. Example: "ATSIGN is a bogus program".
3. False. Example: "Your arguments are bogus".
4. Incorrect. Example: "That algorithm is bogus".
5. Unbelievable. Example: "You claim to have solved the halting
problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus".
6. Silly. Example: "Stop writing those bogus SAGAS". Astrology is
bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break. So is someone who
makes blatantly false claims of having solved a scientific problem.
BOGOSITY (boh'gahss':t-ee) noun. The quality of being bogus; also,
an instance or example thereof.
BOGON (boh'gahn) noun.
1. A person who is bogus or who says bogus things.
2. More rarely, a mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit
charge of bogosity. (A convention in particle physics is to name new
subatomic particles by using the Greek suffix -on, because Greek words
originally used to name such particles. For example hadrons are very
massive particles that were named from the Greek word hadros, meaning
"heavy". More recently, however, physicist have taken to attaching this
suffix to words from other languages. For example, the particles that
help to hold quarks together are called "gluons", from the English word
glue. Hackers have used this convention in fun, on an ad hoc basis; but
two of them, "bogon" and COMPUTRON, are used fairly regularly).
BOGOMETER (boh-gahm':t-:r) noun. A mythical instrument used to
measure bogosity, much as a thermometer measures temperature. Example:
In a seminar, when a speaker makes an outrageous claim, a listener
might raise his hand and say, "My bogometer just triggered".
Someone who is a bogon in the first sense probably radiates a lot
of bogons in the second sense. This provides a (pseudo) scientific
explanation for how a bogometer works: it's like a Geiger counter that
detects bogons.
The agreed-upon unit of bogosity is the microLenat (uL) or one-
-millionth of a Lenat, in honor of computer scientist Doug Lenat. The
consensus is that this is the largest unit practical for everyday use.
BOGOTIFY (boh-gaht':f-ie) verb. To make or become bogus. A program
that has been changed so many times as to become completely dis-
organized has become bogotified. If you tighten a nut too hard and
strip the threads on the bolt, the bolt has become bogotified and you'd
better not use it any more.
BOGUE OUT (bohg owt) verb. To become bogus, suddenly and un-
expectedly. Example: "His talk was relatively sane, but then someone
asked him a tricky question; he bogued out and did nothing but FLAME
after that".
AUTOBOGOTIPHOBIA (aw'to-boh-gaht':-foh'bee-uh) noun. The fear of
becoming bogotified.
"Bogus" has many, but not all, of the meanings of RANDOM. "Random"
tends to connote pointlessness or a lack of direction, while "bogus"
tends to connote deception or misdirection. Both, however, may connote
confusion.
"Bogus" was originally used in the hacker sense at Princeton in
the late 1960s; not just in the computer science department but all
over the campus. It came to Yale and (we assume) elsewhere through the
efforts of migratory Princeton alumni, Michael Shamos in particular,
now a faculty member at CMU. The hacker usage of this word has since
spread to other places.
BOUNCE verb.
To play volleyball. This term is, or was, used primarily at
Stanford. At on time there was a volleyball court next to the computer
laboratory. From 5:00 P.M. to 7:00 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance
time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5:00 the computer would
become unavailable. And over the intercom a voice would cry, "Bounce,
bounce!" meaning "Everyone come out and play volleyball!"
BRAIN-DAMAGED adjective.
Obviously wrong; extremely poorly designed; CRETINOUS; DEMENTED.
There is a connotation that the person responsible must have
suffered brain damage, because he should have known better. Calling
something brain-damaged is really extreme. The word implies that the
thing is completely unusable, and that its failure to work is due to
poor design, not accident.
BREAK verb.
1. To become BROKEN (in any sense).
2. To cause to be broken (in any sense). "Your latest patch to the
editor broke the paragraph commands".
3. Of a program, to halt or pause temporarily so that it may be
examined for debugging purposes. The place where the program stops is
called a "breakpoint". See CONTROL-B.
BROKEN adjective.
1. Of programs, not working properly. "The FORTRAN compiler is
broken".
2. Behaving strangely -- especially (of people), exhibiting
extreme depression.
BROKET (broh'k:t, broh'ket) noun.
Either of the characters "<" and ">". The first is called a "left
broket", and the second a "right broket".
This word originated as a contraction of the phrase "broken
bracket", that is, a bracket that is bent in the middle.
BUCKY BITS noun.
Bits corresponding to "control" and "meta" keys on a keyboard.
See DOUBLE BUCKY and QUADRUPLE BUCKY.
This phrase requires a long explanation. Most computer keyboards
are arranged more or less like a typewriter keyboard, but have extra
keys. One of them, usually marked "control" or "CTRL", is like a shift
key, but instead of changing letters from lower case to upper case, it
changes them into so-called control characters. The character sent when
you hold down the control key and type F is called simply "control-F".
Such characters are usually used as commands to the computer, es-
pecially to a text editor. In one well-known text editor, EMACS (which
was written at MIT), control-F moves forward one character, control-N
moves to the next line, control-P moves to the previous line, control-D
deletes a character, and so on.
Control characters are so useful that sometimes special keyboards
are built that have even more shift keys. One of the first of these was
used at Stanford. It had the usual shift and control keys, and a third
key called "meta", as well as lots of unusual characters such as Greek
letter. So, one can type such characters as control-F, meta-N, and
control-meta-B.
Now, when you type a character on a Stanford keyboard, the
following information is sent to the computer: a code indicating the
basic character, plus one BIT for each shifting key to indicate whether
that shifting key was pressed along with the basic character key.
Programs usually treat the regular shift key as part of the basic
character, indicating whether you want lower case or upper case (or
whether you want "3" or "#", and so on). The other bits (control and
meta) are called the bucky bits.
Why "bucky"? Rumor has it that the idea for the extra bits for
characters came from computer scientist Niklaus Wirth (who invented the
computer languages PASCAL and MODULA-2) when he was at Stanford, and
that his nickname was "Bucky".
Inspired by the Stanford keyboard, the MIT SPACE CADET KEYBOARD
has seven shifting keys: four "bucky bit" keys -- "control", "meta",
"hyper", and "super" -- and three like the regular shift key, called
"shift", "top", and "front". Many keys have three symbols on them: a
letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek letter on the front. For
example, the L key has an "L" and a two-way arrow on the top, and a
Greek letter lambda on the front. If you press this key with the right
hand while playing an appropriate :chord: with the left hand on the
shift keys, you can get the following results:
L lower-case "l"
shift-L upper-case "L"
front-L Greek lower-case lambda
front-shift-L Greek upper-case lambda
top-L two-way arrow
(front and shift are ignored)
And of course each of these may also be typed with any combination
of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard you can
type over 8000 different character! This allows the user to type very
complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of sin-
gle-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers are actually
willing to memorize the command meanings of that many characters if it
will reduce typing time. Other hackers, however, think having that many
bucky bits is overkill, and object that such a keyboard can require
three or four hands to operate.
BUG noun.
A mistake or problem (possibly simple, possibly very deep); an
unwanted and unintended property, characteristic, or behavior.
Examples: "There's a bug in the editor. It writes things out
backward." "The system CRASHED because of a hardware bug". (That is,
the computer suddenly stopped because of an equipment failure) "Fred is
a WINNER, but he has a few bugs" (Fred is a good guy, but he has a few
personality problems).
Antonym: FEATURE.
This is usually thought of as applying to a program but can be
applied to computers, people, and other things.
Some say this term came from telephone company usage: "Bugs in a
telephone cable" were blamed for noisy lines. However, computer
scientist Grace Hopper has repeatedly been heard to claim that the use
of the term in computer science comes from a story concerning actual
bugs found wedged in an early malfunctioning computer. In any case, in
hacker's slang the word almost never refers to insects. Here is a
plausible conversation that never actually happened: "This ant farm has
a bug." "What do you mean? There aren't even any ants in it." "That's
the bug."
BUM
1. verb. To improve something by removing or rearranging its parts
-- such as wires in a computer or instructions from a program -- while
preserving its function. More generally, to make highly efficient,
either in time or space. The connotation is that this is done at the
expense of clarity. Examples: "I managed to bum three more instructions
out of that code." "I bummed the program not to write the file if it
would be empty." "I bummed the inner loop of the program down to seven
microseconds."
2. noun. A small change to an algorithm, program, or object to
make it more efficient. "This hardware bum makes the jump instruction
faster."
BUZZ verb.
Of a program, to run with no indication of progress and perhaps
without guarantee of ever finishing. The state of a buzzing program
resembles CATATONIA, but you never get out of catatonia, while a
buzzing loop may eventually end of its own accord. Example: "The
program buzzes for about ten seconds trying to sort all the names into
order".
CANONICAL (ki-nahn'i-kil) adjective.
Usual; standard; ordinary. Example: "What is the canonical way to
rejustify a paragraph in EMACS?"
This word has a somewhat more technical meaning in mathematics.
For example, on sometimes speaks of a formula as being in canonical
form. Two formulas such as 9+3x^2+x and 3x^2+x+9 are said to be
equivalent because they mean the same thing, but the second one is in
canonical form because it is written in the usual way, with the highest
power of x first.
Usually there are fixed rules you can use to decide whether
something is in canonical form. The slang meaning is a relaxation of
the technical meaning.
A true story: One Bob Sjoberg, new at MIT, expressed some
annoyance at the use of hacker's slang. Over his loud objections, we
made a point of using the slang as much as possible in his presence,
and eventually it began to sink in, Finally, in one conversation he
used the word "canonical" in slanglike fashion without thinking.
Steele: Aha! We've finally got him talking jargon [slang] too!
Stallman: (who wasn't quite paying attention) What did he say?
Steele: Bob just used "canonical" in the canonical way.
CATATONIA (kat':-toh'ne-uh) noun.
A condition of suspended animation in which something is so WEDGED
that it makes no response. For example, if you are typing on your
terminal and suddenly the computer doesn't even make the letter appear
on the screen as you type -- let alone do what you're asking it to do
-- then the computer is suffering from catatonia (probably because it
has CRASHED).
CATATONIC (kat':-tahn'ik) adjective. In a state of catatonia.
Synonym: WEDGED.
CDR (ku'd:r) verb.
To remove the first item from a list of things.
CDR DOWN verb. To go down a list of things one by one. Example: "Shall
we cdr down the agenda?" Silly.
This term is derived from a function of the LISP language that removes
an item from a list.
CHARACTERS noun.
Those things that you type on a keyboard or that appear on your
terminal. (Sometimes you can type characters on your keyboard that
cannot be printed on the screen, and vice versa. For example, on most
keyboards you can type "control characters" that can't be written down
like the characters "A" and "%" can; they are mostly used as special
commands. Conversely, some terminals can display almost any picture a
program can draw. A program can then draw Greek letters or any other
funny symbol, even if they aren't on the keyboard.)
Computers tend to seem very unforgiving: a program can fail to
work if you get even one character in it wrong. (Folklore has it that a
NASA mission to Venus failed because, in one place in one program,
there was a period where there should have been a comma). Hackers
therefore need to be very precise when talking about characters, and
have developed a considerable amount of verbal shorthand for talking
about characters:
! EXCL, exclam, BANG, SHRIEK, WOW.
# Hash mark, MESH, SPLAT, CRUNCH, pig-pen.
$ Dollar.
& Ampersand (This name is already so silly that no
slang term is needed!)
' Single quote, forward quote.
( and ) Parens (separately called just OPEN and CLOSE).
* Star, SPLAT. (In other computer communities, the
name "gear" is used, because it looks like a little
cogwheel).
. Period, dot, point. (Which of these is used depends
on culture and context. The word "point" is used
more at MIT that "dot" is. CMU uses "dot"
almost exclusively).
/ Slash, forward slash.
; SEMI.
< Less than, left ANGLE BRACKET, open angle bracket,
left BROKET.
= Equals.
> Greater than, right ANGLE BRACKET, close angle
bracket, right BROKET.
? QUES, query.
@ At-sign, at.
\ Backslash.
^ Caret. (The name "uparrow" is also used; this dates
from the days of old ASCII, when the code now
assigned to circumflex was used for an upward-
-pointing arrow).
_ Backarrow. (This dates from the days of old ASCII,
when the code now assigned to an underscore was
used for a leftward-pointing arrow).
` Backquote.
{ and } Curly braces, curly brackets, SQUIGGLE BRACKETS.
| Vertical bar.
~ TWIDDLE, SQUIGGLE, SQIGGLE.
The INTERCAL programming language, consistent with its general
policy of never doing anything the way some other programming language
does it, has odd names especially invented for many characters. Most of
these names are generally not used except in the context of INTERCAL.
. Spot.
: Two-spot.
, Tail.
# Mesh.
= Half-mesh.
' Spark.
` Backspark.
" Rabbit ears.
! WOW.
? What.
| Spike.
- Worm.
< Angle. (The two-character arrow "<-" is called
"angleworm").
> Right angle.
( Wax.
) Wane.
[ U turn.
] U turn back.
{ Embrace.
} Bracelet.
* SPLAT.
& Ampersand (INTERCAL couldn't make this any sillier,
either).
_ Flatworm.
+ Intersection.
/ Slat.
\ Backslat.
^ Shark (or simply shark fin).
@ Whirlpool.
% Double-oh-seven.
CHINE NUAL (sheen'yu-:l) noun.
The reference manual for the Lisp Machine, a computer designed at
MIT especially for running the LISP language. It is called this because
the title, LISP MACHINE MANUAL, appears in big block letters -- wrapped
around the cover in such a way that you have to open the cover out flat
to see the whole thing. If you look at just the front cover, you see
only part of the title, and it reads "LISP CHINE NUAL"
CHOMP (chahmp) verb.
To LOSE; to chew on something of which more was bitten off than
one can.
Synonyms: LOSE, BITE THE BAG (see BAGBITER).
A hand gesture commonly accompanies the use of the word "chomp".
The four fingers are held together as if in a mitten or hand puppet,
and the fingers and thumb are opened and closed rapidly to illustrate a
biting action. The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and
for the real emphasis you can use both hands at once. For example, to
do this to a person is equivalent to saying, "You chomper!". If you
point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of
some failure. I would do this if someone told me that a program I had
written failed in some surprising way and I felt stupid for not having
anticipated it.
CHOMPER (chahmp':r) noun. Someone or something that is chomping; a
loser.
Synonyms: LOSER, BAGBITER.
CLOSE (klohz)
1. adjective. Of a delimiting CHARACTER, used at the righthand end
of a grouping. Used in such terms as "close parenthesis" and "close
bracket".
2. noun. Abbreviation for "close (or right) parenthesis", used
when necessary to eliminate oral ambiguity. See OPEN and CHARACTERS.
3. verb. To terminate one's interaction with a file of in-
formation. See OPEN.
COKEBOTTLE (kohk'baht-:l) noun.
Any very unusual character, particularly one that isn't on your
keyboard so you can't type it. A program written at Stanford, for
example, is likely to have a lot of "control-meta-cokebottle" commands,
that is, commands that you can only type on a Stanford keyboard --
because you need the "control" and "meta" keys (see BUCKY BITS) -- and
also unusual characters such as the downward-pointing arrow. The last
is a "cokebottle" unless you happen to have a Stanford keyboard. (This
usage probably arose because of the unusual and distinctive shape of
Coca-Cola bottles. No keyboard I know of actually has a cokebottle
character on it, so any character you can't type might as well be a
Coke bottle for all the good it does you).
COM MODE, COMM MODE (kahm'mohd) noun.
A situation in which two or more terminals are linked together by
the computer so that whatever is typed on any of them appears on all of
them. Ideally this is accomplished in such a way that what you type
appears on the other terminals but is not otherwise interpreted by the
computer (so what you type doesn't foul up your programs). The word com
is short for communicate.
Com mode is used for conversation: you can talk to other hackers
without leaving your terminal. It combines the immediacy of talking
with all the precision (and verbosity) that written language entail. It
is difficult to communicate inflections, though conventions have arisen
for some of these. For example, to emphasize a word (as if printed in
italics), one may type an asterisk before and after the word. Typing in
all-capital letters is equivalent to raising one's voice).
Neophytes, when in com mode, seem to think they must produce let-
ter-perfect prose because they are typing rather than speaking. This is
not the best approach. It can be very frustrating to wait while your
partner pauses to think of a word, or repeatedly makes the same
spelling error and backs up to fix it. It is usually best just to leave
typographical errors behind and plunge forward, unless severe confusion
may result. In that case, it is often fastest just to type xxx and
start over from before the mistake.
There is a special set of slang terms used only in com mode, which
are not used vocally. These are used to save typing or to communicate
inflection.
BCNU Be seeing you (that is, good-bye).
BTW By the way...
BYE? Are you ready to unlink? (This is the standard way
to end a com mode conversation: the other person
types BYE to confirm, or else continues the
conversation).
CUL See you later.
FOO? A greeting, also meaning R U THERE? Often used in
the case of unexpected links, meaning also "Sorry
if I butted in" (linker) or "What's up?" (linkee).
FYI For your information...
GA Go ahead (used when two people have tried to type
simultaneously; this cedes the right to type to the
other.
HELLOP A greeting, also meaning R U THERE? (This is an
instance of the -P convention).
NIL No. (See the main entry for NIL).
OBTW Oh, by the way...
R U THERE?
Are you there?
SEC Wait a second (sometimes written SEC...). For
example, if you are interrupted by a telephone
call, or need to think about something before
replying, you might type this. You might also type
an additional dot every few seconds to indicate
that you are still there but busy. Also, if you
need to use a program for a moment (possibly
because someone asked you a question), you might
type SEC..., unlink your terminal, use your
program, and the link back into the com mode.
T Yes (See the main entry for T).
TNX Thanks.
TNX 1.0E6
Thanks a million. (This "1.0E6" is a standard way
to write one million in many computer languages).
Silly.
[double crlf]
When the typing party has finished, he types two
CRLF's (that is, presses the RETURN key twice) to
signal that he is done. This leaves a blank line
between individual "speeches" in the conversation,
making it easier to reread the preceding text, and
indicates that the other person may type.
[name]: When three or more terminals are linked, each
speech is preceded by the typist's login name
("computer id") and a colon (or a hyphen) to
indicate who is typing. You need to do this because
you can't tell who is who by tone of voice! The
login name often is shortened to a unique prefix
(possibly a single letter) during a very long
conversation.
/\/\/\ The equivalent of a giggle.
Synonym: TALK MODE. (The term "com mode" is used more at MIT, and
"talk mode" at Stanford.
COMPUTRON (kahm'pyoo-trahn'), COMPUTON (kahm'pyoo-tahn') noun.
A mythical subatomic particle that bears the unit quantity of
computation or information, in much the same way that an electron bears
one unit of electric charge. If the computer is too slow, it's because
you're short of computrons. See BOGON and CYCLE.
An elaborate pseudo-scientific theory of computrons has been
worked out as a jest by MIT hacker Stavros Macrakis. (He called the
particles "mensons", but that name is no longer used). It is a
well-known fact of physics that as you heat something, the molecules
get jiggled around and their positions become more random. The hotter
it gets, the less predictable are the positions of the molecules.
Eventually the molecules just spill all over each other, and the thing
melts. Now, he argues, it obviously melts because each molecule has
lost the information about where it is supposed to be: in other words,
it has lost computrons. This explains why computers get so hot and
require air conditioning: they use up computrons. Conversely, you
should be able to refrigerate something simply by placing it in the
path of a computron beam.
CMU hacker Joe Newcomer has also observed that this theory
explains why a computer works when it's tested in the factory but not
when you've put it in the computer room with all the other computers.
They're tested singly at the factory, and so there are plenty of
computrons available there, but in the computer room all the computers
compete for the computrons in a limited space and some of them come up
short.
CONNECTOR CONSPIRACY noun.
The (perhaps only mythical) tendency of manufacturers (or, by ex-
tension, 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.
This term probably came into prominence with the appearance of the
KL10 model of the PDP-10, none of whose connectors seemed to match
anything else.
CONS (kahnz) verb.
To add a new element to a list, usually to the top rather than at
the bottom. CONS UP verb. To synthesize from smaller pieces; more ge-
nerally, to create or invent. Examples: "I'm trying to cons up a list
of volleyball players". "Let's cons up an example".
This term comes from the LISP programming language, which has a
function called CONS that adds a data item to the front of a list.
CONTROL
The name of one of the several BUCKY BITS. Used as a prefix to
another character, it indicates that the "control" key on your keyboard
should be pressed as the other character is typed.
CONTROL-B (k:n-trohl' bee') interjection.
May I interrupt? or, Beginning of digression. Synonym: PUSH.
Antonym: CONTROL-P.
CONTROL-G (k:n-trohl' jee') interjection.
Stop! Cease! Change the subject! Stop that FLAMING!
CONTROL-P (k:n-trohl' pee') interjection.
End of interruption or digression. If two hackers are sitting in
an office talking, a third one might stick his head in the door and ask
"Control-B?". This is a polite, albeit silly, way of asking "May I
interrupt?" When the side conversation is done, the third hacker might
say "Thanks a lot, Control-P".
Control characters are used in various ways to control the actions
of computer programs. Different computer systems have different con-
ventions about how control characters are used, and hackers will use
the local computer convention when speaking. The definitions given
above correspond to their meanings as used in the MACLISP language and
in DDT at MIT. At other places, "Control-C" replaces "Control-G", for
example.
CRASH
1. noun. A sudden, usually drastic failure. Most often said of the
SYSTEM, sometimes of magnetic disk drives. Example: "Three LUSERS lost
their files in last night's disk crash". The term "system crash"
usually, though not always, implies that the operating system or other
software was at fault. Disk crashes come in two varieties: either the
disks are physically unharmed but some information stored on them is
lost, or else the disks are physically damaged -- in which case the
entire information content of the disk is usually lost. The second kind
usually occurs when the magnetic read/write heads hit the surfaces of
the disks and scrape off the oxide. This kind of disk crash is called a
"head crash".
2. verb. To fail suddenly. Example: "Has the system just
crashed?".
3. verb. To cause to fail. Example: "There is a BUG in the tape
controller; if you try to use the tape drive, you will crash the
system".
4. verb. Of people, to go to sleep -- particularly after a long
period of work. See GRONK OUT.
CREEPING FEATURISM (kreep'eeng feetch':r-iz':m) noun.
The tendency for anything complicated to become even more
complicated because people keep saying, "Gee, it would be even better
if it had this feature too". (See FEATURE)
The result is usually a patchwork, because it grew one ad hoc step
at a time, rather than being planned. Planning is a lot of work, but
it's easy to add just one extra little feature to help someone... And
then another... and another... Usually this term is used to describe
computer programs, but it could also be applied to the federal
government, the IRS 1040 form, and new cars.
CRETIN (kreet-:n) noun.
A congenital LOSER; an obnoxious person; someone who can't do
anything right. CRETINOUS (kree'tin-uhss, kreet':n-uhss) adjective.
Wrong; nonfunctional; very poorly designed (also used pejoratively of
people).
Synonyms: BLETCHEROUS, BAGBITING, LOSING, BRAIN-DAMAGED.
CRLF (k:r'lif, crul':f)
1. noun. A carriage return (CR) followed by a line feed (LF). More
loosely, whatever it takes to get you from the end of one line of text
to the beginning of the next line.
2. verb. To output a crlf; to end a line of text or to begin a new
line of text.
Synonym: TERPRI.
CROCK noun.
1. Something, especially a program, that works but does so in an
unbelievable ugly or awkward manner; more specifically, something that
works acceptably but which is quite prone to failure if disturbed in
the least.
2. A tightly woven, almost completely unmodifiable structure;
something very complicated that ought to be simple.
Computer programs seldom stay the same forever. They tend to
evolve, and are constantly changed as BUGS are fixed or new FEATURES
added. Crocks make this difficult because, although they work, they are
very difficult to make small changes to.
Synonym: KLUDGE. CROCKISH, CROCKY adjective. Having the cha-
racteristics of a crock. See BLETCHEROUS.
CROCKITUDE (krahk':-tood) noun. Crockness, crockhood.
CRUFT (kruhft)
1. noun. An unpleasant substance. The dust that gathers under your
bed is cruft.
2. noun. The results of shoddy construction.
CRUFT TOGETHER verb. To make something quickly and haphazardly to
get it working quickly, without regard to craftsmanship. Example:
"There isn't any program now to reverse all the lines of a file, but I
can probably cruft one together in about ten minutes".
The origin of this word is unknown.
CRUFTY (kruhft'ee)
1. adjective. Unpleasant, especially to the touch; yucky, like
spilled coffee smeared with peanut butter and catsup.
2. adjective. Poorly built, possibly overly complex. "This is
standard old crufty DEC software".
3. adjective. Generally unpleasant.
4. noun (also spelled "cruftie"). A small crufty object, or (in a
program) a small data structure, especially one that doesn't fit well
into the scheme of things. Every desk seems to have one drawer that
accumulates crufties. Example: "A LISP property list is a good place to
store crufties". (In the LISP language, odd data structures can be
stored in a catchall data structure called a property list).
CRUFTSMANSHIP noun. The antithesis of craftsmanship.
CRUNCH
1. verb. To process, usually in a time-consuming or complicated
way. The connotation is of an essentially trivial operation that is
nonetheless painful to perform, possibly because the trivial operation
must be performed millions of times. When the trivial operation
involves numerical computation, this is called "number crunching".
Example: "FORTRAN programs mostly do number crunching".
2. verb. To reduce the size of a file by a complicated scheme that
produces bit configurations completely unrelated to the original data,
such as by the mathematical technique called "Huffman codes". (The file
ends up looking like a paper document would if somebody crunched the
paper into a wad). Since such a compression operation usually requires
a great deal of computation (it is much more sophisticated than such
simper methods as counting consecutive repeated characters), the term
is doubly appropriate. Sometimes the term "file crunching" is used to
distinguish it from "number crunching".
3. noun. A crisis, especially a scarcity of some resource. If you
don't have much time to get something done, you're in a time crunch.
See CYCLE CRUNCH.
4. noun. The character "#". See CHARACTERS.
CTY (sit'ee) noun.
The terminal physically associated with a computer's operating
console. The term is a contraction of "Console TTY", that is, "Console
TeleTYpe".
CUSPY (cuhsp'ee) adjective.
Clean, well-written; functionally excellent. A program that
performs well and interfaces well to users is cuspy.
Antonyms: RUDE, CRUFTY, BLETCHEROUS.
This term originated at WPI. It comes from the acronym CUSP, used
by DEC to mean a "Commonly Used System Program", that is, a utility
program used by many people. Ideally, such programs, whatever the
source, are built to high standards of excellence. The extent to which
a hacker uses this word obviously depends largely on how highly he
regards DEC-supplied software.
CYCLE noun.
The "basic unit of computation". What every hacker wants more of.
You might think that single machine instructions would be the measure
of computation, and indeed computers are often compared by assessing
how many instructions they can process per second -- even though some
instructions take longer that others. Nearly all computers have an
internal clock, though, and you can describe an instruction as taking
so many "clock cycles". Typically the computer can access its memory
once on every clock cycle, and so one speaks also of "memory cycles".
These are technical meanings of "cycle".
The slang meaning comes from the observation that there are only
so many cycles per second; and when you are sharing a computer, the
cycles get divided up among the users. The more cycles the computer
spends working on your program rather than someone else's, the faster
your program will run. That's why every hacker wants more cycles: so he
can spend less time waiting for the computer to respond.
CYCLE CRUNCH noun. The situation where the number of people si-
multaneously trying to use the computer has reached the point where no
one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin. Usually the
only solution is to buy another computer.
CYCLE DROUGHT noun. A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a cycle
crunch, but could also occur because part of the computer is tem-
porarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go around. Example: "The
high MOBY is DOWN, so we're running with only half the usual amount of
memory. There will be a cycle drought until it's fixed".
DAEMON (day'm:n, dee'm:n) noun.
A program that is not invoked explicitly, but that lies dormant
waiting for one or more conditions to occur. The idea is that the
perpetrator of the condition need not be aware that a daemon is lurking
(though often a program will commit an action only because it knows
that it will implicitly invoke a daemon). For example, many operating
systems have a printing daemon. When you want to print a file on some
printing device, instead of explicitly running a program that does the
printing, you just copy your file to a particular directory (file
area). The printer daemon is just a program that is always running; it
checks the special directory periodically, and whenever it finds a file
there it prints it and then deletes it. The advantage is that programs
that want (in this example) files printed need not compete for access
to the printing device itself, and need not wait until the printing
process is completed. In particular, a user doesn't have to sit there
waiting with his terminal tied up while the printing program does its
work. He can do something else useful while the daemon does its job.
Daemon and DEMON are often used interchangeably, but seem to have
discrete connotations. "Daemon" was introduced to computing by people
working on CTSS, the Compatible Time-Sharing System, which was the
first time-sharing system, developed at MIT. They pronounced it
"dee'm:n", and used it to refer to what is now called a DRAGON or
PHANTOM. The meaning and pronunciation have drifted, and we think the
definitions given here reflect current usage.
DAY MODE noun.
The state a person is in when he is working during the day and
sleeping at night.
See PHASE and NIGHT MODE.
DDT (dee'dee'tee') noun.
A program that helps you to debug other programs by showing
individual machine instruction in a readable symbolic form and letting
the user change them. At MIT, DDT is also used as the "top-level
command language" to run other programs.
The DEC PDP-10 Reference Handbook (1969) contained this footnote
on the first page of the documentation for DDT:
Historical footnote: DDT was developed at MIT for the PDP-1
computer in 1961. At that time, DDT stood for "DEC Debugging Tape".
Since then, the idea of an on-line debugging program has propagated
throughout the computer industry. DDT programs are now available for
all DEC computers. Since media other than tape are now frequently used,
the more descriptive name "Dynamic Debugging Technique" has been
adopted, retaining the DDT acronym. Confusion between DDT-10 and
another well-known pesticide, dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane
(C14H9Cl5) should be minimal, since each attacks a different, and
apparently mutually exclusive, class of bugs.
Sad to say, this quotation was removed from later editions of the
handbook as DEC became much more "businesslike".
DEADLOCK noun.
A situation wherein two or more processes (or persons) are unable
to proceed because each is waiting for another to do something.
Here is a typical example: Two programs running on the same computer
both want the exclusive use of two things, say a line printer and a
disk. The first one grabs the line printer and the tries to grab the
disk, but fails because the second one successfully grabbed the disk
and is now waiting to get the line printer.
Deadlock also occurs when two people meet in a narrow corridor and
each tries to be polite by moving aside to let the other pass -- but
they end up swaying from side to side without making any progress
because they always move the same way at the same time.
Synonym: DEADLY EMBRACE.
DEADLY EMBRACE noun.
DEADLOCK. This term is usually used only when exactly two
processes are involved, while "deadlock" can involve any number. Also,
"deadly embrace" seems to be the more popular term in Europe, while
"deadlock" is more frequently used in the United States.
DELTA noun.
1. A change, especially a small or incremental change. Example: "I
just doubled the speed of my program!" "What was the delta on program
size?". "About thirty percent". (He doubled the speed of his program,
but increased its size by thirty percent).
2. A small quantity, but not so small as EPSILON.
DEMENTED adjective.
Useless; totally nonfunctional; BRAIN_DAMAGED.
This is yet another term of disgust used to describe a program.
The connotation in this case that the program works as designed, but
the design is bad; perhaps also that the program explicitly exhibits
strange behavior. For example, a program that generates large numbers
of meaningless error messages, implying that it is on the point of
imminent collapse, would be described as demented.
DEMON (dee'm:n) noun.
A portion of a program which is not involved explicitly, but which
lies dormant waiting for some condition(s) to occur. See DAEMON.
Demons are usually processes that are pieces of a single program,
while daemons are usually entire programs running in the context of a
large system, such as an operating system. This distinction is
admittedly not hard and fast. Demons are particularly common in
artificial intelligence programs. For example, a knowledge manipulation
program might implement inference rules as demons. Whenever a new piece
of knowledge was added, various demons would activate (which demons
depends on the particular piece of data) and would create additional
pieces of knowledge by applying their respective inference rules to the
original piece. These new pieces could in turn activate more demons as
the inferences filtered down through chains of logic. Meanwhile the
main program could continue with whatever its primary task was.
DIDDLE (did':l)
1. verb. To work with in a not particularly serious manner; to
make a very simple change (as to a program). Examples: "Let's diddle
this piece of code and see if the problem goes away". (That is, let's
try the obvious quick fix). "I diddled the text editor to ring the bell
before it deletes all your files".
2. noun. The action of result of diddling.
Synonyms: TWEAK, TWIDDLE.
DIKE (diek) verb.
To remove or disable a portion of something, as a wire form a
computer or subroutine from a program.
A standard slogan: "When in doubt, dike it out". (The implication
is that the program [or whatever] is so bad that taking something out
can only make things better!)
The word "dikes" is widely used among mechanics and engineers to
mean "diagonal cutters", a heavy-duty metal cutting device. To "dike
something out" means to use such cutters to remove something. Among
hackers, this term has been metaphorically extended to nonphysical
objects such as pieces of program.
DO PROTOCOL verb.
To perform an interaction with somebody or something according to
a well-defined standard procedure. For example: "Let's do protocol with
the check" at a restaurant means to ask the waitress for the check,
calculate the tip and everybody's share, make change as necessary, and
pay the bill.
DOUBLE BUCKY adjective.
Using both the "control" and "meta" keys on a keyboard that has
them. "The EMACS command to reformat a LISP program is double-bucky-G".
(That is, the command is control-meta-G).
For a complete explanation, see BUCKY BITS.
The following lyrics were written on May 27, 1978, in celebration
of the Stanford keyboard. A typical MIT comment was that the "bucky
bits" ("control" and "meta" shifting keys) were nice, but there weren't
enough of them -- you could only type 512 different characters on a
Stanford keyboard. An obvious thing was simply to add more shifting
keys, and this was eventually done. One problem is that a keyboard with
that many shifting keys is hard on touch typists, who don't like to
move their hands away from the home position on the keyboard. It was
half-seriously suggested that the extra shifting keys be pedals; typing
on such a keyboard would be very much like playing a pipe organ. This
idea is mentioned below, in what is a parody of a very fine song by
Jeffrey Moss called "Rubber Duckie", which was published in The Sesame
Street Songbook.
Double Bucky
Double bucky, you're the one!
You make my keyboard lots of fun.
Double bucky, an additional bit or two:
(Vo-vo-de-o!)
Control and meta, side by side.
Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!
Double bucky! Half a thousands 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)
DOWN adjective.
Not working; deactivated. Example: "The Up escalator is down".
That is considered a humorous thing to say, but "The elevator is down"
always means "The elevator isn't working", and never refers to what
floor the elevator is on.
Antonym: UP.
GO DOWN verb. To stop functioning, usually said of the SYSTEM. The
message every hacker hates to hear from the operator is, "The system
will go down in five minutes".
TAKE DOWN, BRING DOWN verb. To deactivate purposely, usually for
repair work. Example: "I'm taking the system down to work on that BUG
in the tape drive".
See CRASH.
DPB (d:-pib', duh-pib') verb.
To plop something down in the middle. Silly. Example: "Dpb
yourself into that couch there". (The connotation would be that the
couch is full except for one slot just big enough for you to sit in.
DPB means "DePosit Byte", and is the name of a PDP-10 instruction that
inserts some BITS into the middle of some other bits).
DRAGON noun.
A program similar to a DAEMON, except that it doesn't sit around
waiting for something to happen but is instead used by the SYSTEM to
perform various useful tasks that just have to be done periodically.
A typical example would be an accounting program that accumulates
statistics, keeps track of who is logged in, and so on.
Another example: Most time-sharing systems have several terminals,
and at any given time some are in use and some are sitting idle. The
idle ones usually sit there with some idiotic message on their screens,
such as "logged off", from the last time someone used it. One time-
-sharing system at MIT puts these idle terminals to good use by
displaying useful information on them, such as who is using the
computer, where they are, what they're doing, and what their telephone
numbers are, along with other information such as pretty pictures (the
picture collection includes a unicorn, Snoopy, and the U.S.S. Enter-
prise from "Star Treck"). All this information is displayed on idle
terminals by the "name dragon", so called because it originally printed
just the names of the users. (That it now shows all kinds of things,
including useless though pretty pictures, is an example of CREEPING
FEATURISM). The "name dragon" is a program started up by the system,
and it runs about every five minutes and updates the information on all
idly terminals.
DWIM (dwim) noun.
A complicated procedure (in the INTERLISP dialect of LISP) that
attempts to correct your mistakes automatically. For example, if you
spell something wrong or don't balance your parentheses properly, it
tries to figure out what you meant. DWIM stands for "Do What I Mean".
When this works, it is very impressive. When it doesn't work, anything
can happen.
When a program has become very big and complicated -- so com-
plicated that no one can understand how to use it -- it is often
suggested in jest that dwim be added to it.
See BELLS AND WHISTLES.
EL CAMINO BIGNUM (el' k:-mee'noh big'num) noun.
El Camino Real.
El Camino Real is the name of a street through the San Francisco
peninsula that originally extended (and still appears in places) all
the way down to Mexico City. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula
is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which is assumed to run
north and south even tough it doesn't really in many places (see
LOGICAL). El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University, and so is
familiar to hackers.
The Spanish word real, which has two syllables (ree-ahl'), means
"royal"; El Camino Real is "the royal road". Now, the English word real
is used in mathematics to describe numbers (and by analogy is misused
in computer jargon to mean floating-point numbers). In the FORTRAN
language, for example, a "real" quantity is a number typically precise
to seven decimal places; and a "double-precision" quantity is a larger
floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen decimal places.
When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976 or so, he remarked
what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on "real", he started
calling it "El Camino Double Precision". But when the hacker was told
that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it "El Camino
Bignum", and among hackers that name has stuck. (See BIGNUM).
ENGLISH noun.
The source code for a program, which may be in any computer
language.
This term is slightly obsolete, and used mostly by old-time
hackers who were around MIT in the mid-1960s. To a real hacker, a
program written in his favorite programming language is as readable as
English.
EPSILON (ep'si-lahn)
1. noun. A small quantity of anything. Example: "The cost is
epsilon".
2. adjective. Very small, negligible. "I tried to speed up the
program, but got epsilon improvement".
WITHIN EPSILON OF preposition. Close enough to be indistin-
guishable for all practical purposes. This is even closer than being
within DELTA of. Example: "That's now what I asked for, but it's within
epsilon of what I wanted". Alternatively, it may mean not close enough,
but very little is required to get is there: "My program is within
epsilon of working".
EPSILON SQUARED noun. A quantity even smaller than epsilon, as
small in relation to epsilon as epsilon is to something normal. Suppose
you buy a large computer for one million dollars. You probably need a
thousand-dollar terminal to go with it, but by comparison the cost of
that is epsilon. If you need a ten-dollar cable to connect them
together, its cost is epsilon squared.
See DELTA.
The terms epsilon and delta are names of Greek letter; the slang
usage stems from the traditional use of these letters in mathematics
for very small numerical quantities, particularly in so-called
"epsilon-delta" proofs in the differential calculus.
Once "epsilon" has been mentioned, "delta" is usually used to mean
a quantity that is slightly greater than epsilon but still very small.
For example, "The cost isn't epsilon, but it's delta" means that the
cost isn't totally negligible, but it is nevertheless very small. A
quantity that is a little bit smaller than epsilon is "epsilon over
2", and "epsilon squared" is very much smaller than epsilon.
EXCH (eks'ch:, ekstch) verb.
To exchange two things, one for the other; to swap places. Silly.
If you point to two people sitting down and say "Exch!" you are asking
them to trade places.
EXCH, meaning EXCHange, is the name of a PDP-10 instruction that
exchanges the contents of a register and a memory location.
EXCL (eks'c:l) noun.
The character "!". See CHARACTERS.
FAULTY adjective.
Nonfunctional; buggy. This word means about the same thing as BAG-
BITING, BLETCHEROUS, and LOSING, but the connotation is much milder.
FEATURE noun.
1. An intended property of behavior (as of a program). Whether it
is good is immaterial.
2. A good property or behavior (as of a program). Whether it was
intended is immaterial.
3. A surprising property of behavior; in particular, one that is
purposely inconsistent because it works better that way. For example,
in the EMACS text editor, the "transpose characters" command will
exchange the two characters on either side of the cursor on the screen,
except when the cursor is at the end of a line; in that case, the two
characters before the cursor are exchanged. While this behavior is
perhaps surprising, and certainly inconsistent, it has been found
through extensive experimentation to be what most users want. The
inconsistency is therefore a feature and not a BUG.
4. A property or behavior that is gratuitous or unnecessary,
though perhaps impressive or cute. For example, one feature of the
MACLISP language is the ability to print numbers as Roman numerals. See
BELLS AND WHISTLES.
5. A property of behavior that was put in to help someone else but
that happens to be in your way. A standard joke is that a bug can be
turned into a feature simply by documenting it (then theoretically no
one can complain about it because it's in the manual), or even by
simply declaring it to be good. "That's not a bug; it's a feature!"
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".
The following list covers the spectrum of terms used to rate
programs or portions thereof (except for the first two, which tend to
be applied more to hardware or to the SYSTEM, but are included for
completeness):
CRASH LOSS HACK
STOPPAGE MISFEATURE WIN
BRAIN DAMAGE CROCK FEATURE
BUG KLUDGE PERFECTION
The last is never actually attained.
FEEP (feep)
1. noun. The soft electronic "bell" of a display terminal (except
for a DEC VT-52!): a beep.
2. verb. To make (or to cause a terminal to make) a "feep" sound.
FEEPER noun. The device in the terminal (usually a loudspeaker of some
kind) that makes the feep sound. FEEPING CREATURISM noun. This term
isn't really well defined, but it sounds so nice (being a spoonerism on
CREEPING FEATURISM) that most hackers have said or heard it. It
probably has something to do with terminals prowling about in the dark
making their customary noises.
A true TTY does not feep; it has a real mechanical bell that just
rings. Synonyms for "feep" are "beep", "bleep", or just about anything
suitably onomatopoeic. (Jeff MacNelly, in his comic strip Shoe, uses
the word "eep" for sounds made by computer terminals and video games;
this is perhaps the closest one yet.) The term "breedle" is sometimes
heard at Stanford, where the terminal bleepers are not particularly
soft. (They sound more like the musical equivalent of a raspberry or a
Bronx cheer. For a close approximation, imagine the sound of a "Star
Trek" communicator's beep lasting for five seconds). By contrast, the
feeper on a DEC VT-52 terminal has been compared to the sound of a '52
Chevy stripping it gears.
FENCEPOST ERROR noun.
An "off-by-one" error: the discrete equivalent of a boundary
condition.
This problem is often exhibited in programs containing iterative
loops: something will be done one time too few or too many. The term
comes from the following problem: "If you build a fence 100 feet long
with posts 10 feet apart, how many posts do you need?" (Either 9 or 11
is a better answer than the obvious 10.)
For example, suppose you have a long list or array of items and
want to process items m through n. How many items are there? The
obvious answer is n-m, but that is off by one. The right answer is
n-m+1. A program that used the "obvious" formula would have a fencepost
error in it.
Not all off-by-one problems are fencepost errors. The game of
Musical Chairs involves an off-by-one problem where N people try to sit
in N-1 chairs, but it's not a fencepost error. A fencepost error is
typified by counting things rather than counting the spaces between
them, or vice versa, or by neglecting to consider whether one should
count one or both of the ends of a row.
FINE adjective.
Good, but not good enough to be CUSPY.
This term is used primarily at WPI. The word "fine" is oc-
casionally heard elsewhere, too, but does not connote the implicit
comparison the higher level of perfection implied by CUSPY.
FLAG noun.
A variable or quantity that can take on one of two values: a BIT,
particularly one that is used to indicate one of two outcomes or is
used to control which of two things is to be done. Example: "This flag
controls whether to clear the screen before printing the message". "The
program status word contains several flag bits".
FLAG DAY noun.
A day on which a change is made that is neither forward- nor
backward compatible (so old programs won't work under the new system,
and new programs won't work under the old one), and that is costly to
make and costly to undo. Example: "If we change MACLISP to use square
brackets instead of parentheses, it will cause a flag day for every-
body". A flag day, as well as the weeks or months following, is a time
of great confusion for everyone concerned.
This term has nothing to do with the use of the word FLAG to mean
a variable that has two values. It came into use when a massive change
was made to the MULTICS time-sharing system to convert from the old
ASCII code to the new one. This was scheduled for Flag Day, June 14,
1966.
FLAKY, FLAKEY adjective.
Subject to frequent or intermittent failure.
This use is of course related to the common slang use of the word,
to describe a person as eccentric or crazy. A system that is flaky is
working, sort of, enough that you are tempted to try to use it; but it
fails frequently enough that the odds in favor of finishing what you
start are low.
FLAME
1. verb. To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively
uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.
2. noun. A speech or dialogue in which the speakers are flaming.
3. noun. A subject on which a given person likes to flame.
FLAME SESSION noun. A meeting in which everyone flames; a "bull
session".
FLAME ON verb. To continue to flame.
FLAMER noun. One who flames: a fanatic.
FLAMAGE (flaym':j) noun. Flaming; the content of a flame. (Both
flamage and flaming are used in this sense).
Synonym: RAVE.
When a discussion degenerates into useless controversy, one might
tell the participants, "Now you're just flaming!" or "Stop all that
flamage!" to get them to cool down (so to speak).
FLAP verb.
To give the command to unload a MICROTAPE or, more generally, any
magnetic tape from its drive. (When this operation is finished, the
take-up reel keeps spinning and the end of the tape goes flap, flap,
flap...) "I need to use the tape drive; could you please flap your
tape?"
FLAVOR noun.
1. Variety, type, kind. "EMACS commands come in two flavors: sin-
gle-character and named". "These lights come in two flavors: big red
ones and small green ones". See VANILLA.
2. The attribute that causes something to be FLAVORFUL. Usually
used in the phrase "yields additional flavor". Example: "This feature
yields additional flavor by allowing one to print text either right-
-side-up or upside-down."
FLAVORFUL adjective. Aesthetically pleasing.
Antonym: BLETCHEROUS. See TASTE.
FLUSH verb.
1. To delete, destroy, or get rid of something, typically
something that is useless or superfluous. "All that nonsense has been
flushed". This is standard MIT terminology within the ITS time-sharing
SYSTEM for aborting an output operation. One speaks of the text that
would have been printed -- but was not -- as having been "flushed".
Under that time-sharing system, if you ask to have a file printed on
your terminal, it is printed a page at a time; at the end of each page,
it asks whether you want to see more. If you say no, it says "FLUSHED".
(A speculation is that this term arose from a vivid image of flushing
unwanted characters by hosing down the internal output buffer, washing
the characters away before they can be printed.)
2. To exclude someone from an activity.
3. To leave at the end of a day's work (as opposed to leaving for
a meal). Examples: "I'm going to flush now". "Time to flush". See GRONK
OUT.
FOO (foo)
1. interjection. Term of disgust. For greater emphasis, one says
MOBY FOO (see MOBY).
2. noun. The first metasyntactic variable. When you have to invent
an arbitrary temporary name for something for the sake of exposition,
FOO is usually used. If you need a second one, BAR or BAZ is usually
used; there is a slight preference at MIT for bar and at Stanford for
baz. (It was probably at Stanford that bar was corrupted to baz).
Clearly, bar was the original, for the concatenation FOOBAR is
widely used also, and this in turn can be traced to the obscene acronym
"FUBAR" that arose in the armed forces during World War II) If bar is
used, then baz is used as a third name after that.
Example: "The bug can happen in this way. Suppose you have two
functions FOO and BAR. FOO calls BAR with two arguments. Now BAR calls
BAZ, passing it just one of the two arguments..." In effect, these
words serve as extra pronouns; they are always "nonce names". The very
fact that they always serve this purpose allows some abbreviation. The
preceding example might be shortened without loss of clarity to: "The
bug can happen in this way. Suppose FOO calls BAR with two arguments.
Now BAR calls BAZ, passing it just one of the two arguments..."
Words such as "foo" are called "metasyntactic variables" because,
just as a mathematical variable stands for some number, so "foo" always
stands for the real name of the thing under discussion. A hacker avoids
using "foo" as the real name of anything. Indeed, a standard convention
is that any file with "foo" in its name is temporary and can be deleted
on sight.
FOO? What? What's going on here? See COM MODE.
FOOBAR. A concatenation of FOO and BAR. "Foo" is certainly a
favorite among hackers. While its use in connection with BAR clearly
stems from "FUBAR", its original appearance appears to be untraceable,
and may derive from other common interjections such as the Yiddish
"Feh!". Bill Holman featured the word "foo" prominently in his comic
strip Smokey Stover.
FRIED adjective.
1. Nonfunctional because of hardware failure; burned out. Example:
"The disk controller is fried". (Sometimes this literally happens to
electronic circuits! In particular, resistors can burn out and
transformers can melt down, emitting terrible-smelling smoke. However,
this term is also used metaphorically.)
2. Of people, exhausted, "burned out". This is said particularly
of those who continue to work in such a state, and often used as an
explanation or excuse. Example: "Yeah, I know that fix destroyed the
file system, but I was fried when I put it in".
See FRY
FROB (frahb)
1. noun. A protruding arm or trunnion. (This is the official
definition by the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT).
2. Any somewhat small thing; an object that you can comfortably
hold in one hand. Something you can frob. See FROBNICATION.
3. verb. Abbreviated form of FROBNICATE.
FROBNICATE (frahb'ni-kayt) verb. To manipulate or adjust; to do
the appropriate thing to; to play with; to fondle. This word is usually
abbreviated to simply "frob", but frobnicate is recognized as the
official full form. Examples: "Please frob the light switch". (That is,
flip the light switch) "Stop frobbing that clasp. You'll break it".
Synonyms: TWEAK, TWIDDLE.
Frob, twiddle, and tweak sometimes connote points along a
spectrum. Frob connotes aimless manipulation; twiddly connotes gross
manipulation, often a coarse search for a proper setting; tweak
connotes fine tuning. Suppose someone is turning a knob on an oscil-
loscope. If he's carefully adjusting it, searching for some particular
point, he is probably tweaking it. If he is turning it rather quickly
while looking at the screen, he is probably twiddling it. But if he's
just doing it because turning a knob is fun, he's frobbing it.
FROBNITZ (frahb'nitz), plural FROBNITZEM (frahb'nit-z:m) noun.
1. An unspecified physical object; a widget; a black box. 2. By
extension, a data structure in a program, when regarded as an object.
This rare form is usually abbreviated to FROTZ (frahtz), or more
commonly, to FROB. Also used are frobnule (frahb'nyool), frobule
(frahb'yool), and frobnodule (frahb'nahd'yool). Starting perhaps in
1979, "frobboz" (fruh-bahz', fr:-bahz'), plural "frobbotzim" (fruh-
-baht'z:m), has also become very popular, largely due to its exposure
as a name via the Adventure-type game called Zork (which originated at
MIT).
FROG, PHROG
1. interjection. Term of disgust. (Hackers seem to have a lot of
them).
2. noun. Of things, a CROCK. Of people, something between a turkey
and a toad.
FROGGY adjective. Similar to BAGBITING, but milder. "This froggy
program is taking forever to run!"
FROTZ (frahtz) noun.
An abbreviated form of FROBNITZ.
MUMBLE FROTZ interjection. A term of fairly mild disgust, usually
used as an objection to something someone has just said. See MUMBLE.
FRY verb.
1. To fail. Said especially of smoke-producing hardware failures.
2. More generally, to become nonworking. (This term is never said
of software, only of hardware and humans).
See FRIED.
FTP (ef'tee'pee')
1. noun. The File Transfer Protocol for transmitting files between
systems on the ARPANET.
2. noun. A program that implements the protocol and thereby helps
you to transfer files.
3. verb. To transfer a file using the File Transfer Program.
Example: "Lemme get this copy of Wuthering Heights FTP'd from Stan-
ford".
4. verb. More generally, to transfer a file between two computers
using any electronic network such as ETHERNET (as opposed, say, to
using a magnetic tape as the transfer medium).
FUDGE
1. verb. To perform in an incomplete but marginally acceptable
way, particularly with respect to the writing of a program. "I didn't
feel like doing it all the right way, so I fudged it."
2. noun. The code resulting from fudging as defined above.
3. verb. To make something come out the way it was supposed to by
making an ex post facto change, such as to a FUDGE FACTOR.
All these uses are related to the common slang use of the word to
mean something like cheating, as when a scientist fudges his mea-
surements to fit his pet theory.
FUDGE FACTOR noun. A value or parameter that is varied in an ad
hoc way to produce a desired result. See SLOP.
GABRIEL noun.
An unnecessary (in the opinion of the opponent) stalling tactic
when playing volleyball, such as tying one's shoelaces repeatedly or
asking the time. Also used to refer to the perpetrator of such tactics.
GABRIEL MODE noun. The state a person is in when he performs one
stalling tactic after another. See MODE.
This is in honor of Richard P. Gabriel, a Stanford hacker and vol-
leyball fanatic. His reputation for stalling is a bit undeserved, and
has the status of a running gag. One may speak of "pulling a Gabriel"
or of "being in Gabriel mode."
See RPG.
GARPLY (gahrp'lee) noun.
A meta-word, like FOO. This one is used mostly at Stanford.
GAS
1. interjection. A term of disgust and hatred, implying that gas
should be dispensed in generous quantities, thereby extermination the
source of irritation. "Some LOSER just reloaded the SYSTEM for no
reason! Gas!".
2. An exclamation suggestion that someone or something ought to be
FLUSHED (gotten rid of) out of mercy. "The system is getting WEDGED
every few minutes. Gas!"
3. verb. To get rid of; to flush. "You should gas that old CRUFTY
software".
GASEOUS adjective. Deserving of being gassed.
GC (jee'see')
1. verb. To clean up and throw away useless things. "I think I'll
GC the top of my desk today".
2. To recycle, reclaim, or put to another use.
3. To forget. (The implication is sometimes that one has done so
deliberately). "You told me last week where it was, but I GC'd those
bits".
4. noun. An instantiation of the GC process.
GC is an abbreviation of "garbage collect" or "garbage col-
lection", which is computer science jargon for a particular class of
strategies used to recycle computer memory. One such strategy involves
periodically scanning all the data in memory and discarding useless
data items.
Occasionally the full phrase is used. Note the ambiguity in usage
which has to be resolved by context: "I'm going to garbage-collect my
desk" usually means to clean out the drawers, but it could also mean to
throw away or recycle the desk itself.
GEDANKEN (ge-dahnk-:n) adjective.
Wild-eyed; impractical; not well-thought-out; untried; untested.
Gedanken is a German word for thought. A thought experiment is one you
carry out in you head. In physics, the term "gedanken experiment"
refers to an experiment that is impractical to carry out but useful to
consider theoretically. (A classic gedanken experiment of relativity
theory involves thinking about a man flying through space in an
elevator). Gedanken experiments are very useful in physics, but you
have to be careful. It was a gedanken experiment that led Aristotle to
conclude that heavy things always fall faster than light things (he
thought about a rock and a feather). This was accepted until Galileo
proved otherwise.
Among hackers, however, the word has a pejorative connotation. It
is said of a project -- especially one on artificial intelligence
research -- which is written up in grand detail (typically as a Ph.D.
thesis) without ever begin implemented to any great extent. Such a
project is usually perpetrated by people who aren't very good hackers
or find programming distasteful or are just in a furry. A gedanken
thesis is usually marked by an obvious lack of intuition about what is
programmable and what is not, and about what does and does not
constitute a clear specification of an algorithm.
GLASS TTY (glass ti'tee) noun.
A terminal which has a display screen but which, because of
hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or other
printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both. Like a
printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks; and like a display
terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy (a paper copy that you can carry
away with you). An example is the Lear Siegler ADM-3 terminal, which
was actually advertised as "the dumb terminal" when it first came out
(implying that it was also cheap). See TTY.
GLITCH
1. noun. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity,
continuity, or program function. It may or may not be possible to
recover from it.
2. verb. To commit a glitch. See GRITCH.
An interruption in electric service is usually called a "power
glitch". This is of grave concern because it usually CRASHES all the
computers.
Have you ever been in the middle of a sentence and then forgotten
what you were going to say? If this happened to a hacker, he might say,
"Sorry, I just glitched" (This would be a "mental glitch").
This word almost certainly comes from Yiddish, where the verb
glitschen means to slide or skid on a slippery surface. A fall while
walking on ice would be a glitch.
3. verb. To scroll a display screen.
The use of "glitch" to mean "scroll" needs some explanation. When
a program prints text on a display screen, there is a question of what
to do when it reaches the last line of the screen. There are two main
strategies:
After the last like, go back to the top line (possibly clearing
the screen first). This is called "wraparound".
Move all the lines of text on the screen upward one line. The top
line of text disappears (it "falls off the top of the screen") because
there's no more room for it, and the bottom line of the screen becomes
empty and can be used to display the next line of text. This is called
"scrolling", because it looks as though a papyrus scroll is zipping
past your eyes, unwinding at the bottom and winding up again at the
top.
The advantage of the scrolling technique is that new text always
appears at the bottom of the screen. The disadvantage is that all the
text keeps moving upward as new lens are displayed, so it's awfully
hard to read it as it flashes by on the screen. (Movie fans know about
this problem from trying to read the credits at the end).
The computer system at Stanford compromises. It scrolls, but when
the last line of the screen has been used, the text is moved up many
line (about ten or so). This means that the top ten lines all disappear
at once, but the rest stay put on the screen while the next ten lines
are being displayed at the bottom. So instead of appearing to move
continuously up the screen, the text "jerks" or "glitches" every five
seconds or so.
GLORK (glohrk)
1. interjection. Term of mild surprise, usually tinged with
outrage, as when one attempts to save the results of two house of
editing and finds that the SYSTEM has just CRASHED.
2. A meta-word. See FOO.
3. verb. Similar to GLITCH, but usually used reflexively. "My
program just glorked itself".
GOBBLE verb.
To consume or to obtain. "Gobble up" tends to imply "consume",
while "gobble down" tends to imply "obtain".
Examples: "The output spy gobbles characters out of a TTY output
buffer". (See OUTPUT SPY). "I guess I'll gobble down a copy of the
documentation tomorrow."
See SNARF.
GORP (gohrp)
This is yet another metasyntactic variable like FOO and BAR. It is
used primarily at CMU. (It may be related to its use as the generic
term for hiker's dried food, stemming from the acronym "Good Old
Raisins and Peanuts", but this is uncertain.)
GOSPERISM (gahss'p:r-iz':m)
A hack, invention, or saying by arch-hacker R. William (Bill)
Gosper. This notion merits its own term because there are so many of
them. Many of the entries in HAKMEM are gosperisms. See also LIFE.
GRIND verb.
1. To format code, especially LISP code, by indenting the lines so
that is looks pretty. (This term is used primarily within the MACLISP
community. Elsewhere, to format code so that it looks nice is to
"pretty-print" it.)
2. To run seemingly interminably, performing some tedious and in-
herently useless task. Synonym: CRUNCH.
GRITCH
1. noun. A complaint (often caused by a GLITCH).
2. verb. To complain. Often verb-doubled: "Gritch, gritch".
GROK (grahk) verb.
To understand, usually in a global sense especially, to understand
all the implications and consequences of making a change. Example:
"JONL is the only one who groks the MACLISP compiler".
This word comes from the science-fiction novel Stranger in a
Strange Land by Robert Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning
roughly "to be one with".
GRONK (grahnk) verb.
To clear the state of a WEDGED device and restart it. More severe
than "to FROB".
GRONKED adjective. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired
or sick. Of things, totally nonfunctional. (For things, gronked and
BROKEN mean about the same thing, but they have very different
connotations when used of people. "Gronked" connotes physical ex-
haustion of illness, while "broken" connotes mental or emotional
illness.)
GRONK OUT verb. Of things, to cease functioning. "My terminal just
gronked out". Of people, to go home and go to sleep. "I guess I'll
gronk out now. See you all tomorrow." When you are gronked, the best
thing to do is to gronk out.
"Gronk out" is a more specific term than "flush". In both cases
you stop hacking and leave, but when you flush you might go home or
might go to a restaurant or to see a movie. If you gronk out, however,
you intend to go get some sleep.
GRONK has been popularized as a noise made by dinosaurs in the
comic strip B.C., by Johnny Hart, but the hackers' connotation
apparently predates Hart's usage.
GROVEL verb.
1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used
with "over" or "through". Example: "The file scavenger has been
groveling through the file directories for ten minutes now".
2. To examine minutely or in complete detail. "The compiler
grovels over the entire source program before beginning to translate
it." "I groveled through all the documentation, but I still couldn't
find the command I wanted".
GROVEL OBSCENELY. This is the standard emphatic form of grovel.
GRUNGY (gruhn'jee) adjective.
1. Incredibly dirty, greasy, grubby. Anything that has been washed
within the last year is not really grungy. If you sleep all night in
your clothes and then get up and start hacking again, you feel grungy.
2. More generally, awful or ugly. Programs (especially CROCKS) can
be described as grungy. A person with a headache or a cold probably
feels grungy.
GUBBISH (guhb'ish) noun.
Garbage; crap; nonsense. "What is all this gubbish?" (This word is
probably a portmanteau of "garbage" and "rubbish".)
GUN verb.
To forcibly terminate a program. May be used with or without
"down". "Some idiot left a useless background program running, soaking
up half the CYCLES. So I gunned it."
HACK
1. noun. A quick bit of work that produces what is needed, but not
well.
2. The result of that work: a CROCK. (Occasionally the connotation
is affectionate).
3. An incredibly good, and perhaps very time-consuming, piece of
work that produces exactly what is needed.
4. The result of that work.
5. A clever technique.
6. A brilliant practical joke. The value of the hack varies in
proportion to its cleverness, harmlessness, surprise values, fame, and
appropriate use of technology.
7. verb. With "together", to throw something together so it will
work. See CRUFT and KLUDGE.
8. To bear something emotionally or physically. "I can't hack this
heat!".
9. To work with a computer.
10. To work on something (typically a program). In specific sense:
"What are you doing". "I'm hacking TECO". In general sense: "What do
you do around here?" "I hack TECO". (The former is time-immediate, the
latter time-extended.) More generally, "I hack x" is roughly equivalent
to "X is my bag". Example: "I hack solid-state physics".
11. To pull a prank on. See definition 6 above, and also de-
finition 7 of HACKER.
12. To waste time (as opposed to TOOL). Example: "Watcha up to?"
"Oh, just hacking".
HACK VALUE noun. Term used as the reason or motivation for
expending effort toward a seemingly useless goal, the point being that
the accomplished goal is a hack. For example, the MACLISP language can
read and print integers as Roman numerals; the code for this was
installed purely for hack value.
HACK UP (ON) verb. To hack, but with the connotation that the
result is a hack as in definition 2, above. Examples: "You need a
quick-and-dirty sorting routine? I'll see if I can hack one up by
tomorrow." "I hacked up on EMACS so it can use the Greek alphabet".
HOW'S HACKING? A friendly greeting among hackers. (It recognizes the
other person as a hacker and invites him to describe what he has been
working on recently.)
HAPPY HACKING A farewell.
BACK TO HACKING Another farewell. "Happy hacking" implies that the
other person will continue hacking (perhaps you interrupted him). "Oh,
well, back to hacking" implies that you, the speaker, are going to
return to work (and perhaps the other person also).
HACK, HACK. A somewhat pointless but friendly comment, often used
as a farewell but occasionally also as a greeting.
"The word 'hack' doesn't really have sixty-nine different
meanings", according to Phil Agre, an MIT hacker. "In fact, one which
defies articulation. Which connotation is implied by a given use of the
word depends in similarly profound ways on the context. Similar remarks
apply to a couple of other hacker words, most notably RANDOM.
Hacking might be characterized as "an appropriate application of
ingenuity". Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a
carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that
went into it. Here are examples of practical-joke hacks:
(1) In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of
Technology in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student
posed as a reporter and "interviewed" the director of the University of
Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands who
hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned exactly
how the stunts were operated, and also that the director would be out
to dinner later.
While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves
the "Fiendish Fourteen") picked a lock and stole one of the direction
sheets for the card stunts. They then had a printer run of 2300 copies
of the sheet. The next day they picked the lock again and stole the
master plans for the stunts, large sheets of graph paper colored in
with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide, they carefully made
"corrections" for three of the stunts on the duplicate instruction
sheets. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the stolen master
plans and substituting the stack of altered instruction sheets for the
original set. The result was that three of the pictures were totally
different. Instead of spelling WASHINGTON, the word CALTECH was
flashed. Another stunt showed the word HUSKIES, the Washington
nickname, but spelled it backward. And what was supposed to have been a
picture of a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use
the beaver as a mascot. Beavers are nature's engineers).
After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative
said, "Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant." The Wa-
shington student body president remarked, "No hard feelings, but at the
time it was unbelievable. We were amazed."
This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because
revising the direction sheets constituted a form of programming not
unlike computer programming.
(2) On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football
game. Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale in the second
quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the 40-yard
line and grew bigger and bigger and bigger. The letters "MIT" appeared
all over the ball. As the players and officials stood around gawking,
the ball grew to six feet in diameter and then burst with a bang and a
cloud of white smoke.
As the Boston Globe later reported, "If you want to know the
truth, MIT won The Game".
The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's
Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a weather
balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it out of the
ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it. The hackers made
eight separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1:00 and 5:00 AM,
in which they located an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium and ran
buried wiring from the balloon device. When the time came to activate
the device, two fraternity members had merely to flip a circuit breaker
and push a plug into an outlet.
This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise,
publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and harmlessness.
The use of manual control allowed the prank to be timed so as not to
disrupt the game (it was set off between plays so the outcome of the
game would not be affected). The perpetrators had even thoughtfully
attached a note to the balloon explaining that the device was not
dangerous and contained no explosives.
Harvard president Derek Bok commented: "They have an awful lot of
clever people down there at MIT, and they did it again." President Paul
E. Gray of MIT said, "There is absolutely no truth to the rumor that I
had to do with it, but I wish there were." Such is the way of all good
hacks.
HACK ATTACK noun.
A period of greatly increased hacking activity. "I've been up for
thirty hours; I had a hack attack and finished off that new FEATURE I
thought would take two weeks to program."
HACKER noun.
1. A person who enjoys learning the details of computer systems
and how to stretch their capabilities -- as opposed to most users of
computers, who prefer learn only the minimum amount necessary.
2. One who programs enthusiastically, or who enjoys programming
rather than just theorizing about programming.
3. A person capable of appreciating HACK VALUE.
4. A person who is good at programming quickly. (By the way, not
everything a hacker produces is a hack).
5. An expert on a particular program, or one who frequently does
work using it or on it. Example: "A SAIL hacker". (This definition and
the preceding ones are correlated, and people who fit them congregate).
6. An expert of any kind. One might be an astronomy hacker, for
example.
7. A malicious or inquisitive meddler who tries to discover
information by poking around. For example, a "password hacker" is one
who tries, possibly by deceptive or illegal means, to discover other
people's computer passwords. A "network hacker" is one who tries to
learn about the computer network (possibly because he wants to improve
it or possibly because he wants to interfere -- one can tell the
difference only by context and tone of voice).
HACKISH adjective. Being or involving a hack.
HACKISHNESS, HACKITUDE noun. The quality of being or involving a
hack. (The word "hackitude" is considered silly; the standard term is
"hackishness").
Hackers consider themselves somewhat of an elite, though one to
which new members are gladly welcome. It is a meritocracy based on
ability. There is a certain self-satisfaction in identifying yourself
as a hacker (but if you claim to be one and are not, you're quickly
labeled BOGUS).
HAIR noun.
Complexity. "Decoding TECO commands requires a certain amount of
hair".
INFINITE HAIR, HAIR SQUARED noun. Extreme complexity. The phrase
"infinite hair" is usually used in sentences, while "hair squared" is
used as an interjection. For example: "I wrote a program to do my
income taxes; properly handling Schedule G requires infinite hair". (To
which his friend replies, "Hair squared!")
HAIRY adjective.
1. Overly complicated. "DWIM is incredibly hairy".
2. Incomprehensible. "DWIM is incredibly hairy".
3. Of people: High-powered, authoritative, rare, expert, or in-
comprehensible. This usage is difficult to explain except by example:
"He knows a hairy lawyer who says there's nothing to worry about". F.
Lee Bailey would be considered hairy.
HAKMEM (hak'mem) noun.
MIT Artificial Intelligence Memo 239 (February 1972). A collection
of neat mathematical, programming, and electronic hacks contributed by
people at MIT and elsewhere. (The title of the memo really is HAKMEM,
which is a portmanteau word for "hacks memo".) Some of them are very
useful techniques or powerful theorems, but most fall into the category
of mathematical and computer trivia. A sampling of the entries (with
authors), slightly paraphrased:
Item 41. (Gene Salamin) There are exactly 23,000 prime numbers
less than 2^18.
Item 46. (Rich Schroeppel) The most probable suit distribution in
bridge hands is 4-4-3-2, as compared to 4-3-3-3, which
is the most evenly distributed. This is because the
world likes to have unequal numbers: a thermodynamic
effect saying things will not be in the state of lowest
energy, but in the state of lowest disordered energy.
Problem 81 (Rich Schroeppel) Count the magic squares of order 5
(that is, all the 5-by-5 arrangements of the numbers
from 1 to 25 such that all rows, columns and diagonals
add up to the same number). There are about 320 million,
not counting those that differ only by rotation and re-
flection.
Item 174. (Bill Gosper and Stuart Nelson) 21963283741 is the only
number such that if you represent it on the PDP-10 as
both an integer and a floating-point number, the bit
patterns of the two representations are identical.
HAKMEM also contains some rather more complicated mathematical and
technical items, but these examples show some of its fun flavor.
HANDWAVE
1. verb. To gloss over a complex point; to distract a listener; to
support a (possibly actually valid) point with blatantly faulty logic.
If someone starts a sentence with "Clearly..." or "Obviously..." or "It
is self-evident that...", you can be sure he is about to handwave.
The idea is that if you wave your hands at the right moment, the
listener may be sufficiently distracted that he will not notice that
what you have said is BOGUS. Alternatively, if a listener does object,
you might try to dismiss the objection "with a wave of your hand".
2. noun. A specific act of handwaving.
The use of this word is often accompanied by gestures both hands
up, palms forward, swinging the hands in a vertical plane pivoting at
the elbows and/or shoulders (depending on the magnitude of the
handwave); alternatively, holding the forearms still while rotating the
hands at the wrist suffice as a remark. If a speaker makes an outra-
geous, unsupported assumption, you might simply wave your hands in this
way as an accusation, more eloquent than words could express, that his
logic is faulty.
HANG verb.
1. To wait for some event to occur; to hang around until something
happens. Example: "The program prints out a menu and then hangs until
you type a character".
2. To wait for some event that will never occur. "The system is
hanging because the disk controller never sent the interrupt signal".
HUNG adjective. In the state of hanging. If you're hacking, away
at a terminal and suddenly the computer stops responding, you might
yell across the hallway, "Is the system hung?".
Synonym: WEDGED.
HARDWARILY (hahrd-war':-lee) adverb.
In a way pertaining to hardware. "The SYSTEM is hardwarily
unreliable". Note the adjective "hardwary" is not used. See SOFTWARILY.
HIRSUTE adjective.
This word is occasionally used humorously as a synonym for HAIRY.
HOOK noun.
An extraneous piece of software or hardware included in order to
simplify later changes of to permit changes by a user. For instance, a
PDP-10 program might execute a location that is normally a JFCL (no
operation), but by changing the JFCL to a PUSHJ (subroutine call) one
can insert a debugging routine at that point.
As another example, a simple program that prints numbers might
always print them in base ten, but a more flexible version would let a
variable determine what base to use. Setting the variable to "5" would
make the program print numbers in base five. The variable is a simple
hook. An even more flexible program might examine the variable and
treat any other number as the address of a user-supplied program for
printing a number. This is a very powerful hook: one can then write a
routine to print numbers as Roman numerals, say, or as Hebrew ch-
aracters, and connect it to the program by hanging it on the hook.
Often the difference between a good program and a superb one is that
the latter has useful hooks in judiciously chosen places. Both may do
the original job about equally well, but the one with the hooks is much
more flexible for future expansion of capabilities.
ILL MEM REF (ill'mem'ref') noun.
A lapse of memory; a GLITCH. This phrase is a contraction of
"illegal memory reference", computer jargon for the result of im-
properly accessing a computer's memory. Example: "I recognized his
face, but got an ill mem ref on his name".
See NXM.
INFINITE adjective.
Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used very
loosely. Example: "This program produces infinite garbage". "He is an
infinite LOSER". See HAIR.
The slang use of "infinite" is an abuse of its precise technical
meaning in mathematics.
INTERCAL (int':r-cal) noun.
A computer language designed by Donald R. Woods and James M. Lyon.
INTERCAL is purposely different from any other computer language in all
ways but one: it is purely written language, being totally unspeakable.
The name "INTERCAL" is an abbreviation for "Compiler Language With
No Pronounceable Acronym".
An excerpt from the INTERCAL Reference Manual will make the style
of the language clear. In most programming languages, if you want a
variable (say A) to have the value 65536, you would write something
like
LET A=65536
or
A:=65536;
The INTERCAL Reference Manual, however, explains that "it is a
well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is
incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example: if one were to
state that the simplest way to store 65536 in an INTERCAL variable is
DO :1 <- #0?#256
any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is
indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look
foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn
up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating
for the programmer having been correct.".
INTERCAL has many other peculiar features, as well, to make it
even more unspeakable. The language was actually implemented and used
by many people at Princeton University.
See CHARACTERS for a discussion of names of characters in
INTERCAL.
IRP (urp) verb.
To perform a series of tasks repeatedly with a minor change each
time through. A hacker who is also a teaching assistant might say, "I
guess I'll IRP over these homework papers and give each a RANDOM
grade".
The word "IRP" is an acronym for "Indefinite RePeat". It is the
name of a command in the MIDAS assembler, a program that translates
PDP-10 instructions from a symbolic form to binary bits.
JEDGAR (jed'g:r)
A "counterspy" program. See OUTPUT SPY.
JFCL (j:-fik':l, jif'k:l) verb.
To cancel or annul something. "Why don't you jfcl that out?"
The PDP-10 has several instructions that don't do anything (remember
that SKIP means "Do not SKIP", as explained in the entry for AOS).
However, the fastest do-nothing instruction happens to be JFCL, which
stands for "Jump if Flag set and the CLear the flag". This does
something useful, but is a very fast no-operation if no flag is
specified.
If one wants to patch a program by removing one instruction, the
easiest thing to do is to replace the instruction with one that doesn't
do anything. Such and instruction is said to have been jfcl'd out. This
bit of jargon was then extended metaphorically.
The license plate on hacker Geoff Goodfellow's BMW is JFCL.
JIFFY (jif'ee) noun.
1. The time unit used by a clock attached to a computer to measure
CPU time, typically either 1/60 second or (less commonly) one mil-
lisecond. "The swapper runs every six jiffies" means that the virtual
memory management routine is executed once for every six ticks of the
computer's clock, or ten times a second.
2. An indeterminate time from a few seconds to forever. "I'll do
it in a jiffy" means certainly not now and possibly never. This is a
bit contrary to the more widespread use of the word.
JOCK noun.
A programmer who is characterized by the large and somewhat
brute-force programs he writes. Brute-force programs typically work by
enumerating all possible combinations of things in an effort to find
the one combination that solves the problem. An example of a brute-
-force program is one that sorts ten thousand numbers by examining them
all, picking the smallest one, and saving it in another table; then
examining all the numbers again and picking the smallest on except for
the one it already picked; and in general choosing the next number by
examining all ten thousand numbers and choosing the smallest one that
hasn't yet been picked (as determined by examining all the ones already
picked.)
Yes, the program will produce the right answer, but it will be
much slower than a program that uses even a modicum of cleverness to
avoid most of the work. (A little bit of computer science -- spe-
cifically, the theory of algorithms -- will show that a typical large
computer such as a PDP-10, using a clever sorting method, can sort ten
thousand numbers in about eight seconds, while the brute-force method
outlined above would take about 40 days.)
J. RANDOM (jay' ran'd:m) adjective.
Arbitrary; ordinary; any one; "any old". Would you let J.Random LOSER
marry your daughter?". See RANDOM.
JRST (jusrt) verb.
1. To suddenly change subjects, with no intention of returning to
the previous topic. Usage: rare and considered silly.
2. To jump. "Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jrst over the
candle stick". This is even sillier.
The PDP-10 JUMP instruction means "Do not jump", as explained in
the definition of AOS. The JUMPA instruction ("JUMP Always") does jump,
but it isn't quite so fast as the JRST instruction ("Jump and ReSTore
flags"). The instruction is used so frequently that the speed matters,
so all PDP-10 hackers automatically use the faster though more obscure
JRST instruction.
KLUGE, KLUDGE (klooj) noun.
1. A Rube Goldberg device in hardware of software.
2. A clever programming trick intended to solve a particularly
nasty case in an efficient, if not clear, manner. Often used to repair
BUGS. Often verges on being a CROCK.
3. Something that works for the wrong reason.
4. verb. To insert a kluge into a program. "I've kluged this
routing to get around that weird bug, but there's probably a better
way". Also "kluge up".
5. A feature that is implemented in a RUDE manner.
KLUGE AROUND. To avoid (a problem) by inserting a kluge.
LASER CHICKEN noun.
Kung Pao Chicken, a standard Chinese dish containing chicken,
peanuts, and bell peppers in a spicy pepper-oil sauce. A few hackers
call it "laser chicken" for two reasons: It can ZAP you just like a
laser, and the pepper-oil sauce has a red color reminiscent of a laser
beam.
LIFE noun.
A cellular-automaton game invented by mathematician John Horton
Conway, and first introduced publicly by Martin Gardner in his column
"Mathematical Games" (Scientific American", October 1970). Hackers at
various places contributed to the mathematical analysis of this game,
notably Bill Gosper at MIT. When a hacker mentions "life", he is much
more likely to mean this game than the magazine, the breakfast cereal,
or the human state of existence.
LINE FEED
1. verb. To feed the paper through a terminal by one line (in
order to print on the next line). On a display terminal, to move the
cursor down to the next line of the screen.
2. noun. The "character" which, when sent to a terminal by the
computer, causes the terminal to perform this action.
This is standard ASCII terminology.
LINE STARVE
1. verb. To feed the paper through the terminal the wrong way by
one line. (Most terminals can't do this!) On a display terminal, to
move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen. Example: "To
print X squared, you just output X, line starve, 2, line feed". (The
line starve causes the "2" to appear on the line above the "X", and the
line feed gets back to the original line.)
2. noun. A "character" (or character sequence) that causes a
terminal to perform this action.
This is not standard ASCII terminology. Even among hackers it is
considered a bit silly.
LOGICAL adjective.
Conventional; assumed for the sake of exposition or convenience;
not the actual thing but in some sense equivalent to it; not ne-
cessarily corresponding to reality.
Example: If a person who had long held a certain post (for
example, Les Earnest at Stanford) left and was replaced, the re-
placement would for a while be known as the "logical Les Earnest."
Pepsi might be referred to as "logical Coke" (or vice versa).
At Stanford, "logical" compass directions denote a coordinate
system in which "logical north" is toward San Francisco, "logical
south" is toward San Jose, "logical west" is away from the ocean --
even though logical north varies between physical (true) north near San
Francisco and physical west near San Jose. The best rule of thumb here
is that El Camino Real by definition always runs north-and-south. In
giving directions, one might say, "To get to Rincon Taraco Restaurant,
get onto EL CAMINO BIGNUM going logical north". Using the word
"logical" helps to prevent the recipient from worrying about the fact
that the sun is setting almost directly in front of him as he travels
"north".
A similar situation exists at MIT. Route 128 (famous for the ele-
ctronics industries that have grown up along it) is a three-quarters
circle surrounding Boston at a radius of ten miles, terminating at the
coast line at each end. It would be most precise to describe the two
directions along this highway as being "clockwise" and "counter-
clockwise", but the road signs all say "north" and "south", res-
pectively. A hacker would describe these directions as "logical north"
and "logical south", to indicate that they are conventional directions
not corresponding to the usual convention for those words. (If you went
logical south along the entire length of Route 128, you would start out
going northwest, curve along to the south, and finish headed due east!)
Synonym: VIRTUAL. Antonym: physical.
This use is an extension from its technical use in computer
science. A program can be written to do input or output using a
"logical device". When the program is run, the user can specify which
"physical" (actual) device to use for that logical device. For example,
a program might send all its error messages to a logical device called
ERROR; the user can then specify whether logical device ERROR should be
terminal, a disk file, or the NULL DEVICE (to throw the error messages
away).
A speculation is that the word "logical" is used because, even
though a thing isn't the actual object in question, you can reason
logically about the thing as if it were the actual object.
LOSE verb.
1. To fail. A program loses when it encounters an exceptional
condition or fails to work in the expected manner.
2. To be exceptionally unaesthetic.
3. Of people, to be obnoxious or unusually stupid (as opposed to
ignorant). See LOSER.
DESERVE TO LOSE verb. Said of someone who willfully does THE WRONG
THING, or uses a feature known to be MARGINAL. What is meant is that
one deserves the consequences of one's losing actions. "Boy, anyone who
tries to use UNIX deserves to lose!".
LOSE, LOSE interjection. A reply or comment on an undesirable s-
ituation. Example: "I accidentally deleted all my files!" "Lose, lose".
LOSER noun.
An unexpectedly bad situation, program, programmer, or person.
Someone who habitually loses (even winners can lose occasionally).
Someone who knows not and knows not that he knows not.
Emphatic forms are "real loser", "total loser", and "complete
loser" (but not "MOBY loser", which would be a contradiction in terms).
LOSS noun. Something (but not a person) that loses: a situation in
which something is losing. Emphatic forms are "MOBY loss", "total
loss", "complete loss". (Note that a loss can be moby, even though a
loser cannot be).
WHAT A LOSS! interjection. A remark to the effect that a situation
is bad. Example: Suppose someone said, "Fred decided to write his
program in ADA instead of LISP." The reply "What a loss!" comments that
the choice was bad, or that it will result in an undesirable situation
-- but may also implicitly recognize that Fred was forced to make that
decision because of outside influences. On the other hand, the reply
"What a loser!" is a more general remark about Fred himself, and
implies that bad consequences will be entirely his fault.
LOSSAGE (lowss':j) noun. The stuff of which losses are made. This
is a collective noun. "What a loss!" and "What a lossage!" are nearly
synonymous remarks.
LPT (lip':t) noun.
A Line PrinTer. "The LIST command can be used to send a file to
the lpt".
LUSER (loo'z:r) noun.
A USER who is probably also a LOSER. ("Luser" and "loser" are
pronounced identically).
This word was coined about eight years ago at MIT. When you first
walk up to a terminal at MIT and type "Control-Z" to get the computer's
attention, it prints out some status information, including how many
people are already using the computer. It might print "14 users", for
example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the SYSTEM
to print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a great controversy, as some
of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to theirs
faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers
struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the
others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money whether
it would say "users" or "losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise
"lusers", and it stuck. To this day, when you connect to the MIT
computer, it will say "14 lusers".
MACROTAPE (mak'roh-tayp) noun.
An industry standard reel of magnetic tape, about ten inches in
diameter, as opposed to MICROTAPE.
MAGIC adjective.
1. As yet unexplained, or too complicated to explain. (Arthur C.
Clarke once said that any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic). "The precise form in which CHARACTERS
are printed to the terminal is controlled by a number of magic BITS".
"This routine computes the parity of an eight-bit byte in only three
instructions".
2. Characteristic of something that works though no one really
understands why.
3. Characteristic of a FEATURE not generally publicized which
allows something otherwise impossible -- or a feature formerly in that
category but now unveiled. Example: the keyboard commands at Stanford
that override the screen-hiding features.
See AUTOMAGICALLY.
(1) When Barbara Steele was pregnant, her doctor had her take a
sonogram to determine whether she was carrying twins. Now Barbara and I
had both studied computer science at MIT, and we saw that some complex
computerized image-processing was involved. We asked the doctor how it
was done, hoping to learn some details about the mathematics involved
in the computer program. The doctor simply said, "The probe sends out
sound waves, which bounce off the internal organs. A microphone picks
up the echoes, like radar, and sends the signals to a computer -- and
the computer makes a picture." Thanks a lot! Now a hacker would have
said, "... and the computer magically makes a picture", implicitly
acknowledging that he had glossed over an extremely complicated
process.
(2) Some years ago I was snooping around in the cabinets that
housed the MIT AI lab's PDP-10, and I noticed a little switch glued to
the frame of on cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job added by one
of the lab's hardware hackers (no one knows who).
You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing
what it does, because you might CRASH it. The switch was labeled in a
most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the
metal switch body were the words "magic" and "more magic". The switch
was in the "more magic" position.
I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the
switch before, either. Closer examination revealed that the switch only
had one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear
into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of
electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires
connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no
wire on its other side.
It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke.
Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped
it. The computer instantly crashed!
Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence,
but nevertheless restored the switch to the "more magic" position
before reviving the computer.
A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker -- David
Moon, as I recall. (See MOON). He clearly doubted my sanity, or
suspected me of a supernatural belief in the power of this switch, or
perhaps thought I was fooling him with a BOGUS SAGA. To prove it to
him, I showed him the very switch, still glued to the cabinet frame
with only one wire connected to it. It was still in the "more magic"
position. We scrutinized the switch and its lone connection and found
that the other end of the wire, though connected to the computer
wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That clearly made the switch
doubly useless: not only was it electrically nonoperative, but it was
connected to a place that couldn't affect anything anyway. So we
flipped the switch.
The computer promptly crashed.
This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker
who was close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either.
He inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters
and DIKED IT OUT. We then revived the computer, and it has run fine
ever since.
We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a
theory that some circuit near the ground pin was MARGINAL, and flipping
the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset the
circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But we'll
never know for sure. All we can really say is that the switch was
magic.
I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I
usually keep it set on "more magic".
MARGINAL adjective.
1. Extremely small. "A marginal increase in memory can decrease GC
time drastically". (In everyday terms, this means that it's a lot
easier to clean off your desk if you have a spare place to put some of
the junk while you sort through it). See EPSILON.
2. Of extremely small merit. "This proposed new FEATURE seems
rather marginal to me".
3. Of extremely small probability of WINNING; on the edge of
LOSING. "The power supply was rather marginal anyway; no wonder it
FRIED".
MARGINALLY adverb. Slightly, somewhat. "The RAVS (raviolis) here
are only marginally better than at Small Eating Place".
MARGINAL HACKS noun. Margaret Jacks Hall, a building into which
the Stanford Computer Science Department was recently moved.
MESH noun.
The character "#" (number sign).
Synonyms: CRUNCH, SPLAT. See CHARACTERS.
MICROTAPE (miek'roh-tayp) noun.
A DECtape, as opposed to a MACROTAPE. A DECtape is a small reel of
magnetic tape about four inches in diameter and an inch wide. Unlike
standard magnetic tapes, microtapes allow "random access" to the data.
In their heyday they were used in pretty much the same ways one would
now use a floppy disk: as a small, portable way to save and transport
files and programs, Apparently the term "microtape" was actually the
official term used within DEC for these tapes until someone CONSED UP
the word "DECtape", which of course has more commercial appeal.
MISFEATURE noun.
A FEATURE that eventually clobbers someone, possibly because it is
not adequate for a new situation that has evolved. It is not the same
as a BUG because fixing it involves a gross philosophical change to the
system's structure. A misfeature is different from a simple and
unforeseen side effect. The term implies that the misfeature was
carefully planned, but that not all the consequences or circumstances
were predicted accurately. Often a feature becomes a misfeature because
a trade-off is made.
Example: "Well, yeah, it's kind of a misfeature that file names
are limited to six characters. That decision was made N years ago to
simplify the file access software and save space on the disk, and now
we're stuck with it."
MOBY (moh'bee)
1. adjective. Large, immense, complex, impressive. Examples: "A
Saturn V rocket is a truly moby FROB". (This example is oxymoronic --
frobs are normally not very large.) "Some MIT undergrads pulled off a
moby HACK at the Harvard-Yale game."
2. noun. The total size of a computer's address space, that is,
the amount of memory that a given computer can access. Examples: For a
PDP-10, a moby is 262144 36-bit words; for a PDP-8, it is 4096 12-bit
words; for a 68000 or a VAX, it is 4294967296 8-bit bytes. This term is
useful because when a computer has "virtual memory mapping", a computer
may have more physical memory attached to it than any one program can
access directly. One can then say, "This computer has six mobies" to
mean that the ration of physical memory to address space is six --
without having to say specifically how much memory there actually is.
That in turn implies that the computer can time-share six
"full-sized" programs without having to swap programs between memory
and disk. If a computer has exactly two mobies, then the one with
smaller (physical) addresses is called the "low moby" and the other one
is called the "high moby". Example: "Response times will be long today.
The high moby just FRIED, so we're limping along with only half our
memory".
3. noun. 256K 36-bit words, which is the size of a moby on every
hacker's favorite computer, the PDP-10. This amount is sufficiently
close to a megabyte (one million bytes) that sometimes the term "moby"
and "megabyte" are used interchangeably.
4. adjective. An honorific term of address (never of third-person
reference) usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or
friendliness to a competent hacker. Example: "So, moby Knight, how's
the CONS machine doing?" (Tom Knight was one of the designers of MIT's
LISP Machine, a personal computer designed to run LISP. The prototype
was called "CONS".)
5. adjective. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in "moby
sixes", "moby threes", "moby ones", etc. Compare this with BIGNUMS:
Double sixes are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not
bignums. (The use of term "moby" to describe double ones is sarcastic).
MOBY FOO, MOBY LOSS, MOBY HACK, MOBY WIN. These are standard
emphatic forms.
MODE noun.
A general state, usually used with an adjective or noun describing
the state. Use of the word "mode" rather that "STATE" implies that the
state is extended over time, and probably also that some activity
characteristic of that state is being carried out. Examples: "No time
to HACK; I'm in these mode". "I'll be in vacation mode next week". "My
editor is stuck in some weird mode where every CHARACTER I type appears
twice on the screen". "The E editor normally uses a display terminal,
but if you're on a TTY it will switch to nondisplay mode".
This term is normally used in a technical sense to describe the
state of a program. Extended usage -- for example, to describe people
-- is definitely slang.
See DAY MODE, NIGHT MODE, and YOYO MODE; also COM MODE, TALK MODE,
and GABRIEL MODE.
MODULO (mahd'yoo-loh) preposition.
Except for. This is from mathematical terminology. One writes "4=2
mod 9" to mean that 4 and 22 give the same remainder when divided by 9
(the precise meaning is a bit more complicated, but that's the idea).
One might say that 4 equals 22 "except for some 9's", because if you
add two 9's to 4 you get 22. Examples: "Well, LISP seems to work okay
now, modulo that GC BUG". "I feel fine today modulo a slight headache".
MOON noun.
1. A celestial object whose phase is very important to hackers.
See PHASE OF THE MOON.
2. The login name of MIT hacker David A. Moon. Because he hacks
important system software, his PHASE may also be very important to
hackers.
MUMBLAGE (muhm'bl:j) noun.
The topic of one's mumbling. (See MUMBLE). "All that mumblage" is
used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear what it is or how
it works, or like "all that crap" when "mumble" is being used as an
implicit replacement for obscenities.
MUMBLE interjection.
1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate
or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer,
or indicates a general reluctance to get into a big long discussion.
Example: "Don't you think that we could improve LISP performance by
using a hybrid reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the
cache is big enough and there are some extra cache BITS for the
microcode to use?" "Well, mumble... I'll have to think about it".
2. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement. "I think we
should buy a VAX". "Mumble!". Common variant: Mumble frotz. (See FROTZ)
3. Yet another metasyntactic variable like FOO.
MUNCH verb.
To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring
large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure.
Synonyms: CRUNCH, GROVEL. "Munch" connotes somewhat less paint
than the other two words.
MUNCHING SQUARES noun.
A display HACK dating back to the PDP-11 (early 1960s) at MIT,
which employs a trivial computation (involving XOR'ing of x-y display
coordinates, described in items 146-148 of HAKMEM) to produce an
impressive display of moving, growing, and shrinking squares. The hack
usually has a parameter (usually taken from toggle switches) which,
when well chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these,
discovered recently on the LISP machine, have been christened "munching
triangles", "munching w's" and "munching mazes". More generally,
suppose a graphics program produces an impressive and everchanging
display of some basic form FOO on a display terminal, and does it using
a relatively simple program; then the program (or the resulting
display) is likely to be referred to as "munching foos". [By the way,
note the use of the word foo as a metasyntactic variable in the last
sentence.]
MUNG (muhng) verb.
1. To make changes to a file, often large-scale, usually ir-
revocable, occasionally accidental.
2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously.
Note that the SYSTEM only mungs things maliciously (this is a con-
sequence of Murphy's Law).
3. The kind of beans of which the sprouts are used in Chinese
food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!)
This word is said to be a recursive acronym: MUNG means Mung Until
No Good.
MUNGE (muhnj) verb. Variant of MUNG.
N (en) noun.
1. Some large and indeterminate number. "There were N bugs in that
crock!".
2. An arbitrarily large (and perhaps infinite) number.
3. A variable whose value is specified by the current context. For
example: When ordering a meal at a restaurant, "N" may refer to however
many people there are at the table. From the remark "We'd like to order
N wonton soups and a family dinner for N minus one", you can deduce
that one person at the table wants to eat only soup, even though you
don't know how many people there are. A silly riddle: "How many
computers does it take to shift the bits in a register?" "N+1: N to
hold all the bits still, and one to shove the register over."
NTH (enth) adjective. The ordinal counterpart of N. "Now, for the
Nth and last time..." In the specific context "Nth-year graduate
student", N is generally assumed to be at least 4, and is usually 5 or
more.
See also 69.
NIGHT MODE noun.
The state a person is in when he is working at night and sleeping
during the day. (The advantage of being in night mode is that the
computers are usually overloaded during the day; at night more CYCLES
are available).
See PHASE and DAY MODE.
NIL (nil)
No. This word is used in reply to a question, particularly one
asked using the "-P" convention. Example: "Foodp?" "Nil". That simple
interchange means "Do you want to come eat with us?" "No, thanks". See
T. (In the LISP language, the name "nil" means "false", among other
things).
NULL DEVICE noun.
An input/output device that doesn't do anything. A card reader
reads cards, and a terminal keyboard reads the characters typed on the
keyboard, but reading from the null device always yields zeros.
Similarly, writing to a printer produces words on paper, but writing to
the null device just throws the output into the BIT BUCKET.
There is no such physical thing as a null device -- it would be
pointless to build one -- but it is a useful notion that is provided
LOGICALLY by many operating systems. If a program normally prints out a
lot of information and you don't happen to want to see it, you simply
direct the program to send the output to the null device. The program
is satisfied because the output is AUTOMAGICALLY discarded without
wasting paper.
NXM (niks':m)
A lapse of memory; a GLITCH. This phrase is an acronym for
"NoneXistent Memory", the result of accessing a computer's memory at an
address for which no memory has been connected. A NXM is technically a
special case of an ILL MEM REF, but in slang usage they are practically
synonymous.
OBSCURE adjective.
Little-known; incomprehensible; undocumented. This word is used,
in an exaggeration of its normal meaning, to imply a total lack of
comprehensibility. "The reason for that last CRASH is obscure". "That
program has a very obscure command syntax". "This KLUDGE works by
taking advantage of an obscure FEATURE in TECO". The phrase "moderately
obscure" implies that it could be figured out but probably isn't worth
the trouble.
OPEN noun.
A left parenthesis, "(". This word is used as shorthand to
eliminate ambiguity when communicating a sequence of characters
vocally. To read aloud the LISP program "DEFUN FOO (X) (PLUS X 1))",
which takes an arguments X and adds 1 to it, one might say: "Open
def-fun foo. Open eks close. Open, plus eks one, close, close." See
CLOSE.
OPEN BRACKET noun. The character "[".
OPEN BRACE noun. The character "{".
OUTPUT SPY noun.
On the MIT system there is a program that allows you to see what
is being printed on someone else's terminal. It works by "spying" on
the other guy's output, by examining the insides of the monitor system.
It can do this because the MIT system purposely has very little in the
way of "protection" that prevents one user from interfering with
another. Fair is fair, however. There is another program that will
automatically notify you if anyone starts to spy on your output. It
works in exactly the same way, by looking at the insides that have to
do with you output. This "counterspy" program is called JEDGAR
(pronounced as two syllables: jed'gar), in honor of the former head of
the FBI.
By the way, the output spy program is called "os" (oh'ess').
Throughout the rest of computer science, and also at IBM, "OS" means
"operating system", but among MIT hackers it almost always means
"output spy".
PARSE verb.
1. To determine the syntactic structure of a sentence or other
utterance. (This is close to the standard English meaning). Example:
"That was the one I saw you". "I can't parse that".
2. More generally, to understand or comprehend. "It's very simple.
You just kretch the glims and then AOS the zotz" "I can't parse that".
3. Of fish, to have to remove the bones yourself (usually at a
Chinese restaurant). "I object to parsing fish" means "I don't want to
get a whole fish, but a sliced one is okay". A "parsed fish" has been
de-boned. There is some controversy whether "unparsed" should mean
"bony", or also mean "deboned".
This term is derived from the technical use of the word in
linguistics. Hackers know about it because some researchers in
artificial intelligence work on the problem of writing computer
programs that can understand and/or speak human languages.
PATCH
1. noun. A temporary addition to a piece of code, usually as a
quick-and-dirty remedy to an existing BUG or MISFEATURE. A patch may or
may not work, and may of may not eventually be incorporated permanently
into the program.
2. verb. To fix something temporarily; to insert a patch into a
piece of code. See KLUGE AROUND.
PDL (pid':l, pud':l) [acronym for Push Down List] noun.
1. A last-in/first-out (LIFO) queue, also known as a "stack" in
computer science; more loosely, any ordered list of things. Even more
loosely, any set of things. A person's "pdl" is the set of things he
has to do in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked
as having "risen to the top of the pdl" (or the top of the stack).
Examples: "I'm afraid I've got real work to do, so this HACK will
have to be pushed way down on my pdl." "I haven't done it yet because
every time I POP my pdl something new gets PUSHED". If you are
interrupted several times in the middle of a conversation, "my pdl
overflowed" means "I forget what we were talking about originally".
(The implication is that too many items were pushed onto the pdl than
could be remembered, and so the least recent items were lost.) See PUSH
and POP.
OVERFLOW PDL noun. The place where you put things when your pdl is
full. If you don't have one and too many things get pushed, you gorget
something. The overflow pdl for a person's memory might be a memo pad.
Hey, diddle, diddle
The overflow pdl
To get a little more stack;
If that's not enough
Then you lose it all,
And have to pop all the way back.
-- The Great QUUX
The term "pdl" is an acronym for Push Down List, and in its
technical sense rather than its slang meaning always means a stack. The
best example of a stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of plates
sitting on a spring in a well in a cart, so that when you put a plate
on the top they all sink down; and when you take one off the top the
rest spring up a bit.
PESSIMAL adjective.
Maximally bad. "This is a pessimal situation".
PESSIMIZE verb. To make as bad as possible.
PESSIMIZING COMPILER noun. A compiler that produces object code
that is worse than the straightforward or obvious translation. (The
implication is that the compiler is actually trying to optimize the
program, but through stupidity is doing the opposite. A few pessimizing
compilers have been written on purpose, as pranks).
These words are the obvious Latin-based antonyms for "optimal" and
"optimize", but for some reason they do not appear in most English
dictionaries -- although "pessimize" is listed in the Oxford English
Dictionary.
PHANTOM noun.
At Stanford, the term "phantom" is used to mean a DRAGON.
PHASE noun.
The offset of one's waking-sleeping schedule with respect to the
standard 24-hour cycle. This is a useful concept among people who often
work at night according to no fixed schedule. Examples: "What's your
phase?" "I've been getting in about eight P.M. lately, but I'm going to
phase around to the day schedule by Friday". A person who is roughly 12
hours out of phase is sometimes said to be in NIGHT MODE. (The term DAY
MODE is also, but less frequently, used, meaning you're working 9 to 5
-- or, more likely, 10 to 6.)
It is not uncommon to change one's phase by as much as six hours
per day on a regular basis. For example, one can stay awake for twenty
hours and then sleep for ten. This can be a bit of a strain on the
metabolism when done for extended periods, however. One nice
phase-changing schedule is to keep a 28-hour day: stay awake 18 hours
and sleep for ten, for example. Six 28-hour days are equal to seven
24-hour days, so this schedule means you can be in day mode on weekends
and in night mode (or close to it) for most weekdays that way you get
lots of CYCLES by being awake at night, and yet are reasonably
synchronized with the REAL WORLD on weekends.
CHANGE PHASE THE HARD WAY. To stay awake for a very long time in
order to get into a different phase.
CHANGE PHASE THE EASY WAY. To stay asleep for a very long time in
order to get into a different phase.
The phenomenon of "jet lag" that afflicts travelers who cross many
time-zone boundaries may be attributed to two distinct causes: the
strain of travel per se, and the strain of changing phase. Hackers who
suddenly find that they must change phase drastically in a short period
of time, particularly the hard way, experience something like jet lag
without traveling.
PHASE OF THE MOON noun.
A random parameter on which something is (humorously) said to
depend. Something that depends on the phase of the moon is at best
unpredictable, at worst unreliable. (Maybe it is predictable, but
figuring it out is so complicated it isn't worth it.) Example: "Whether
the editor will save your file automatically when you exit depends on
the phase of the moon".
The "phase of the moon" is one example of RANDOMNESS.
Once a program written by Gerald Sussman (professor of electrical
engineering at MIT) and Guy Steele had a BUG that really did depend on
the phase of the moon! There is a little subroutine that has
traditionally been used in various programs at MIT to calculate an
approximation to the moon's true phase; the phase is the printed out --
at the top of program listings, for example -- along with the date and
time, purely for fun. (Actually, since hackers spend most of their time
indoors, this might be the only way they would ever know what the
moon's phase was!) Steele incorporated this routine into a LISP program
that, when it wrote out a file, would print a 'timestamp' at the top
that looked something like this:
; THE MOON IS 1 DAY, 20 HOURS, 42 MINUTES, AND 54 SECONDS
; PAST THE FIRST QUARTER.
; THE SUN IS 41*44'1" NORTH OF EAST,
; 35*7'26" BELOW THE HORIZON.
; THAT MEANS IT IS NOW 2:21 AM
; ON WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 1983.
(A calculation of the position of the sun was also included for
additional HACK VALUE. The asterisk was used in lieu of a "degrees"
symbol to indicate angles). Occasionally the first line of the message
would be too long and would overflow onto the next line like this:
; THE MOON IS 2 DAYS, 17 HOURS, 20 MINUTES, AND 45 SECONDS
; PAST THE FIRST QUARTER.
; THE SUN IS 17*17'46" WEST OF NORTH,
; 44*56'42" BELOW THE HORIZON.
; THAT MEANS IT IS NOW 10:59 PM
; ON WEDNESDAY, MARCH 23, 1983.
When the file was later read back, the program would BARF. The
length of the first line depended on the precise time when the
timestamp was printed, and so the bug literally depended on the phase
of the moon!
POM (pee-oh-em, pahm) noun. An abbreviation for PHASE OF THE MOON.
This is usually used in the phrase "POM-dependent", meaning FLAKEY.
POP verb.
1. To remove something from a stack or PDL. If a person says he
has popped something from his pdl, he means he has finally finished
working on it and can now remove it from the list of things hanging
over his head.
2. To return from a digression. The term "popj" (pop'jay) is also
used in this sense. "Popj?" as a simple request means "Have we finished
with this digression? Shall we return to the previous subject of
conversation?". "Popj!" has more the force of "Stop FLAMING about that,
you LOSER! Let's return to the main point." "Popj, popj" means roughly
"Now let's see, where were we?"
Synonyms: CONTROL-P.
Antonyms: PUSH, PUSHJ.
The PDP-10 has instructions named POP and POPJ; the former pops a
single word from a stack, and the latter (POP and Jump always) is a
subroutine return instruction.
PPN (pip':n)
1. A combination of a "project identifier" and "programmer name",
used to identify a specific file directory belonging to that pro-
grammer. This is used in the TOPS-10 operating system that DEC provides
for the PDP-10. The implicit assumption is that there will be many
projects, each with several programmers working on it, and that a
programmer may work on several projects. This is not a bad orga-
nization; what is totally BOGUS is that projects and programmers are
identified by octal (base eight) numbers! Hence the term Project-
-Programmer Number, or PPN. If I were programmer 72534 and wanted to
work on project 306, I would have to tell the computer
"login 306,72534". This is totally ridiculous. At CMU the TOPS-10
system was modified to be somewhat less ridiculous. Projects are
identified by a letter and three decimal (not octal) digits, and a
programmer is identified by his two initials, a digit indicating the
first year he came to CMU, and a fourth character that is used to
distinguish between, say, Fred Loser and Farlay Luser who both happened
to arrive the same year. So to use the PDP-10 at CMU one might say
"login A780GS70". The programmer name "GS70" is also called a "man
number" at CMU, even though it isn't really a number. At Stanford,
projects and programmers are identified by three letters or digits
each. To work on a LISP project at Stanford, I might log in as: "login
lsp, gls". This is much more mnemonic. Programmer identifiers at
Stanford are usually the programmers's initials, though sometimes they
are nicknames or other three-letter sequences. Even though sometimes
the CMU and Stanford forms are not really (pairs of) numbers, the term
"ppn" is used to refer to the combination.
2. At Stanford, the term "ppn" is often used loosely to refer to
the programmer name alone. "I want to send you some mail. What's your
ppn?".
MIT uses an operating system called ITS that is completely
unrelated to TOPS-10. ITS does not use PPN's. The closest approximation
to a ppn on ITS is UNAME (user name), which is a six-character
programmer name with no project number.
The names JRN and JRL are sometimes used as example names when
discussing ppn's; they are understood to be programmer names for
(fictious) programmers named "J. Random Nerd", and "J. Random Loser".
(See J. RANDOM). For example, one might say "To log in, type log one
comma jay are en" (that is, "log 1,JRN"). And the listener will
understand that he should use his own programmer name in place of JRN.
PROTOCOL
See DO PROTOCOL.
PSEUDOPRIME (soo'doh-priem) noun.
A backgammon prime (six consecutive occupied points) with one
point missing; that is, only five out of six consecutive points are
really occupied.
This term is a pun. In mathematics, a pseudoprime is an integer
that satisfies one of a set of criteria. Any number that passes even
one of these tests is almost certainly a true prime (an integer that
cannot be divided evenly by any integer except itself or 1); however,
there are a very few integers that can fool the tests, so the best you
can say is that a number that passes the test is "probably" prime. The
hacker backgammon usage stems from the idea that a pseudoprime is
almost as good as a prime: it does the job of a prime for most purposes
until proven otherwise, and that probably won't happen. A true
backgammon prime guarantees that your opponent cannot escape; a
backgammon pseudoprime will probably prevent the opponent from
escaping.
PUNT verb.
To give up; to decide not to do. Typically there is no intention
of trying again later. Examples: "Let's punt the movie tonight". "I was
going to HACK all night to get this FEATURE in, but I decided to punt"
may mean that you've decided not to stay up all night, and may also
mean you're not ever even going to put in the feature.
This doubtless comes from football: When you punt, you give up the
offense.
PUSH verb.
1. To put something onto a stack or PDL. If a person says
something has been pushed onto his pdl, he means yet another thing has
been added to the list of things hanging over his head for him to do.
2. To enter upon a digression; to save the current discussion for
later. The term PUSHJ (push'jay) is also used in this sense. "Pushj?"
means "May I interrupt for a moment?".
Antonyms: POP, POPJ.
Synonym: CONTROL-B.
The PDP-10 has instructions named PUSH and PUSHJ; the former
pushes a single word onto a stack, and the latter (PUSH and Jump
always) is a subroutine call instruction.
QUADRUPLE BUCKY adjective.
1. Using all four of the shifting keys "control", "meta", "hyper",
and "super" while typing a character key (on an MIT keyboard that has
all these keys). This combination is very seldom used in practice,
because when you invent a new command you usually assign it to some
character that is easier to type than using all four shift keys. If you
want to imply that a program has ridiculously many commands or
features, you can say something like "Oh, the command that makes it
spin all the tapes while whistling Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is
quadruple bucky COKEBOTTLE".
2. Using four shift keys while typing a fifth character, where the
four shift keys are the "control", and "meta" keys on both sides of the
(MIT or Stanford) keyboard. This is very difficult to do! One accepted
technique is to press the left-control and left-meta keys with your
left hand, the right-control and right-meta with your right hand, and
the fifth key with your nose. Such hard-to-type commands are used for
things that you want to be very sure can't happen accidentally, such as
throwing away your entire program and starting all over.
For a complete explanation, see BUCKY BITS.
QUES (kwess)
1. noun. The question mark character ("?").
2. interjection. What? Also Ques, Ques? See WALL.
QUUX (kwuhks)
Originally, a meta-word like FOO. This word was coined by Guy
Steele for precisely this purpose when he was young and naive and not
yet interacting with the real hacker community. Had he known that "foo"
was the standard, he would not have bothered. Many people invent such
silly words; this one seems simply to have been lucky enough to have
spread a little. In an eloquent display of poetic justice, it has
returned to the originator in the form of a nickname as punishment for
inventing this BLETCHEROUS word in the first place.
QUUXY (kwuhks'ee) adjective. Of or pertaining to a QUUX.
RANDOM
1. adjective. Unpredictable (closest to mathematical definition);
weird. "The SYSTEM's been behaving pretty randomly".
2. Assorted; various; undistinguished; uninteresting. "Who was at
the conference?" "Just a bunch of random business types".
3. Frivolous; unproductive; undirected. "He's just a random
LOSER".
4. Incoherent or inelegant; not well organized. "The program has a
random set of MISFEATURES". "That's a random name for that function".
"Well, all the names were chosen pretty randomly".
5. Gratuitously wrong; poorly done and for no good apparent
reason. "This subroutine randomly uses six registers where two would
have sufficed".
6. In no particular order, though deterministic. "The I/O channels
are in a pool, and when a file is opened one is chosen randomly".
7. noun. A random hacker. This is used particularly of high school
students who soak up computer time and generally get in the way. The
term "high school random" is frequently heard.
8. One who lives at Random Hall at MIT.
J. RANDOM is often prefixed to a noun to make a "name" out of it
(by analogy to common names such as "J. Fred Muggs"). It means roughly
"some particular" or "any specific one". The most common uses are "J.
Random Loser" and "J. Random Nerd". Example: "Should J. Random Loser be
allowed to delete system files without warning?"
RANDOMNESS noun.
1. An unexplainable MISFEATURE; gratuitous inelegance or in-
consistency; failure to so THE RIGHT THING.
2. A HACK or CROCK that depends on a complex combination of
coincidences; also, the combination upon which the hack or crock
depends for its accidental failure to malfunction; a situation in which
several BUGS or MISFEATURES happen to cancel each other.
See also PHASE OF THE MOON.
RAPE verb.
To (metaphorically) screw someone or something, violently; in
particular, to destroy a program or information irrecoverably.
This term is usually used in describing damage to the file system (that
portion of the computer system responsible for keeping track of all
files and maintaining their integrity). Example: "Some LOSER ran a
program that did direct output to the disk instead of going through the
file system and ended up raping the master directory".
RAV (rav) noun.
A Chinese appetizer known variously in the plural as Peking
ravioli, dumplings, and potstickers. The term "rav" is short for
"ravioli", which among hackers always means the Chinese kind rather
than the Italian kind. Both consist of a filling in a pasta shell, but
the Chinese kind uses a thinner pasta and is cooked differently, either
by steaming or frying. A rav or dumpling can be steamed or fried, but a
potsticker is always the fried kind (so called because it sticks to the
frying pot and has to be scraped off). "Let's get hot-and-sour soup and
three orders of ravs".
RAVE verb.
1. To persist in discussing a specific subject.
2. To speak authoritatively on a subject about which one knows
very little.
3. To complain (loud and long) to a person who is not in a
position to correct the difficulty.
4. To purposely annoy another person verbally.
5. To proselytize (in a loose or metaphorical sense).
Synonym: FLAME.
This term was imported from WPI. It differs slightly from "flame"
in that "rave" implies that it is the manner or persistence of speaking
that is annoying, while "flame" implies somewhat more strongly that the
subject matter is annoying as well.
REAL USER noun.
1. A commercial user; one who is paying "real" money for his
computer usage.
2. A nonhacker; someone using the system for an explicit purpose
(such as a research project, or academic course-work). See USER.
It is possible for one person to play different roles at different
times. This is especially true of hackers who are also students. "I
need this fixed so I can do a problem set. I'm not complaining out of
RANDOMNESS, but as a real user".
REAL WORLD, THE noun.
1. Those institutions at which people might use the word "pro-
gramming" in the same sentence as "FORTRAN", "COBOL", "RPG", "IBM",
etc.
2. Places where programs do such commercially necessary but
intellectually uninspiring things as compute payroll checks and
invoices.
3. To programmers (especially hackers), the location of non-
-programmers and activities not related to programming.
4. A universe in which the standard dress is shirt and tie, and in
which a person's working hours are defined as 9 to 5.
5. The location of the status quo.
6. Anywhere outside a university. Example: "Poor fellow, he's left
MIT and gone into the real world".
This term is used pejoratively by those not in residence there. In
conversation, talking of someone who has entered the real world is not
unlike talking about a deceased person.
RIGHT THING, THE noun.
That which is "obviously" the correct or appropriate thing to use,
do, say, etc. Use of this term often implies that in fact reasonable
people may disagree. Examples: "Never let your conscience keep you from
doing the right thing!" "What's the right thing for LISP to do when
computing a mod 0? Should it return a, or give a divide-by-zero
error?".
RPG (ahr'pee'jee) noun.
1. Report Program Generator, an extremely RUDE, BOGUS, and
BLETCHEROUS programming language.
2. Richard P. Gabriel, a hacker at Stanford. See GABRIEL.
RUDE adjective.
1. Badly written (said of programs).
2. Functionally poor, such as a program that is very difficult to
use because of gratuitously poor (RANDOM?) design decisions.
Antonym: CUSPY.
SACRED adjective.
Reserved for the exclusive use of something (this is a me-
taphorical extension of the standard meaning). Often this means that
anyone may look at the sacred object, but destroying it will cause a
malfunction in whatever it is sacred to. Example: The comment "Register
seven is sacred to the interrupt handler" appearing in a program would
be interpreted by a hacker to mean that one part of the program, the
"interrupt handler", uses register 87, and if any other part of the
program changes the contents of register 7 there will be dire
consequences. (This information would be useful to him if he had to
change a program someone else had written it tells him that new code
added to the program must avoid using register 7).
SAGA noun.
A CUSPY but BOGUS RAVING story dealing with N RANDOM BROKEN
people.
Here is an example of a saga:
Jon L. White (login name JONL) and I (GLS) were office mates at
MIT for many years, and worked together on the LISP language. One April
we both flew from Boston to California for a week on research business,
to consult face to face with some people at Stanford, particularly our
common friend Richard P. Gabriel (RPG; see GABRIEL).
RPG picked us up at the San Francisco airport and drove us back to
Palo Alto (going LOGICAL SOUTH on Route 101, parallel the EL CAMINO
BIGNUM). Palo Alto is adjacent to Stanford University, and about forty
miles south of San Francisco. We ate at The Good Earth, a "health food"
restaurant, very popular, the sort whose milkshakes all contain honey
and protein powder. JONL ordered such a shake -- the waitress claimed
the flavor of the day was "lalaberry". I still have no idea what that
might be, but it became a running joke. It was the color of raspberry,
and JONL said it tasted rather bitter. I ate a better tostada there
than I have ever had in a Mexican restaurant.
After this we went to the local Uncle Gaylord's Old Fashioned Ice
Cream Parlor. They make ice cream fresh daily, in a variety of
intriguing flavors. It's a chain, and they have a slogan: "If you don't
live near an Uncle Gaylord's -- MOVE!". Also, Uncle Gaylord (a real
person) wages a constant battle to force big-name ice cream makers to
print their ingredients on the package (such as air and plastic and
other non-natural garbage). JONL and I had first discovered Uncle
Gaylord's the previous August when we had flown to a computer science
conference in Berkeley, California, the first time either of us had
been on the West Coast. When not in the conference sessions, we spent
our time wandering the length of Telegraph Avenue, which, like Harvard
Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in summer was lined with pic-
turesque street vendors and interesting little shops. On that street we
discovered Uncle Gaylord's Berkeley store. The ice cream there was very
good. During that August visit, JONL went absolutely bananas (so to
speak) over one particular flavor, ginger honey.
Therefore, after eating at The Good Earth -- indeed, after every
lunch and dinner and before bed during our April visit -- a trip to
Uncle Gaylord's (the one in Palo Alto) was mandatory. We had arrived on
a Wednesday, and by Thursday evening we had been there at least four
times. Each time JONL would get ginger honey ice cream and proclaim to
all bystanders that "Ginger was the spice that drove the Europeans mad!
That's why they sought a route to the East! They used it to preserve
their otherwise off-taste meat." After the third or fourth repetition,
RPG and I were getting a little tired of this spiel, and we began to
paraphrase him: "Wow! Ginger! The spice that makes rotten meat taste
good!" "Say! Why don't we find some dog that's been run over and sat in
the sun for a week and put some ginger on it for dinner?!" "Right! With
a lalaberry shake!" And so on. This failed to faze JONL; he took it in
good humor, as long as we kept returning to Uncle Gaylord's. He loves
ginger honey ice cream.
Now, RPG and his wife KBT (Kathy Tracy) were putting us up
(putting up with us?) in their home for our visit, so to thank them
JONL and I took them out to a nice French restaurant of their choosing.
I unadventurously chose the filet mignon, and KBT had je ne sais quoi
du jour, but RPG and JONL had lapin (rabbit). (Waitress: "Oui, we have
fresh rabbit, fresh today." RPG: "Well, JONL, I guess we won't need any
ginger!")
We finished the meal late, about 11:00 PM, which is 2:00 AM Boston
time, so JONL and I were rather droopy. But it wasn't yet midnight. Off
to Uncle Gaylord's.
Now, the French restaurant was in Redwood City, north of Palo
Alto. In leaving Redwood City, we somehow got onto Route 101 going
north instead of south. JONL and I wouldn't have known the difference
had RPG not mentioned it. We still knew very little of the local
geography. I did figure out, however, that we were headed in the
direction of Berkeley, and I half-jokingly suggested that we continue
north and go to Uncle Gaylord's in Berkeley.
RPG said "Fine!" and we drove on for a while and talked. I was
drowsy, and JONL actually dropped off to sleep for five minutes. When
he awoke, RPG said, "Gee, JONL, you must have slept all the was over
the bridge!" -- referring to the one spanning San Francisco Bay. Just
then we came to a sign that said "University Avenue". I mumbled
something about working our way over to Telegraph Avenue; RPG said
"Right!" and maneuvered some more. Eventually we pulled up in front of
an Uncle Gaylord's.
I hadn't really been paying attention because I was too sleepy,
and I didn't really understand what was happening until RPG let me in
on it a few moments later, but I was just alert enough to notice that
we had somehow come to the Palo Alto Uncle Gaylord's after all.
JONL noticed the resemblance to the Palo Alto store, but hadn't caught
on. He said, "This isn't the Uncle Gaylord's I went to in Berkeley! It
looked like a barn! But this place looks just like the one back in Pale
Alto!"
RPG deadpanned, "Wee, this is the one I always come to when I'm in
Berkeley. They've got two in San Francisco, too. Remember, they're a
chain.
JONL accepted this bit of wisdom. And he was not totally ignorant
-- he knew perfectly well that University Avenue was in Berkeley, not
far from Telegraph Avenue. What he didn't know was the there is a
completely different University Avenue in Palo Alto.
JONL went up to the counter and asked for ginger honey. The guy at
the counter asked whether JONL would like to taste it first --
evidently their standard procedure with that flavor, as not too many
people like it.
JONL said, "I'm sure I like it. Just give me a cone." The guy
behind the counter insisted that JONL try just a taste first. "Some
people think it tastes like soap." JONL insisted, "Look, I love ginger.
I eat Chinese food. I eat raw ginger roots. I already went through this
hassle with the guy back in Palo Alto. I know I like that flavor!"
At the words "back in Palo Alto", the guy behind the counter got a very
strange look on his face, but said nothing. KBT caught his eye and
winked. Through my stupor I still hadn't quite grasped what was going
on and thought RPG was rolling on the floor laughing and clutching his
stomach just because JONL had launched into his spiel ("makes rotten
meat a dish for a prince") for the forty-third time. At this point RPG
clued me in fully.
RPG, KBT and I retreated to a table, trying to stifle our
chuckles. JONL remained at the counter, talking about ice cream with
the guy b.t.c., comparing Uncle Gaylord's to other ice cream shops and
generally having a good old time.
At length the g.b.t.c. said, "You really like that stuff, huh?".
JONL said, "Yeah, I've been eating it constantly back in Palo Alto for
the past two days. In fact, I think that this batch is about as good as
the cones I got back in Palo Alto!"
G.b.t.c. looked him straight in the eye and said, "You're in Palo
Alto!".
JONL turned slowly around and saw the three of us collapse in a
fit of giggles. He clapped a hand to his forehead and exclaimed, "I've
been HACKED!".
SEMI
1. (sem'ee) noun. The semicolon character ";". Example: "Commands
to GRIND are prefixed by semi-semi-star" means that grind commands
(whatever they are) begin with ";;*", not 1/4 of a star (*).
2. (sem'ee, sem'ie) Prefix with words such as "immediately", as a
qualifier meaning "sort of" or "not really". Example: "When is the
system coming up?" "Semi-immediately". (That is, maybe not for an
hour).
See CHARACTERS.
SHIFT LEFT (RIGHT) LOGICAL verb.
To move oneself to the left (right). To move out of the way. As an
imperative, this implies "Get out of that (my) seat! You can move to
that empty one to the left (right)."
This term is used technically to describe the motions of in-
formation bits in a computer register. Most computers have specific
instructions with these names to perform such motions. The slang usage
asks the listener to imagine that he is a BIT and to perform the
appropriate motion. Other computer instructions, such as "rotate left"
and EXCH, are also used in this way. The PDP-10 instruction that
performs left-shifting is called LSH (lish), and so that word is
sometimes used too.
SHRIEK
The exclamation point character "!".
Synonyms: BANG, EXCL. See CHARACTERS.
69 adjective.
A moderately large quantity. Example: "Go away, I have sixty-nine
things to do before I GRONK OUT".
Actually, any number less than 100 but large enough to have no
obvious special properties will be recognized as a "large number".
There is no denying that 69 is the local favorite. I don't know whether
its origins are related to the obscene interpretation, but I do know
that 69 decimal = 105 octal, and 69 hexadecimal = 105 decimal, which is
a nice property.
SLOP noun.
1. A one-sided FUDGE FACTOR, that is, an allowance for error but
only in one of two directions. For example, if you need a piece of wire
ten feet long and have to guess when you cut it, you make very sure to
cut it too long -- by a large amount if necessary -- rather than too
short by even a little bit. You can always cut off the "slop", but you
can't paste it back on again. When discrete quantities are involved,
slop is sometimes introduced to avoid the possibility of a FENCEPOST
ERROR.
2. The ratio of the size or speed of code generated by a compiler
to that of code carefully written by hand, minus one. Suppose that you
have the choice to write a program in a so-called high-level language
such as LISP or PASCAL, or to hand-craft it directly in machine
language. (The advantage of the former is that you can write the
program more easily; the advantage of the latter is that the program
may be more efficient). Then the slop, as defined by the formula given
above, is the amount of inefficiency in the final program because you
used a compiler instead of hand-crafting it. This number is often used
as a measure of the goodness of a compiler: slop below 5% is very good,
and 10% is usually acceptable for most purposes.
The second definition of "slop" is consonant with the first under
the assumption that a compiler will never produce better code than a
competent hacker. However, this assumption is not always valid. Recent
software technology has produced compilers that sometimes produce
better code than a good hacker because the hacker will get bored
hand-crafting mountains of code and therefore be less TENSE than he
could be. Compilers don't get bored.
SLURP verb.
To read a large data file entirely into the computer's main memory
before beginning to work on it. (This may be contrasted with the
strategy of reading a small piece at a time, processing it, and then
reading the next piece.) Example: "This program slurps in a
1024-by-1024 matrix of numbers and than CRUNCHES them using an FFT
(Fast Fourier Transform).
SMART adjective.
1. Said of a program or other object that does THE RIGHT THING in
a wide variety of complicated circumstances. There is a difference
between calling a program smart and calling it intelligent; in
particular, there do not exist any intelligent programs (although some
researchers in artificial intelligence are working toward that goal).
SMART TERMINAL noun. A terminal that has enough computing
capability to perform useful work independent of the main computer.
SMOKING CLOVER verb.
A psychodelic color MUNCH due to Gosper (see GOSPERISM). This is a
display HACK that produces a very strong optical illusion. A series of
nested, wildly colored clover-leaf patterns appear on the screen and
seem to expand in size indefinitely. When the program is stopped, the
patterns are frozen; but because you have been watching them expand for
a while, they suddenly seem to contract.
The display changes with a speed that is awesome to anyone who is
familiar with the computer hardware being used. This speed is made
possible by a very clever programming technique. Also, the clover-leaf
pattern is the non-obvious result of another program that is startingly
simple. For both of these reasons, as well as for the illusion, smoking
clover is a favorite HACK.
SMOP (ess'em'oh'pee') noun.
An acronym for "a Small Matter Of Programming". A piece of program
code, not yet written, whose anticipated length is significantly
greater than its intellectual complexity.
This term is used to refer to a program that could obviously be
written but is not worth the trouble. It is also used ironically to
imply that a difficult problem can be easily solved because a program
can be written to do it. The irony is that it is very clear that
writing such a program will be a great deal of work. Example: "It's
easy to change a FORTRAN compiler to compile COBOL as well; it's just a
small matter of programming."
SNAIL MAIL noun.
Mail sent via the Postal Service rather than electronically,
sometimes written as one word: SnailMail. At its worst, electronic mail
usually arrives within half an hour. Compare that to the typical three
days for SnailMail. If you ask a hacker for his mailing address, he
will usually give you his network address for electronic mail. You have
to say "What's you SnailMail address?" if you want to send him a
package.
SNARF (snahrf) verb.
1. To grab, especially a large document or file for the purpose of
using it either with or without the owner's permission. Examples: "I
snarfed the DDT manual from you desk last night". "This program snarfs
all the file directories and searches for files named 'DELETE.ME'".
SNARF DOWN. To snarf, sometimes with the connotation of absorbing,
processing, or understanding. "I think I'll snarf down the list of DDT
commands so I'll know what's changed recently".
SOFTWARE ROT noun.
A hypothetical disease the existence of which has been deduced
from the observation that unused programs or FEATURES will stop working
after sufficient time has passed even if "nothing has changed".
Synonym: BIT DECAY.
SOFTWARILY (sawft-war'-:l-ee) adverb.
In a way pertaining to software. "The system is softwarily
unreliable". Note: the adjective "softwary" is not used. See HARD-
WARILY.
SOS
1. (ess'oh-ess') noun. A LOSING text editor. Once, back in the
1960s, when a text editor was needed for the PDP-6, a hacker CRUFTED
TOGETHER a quick-and-dirty "stopgap editor" to be used until a better
one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never really discarded
when new ones came along. SOS is a descendant of that editor: SOS means
"Son Of Stopgap". (Since then other programs similar in style to SOS
have been written, notably BILOS (bye'lohss) the Brother-in-Law Of
Stopgap).
2. (sahss) verb. To substract one from a number; to decrease the
amount of something. This SOS means "Subtract One and do not Skip"; it
is an antonym of AOS, named after a PDP-10 instruction.
SPACE CADET KEYBOARD noun.
A computer keyboard designed at MIT and used on special LISP
computers. It has seven shifting keys: control, meta, hyper, super,
shift, top and Greek. (See BUCKY BITS). There are six rows of keys
instead of the usual four rows, and each row of keys is half again as
wide as usual. It is jocularly called a "space cadet" keyboard because
when sitting at it for the first time you feel like a junior space
cadet at the control panel of a rocket ship: a little bit overwhelmed
by all the controls.
SPAZZ (spaz)
1. verb. To behave spastically or erratically; more often, to
commit a single gross error. "I'm sorry I BROKE the LISP system last
night. I was trying to fix that printing bug and must've spazzed
royally".
2. noun. One who spazzes. "Boy, what a spazz!"
3. noun. The result of spazzing; spasticity. Example: "He forgot
to make the routine that prints numbers handle negative numbers. In
particular, trying to print -32768 gets an ILL MEM REF." "Boy, what a
spazz!"
SPLAT (splat) noun.
1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the ASCII
asterisk ("*") CHARACTER.
2. Name used by some people for the ASCII number-sign ("#")
CHARACTER.
3. Name used by some people for the extended Stanford ASCII
circle-x character. This character is also called "circle-x", "grinch",
"blobby", and "FROB", among other names.)
4. Name for the semimythical extended Stanford ASCII circle-plus
character.
5. The CANONICAL name for an output routine that outputs whatever
the local interpretation of "splat" is.
Nobody really agrees what character "splat" is, but the term is
common. See CHARACTERS.
SQUIGGLE (skwig':l), SQIGGLE (skig':l) noun.
The character "~" (tilde). Synonym: TWIDDLE.
SQUIGGLE BRACKETS noun. The brace characters "{" and "}".
See CHARACTERS.
STATE noun.
Condition, situation. Examples: "What's the state of your latest
hack?" "It's WINNING away." "The SYSTEM tried to read and write the
disk simultaneously and got into at totally WEDGED state."
A standard question is "What's your state?" which means "What are
you doing?" or "What are you about to do?". Typical answers might be
"I'm about to GRONK OUT" or "I'm hungry".
Another standard question is "What's the state of the world?"
meaning "What's new?" or "What's going on?".
STOPPAGE (stahp':j) noun.
Extreme LOSSAGE resulting in something (usually vital) becoming
completely unusable. Example: "The recent system stoppage was caused by
a FRIED transformer".
SUPERPROGRAMMER noun.
A prolific programmer; one who can code exceedingly well and
quickly. Not all hackers are superprogrammers, but many are.
Productivity can vary from one programmer to another by factors of
as much as 1000. For example, one programmer might be able to write an
average of 3 lines of working code in one day, while another, with the
proper tools and skill, might be able to write 3000 lines of working
code in one day. This variance is astonishing, appearing in very few
other areas of human endeavor.
Mark Crispin once reported, "While working at Stanford, I wrote
the first 96-bit leader PDP-10 Network Control Program as my first
monitor coding project. That took about two weeks, and at the time
nobody believed I had accomplished it because someone on the East Coast
had been working on it for over a year and still hadn't finished. I
understand I rocked some boats when it was proven I had succeeded."
The term "superprogrammer" is more commonly used within such
places as IBM than in the hacker community. It tends to stress
productivity rather than creativity or ingenuity. Hackers prefer the
terms HACKER and WIZARD.
SWAP verb.
1. To exchange; to trade places. See EXCH.
2. To move information from a fast-access memory to a slow-access
memory (swap out), or vice versa (swap in). This is a technical term in
computer science, and often specifically refers to the use of disks as
"virtual memory". As pieces of data or program are needed, they are
swapped into main memory for processing; when they are no longer needed
for the nonce they are swapped out again. The slang use of these terms
is as a fairly exact analogy referring to people's memories. Cramming
for an exam might be spoken of as swapping in. If you temporarily
forget someone's name but then remember it, your excuse is that it was
swapped out. To "keep something swapped in" means to keep it fresh in
your memory: "I reread the TECO manual every few months to keep it
swapped in." If someone interrupts you just as you get a good idea, you
might say, "Wait a moment while I write this down so I can swap it
out", implying that if you don't write it down it will get swapped out
(forgotten) as you talk.
SYSTEM noun.
1. The supervisor program on the computer; the program that is
responsible for coordinating the activities of the various users of the
computer.
2. The entire computer system, including input/output devices, the
supervisor program, and possibly other software.
3. Any large-scale program.
4. Any method or methodology.
5. The way things are usually done.
6. The existing bureaucracy. "You can't beat the system".
SYSTEM HACKER noun. One who hacks the system (in sense 1 only; for
sense 3 one mentions the particular program, as in LISP hacker or TECO
hacker).
T (tee)
1. A particular time. See TIME T. (The variable "T" is customarily
used in physics to represent points in or quantities of time).
2. Yes. This word is used in reply to a question, particularly one
asked using the "-P" convention. Example: "Foodp?" "T". That simple
interchange means, "Do you want to come eat with us?" "Sure". See NIL.
In the LISP language, the name "T" means "true", among other
things. Some hackers use "T" and "NIL" instead of "yes" and "no" almost
reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings, when a waiter or
flight attendant asks if a hacker wants coffee; but of course he will
be brought a cup of tea instead. As it happens, most hackers like tea
at least as well as coffee -- particularly those who frequent Chinese
restaurants -- so it's not that big a problem.
TALK MODEM
A situation in which two or more terminals are logically linked
together so that whatever is typed on the keyboard of any one appears
on the screens of all. This is used for conversation via computer. See
COM MODE and MODE.
TASTE noun.
1. Aesthetic pleasance; the quality in programs which tends to be
inversely proportional to the number of FEATURES, HACKS, CROCKS, and
KLUGES programmed into it.
TASTY adjective. Aesthetically pleasing; FLAVORFUL. Example: "This
FEATURE comes in N tasty FLAVORS".
Although "tasteful" and "flavorful" are essentially synonyms,
"taste" and "flavor" are not. "Taste" refers to sound judgment on the
part of the creator; a program or feature can exhibit taste but cannot
"have" taste. On the other hand, a feature can have flavor. Also,
"flavor" has the additional meaning of "kind" or "variety" not shared
by "taste". "Flavor" is a more popular word among hackers than "taste",
though both are used.
TECO (tee'koh)
1. noun. A text editor developed at MIT and modified by just about
everybody. If all the dialects are included, TECO might well be the
single most prolific editor in use. Noted for its powerful
pseudo-programming features and its incredibly hairy syntax. As an
example, here is a TECO program that takes a list of names like this...
Loser, J. Random
Quux, The Great
Dick, Moby
...sorts them alphabetically according to last name, and then puts
the last name last, removing the comma, to produce this:
Moby Dick
J. Random Loser
The Great Quux
The program is:
[1 J ^ P $ L $ $
J <.-Z; .,(S,$ -D .)FXl @F ^ B $K :L I $ Gl L> $
In fact, this very program was used to produce the second, sorted,
list from the first list! The manuscript for this book was produced
using the EMACS editor, which is built on top of TECO and allows you to
execute TECO programs. The first time I tried the program it had a BUG;
I had accidentally omitted the "@" in front of "F ^ B", which, as
anyone can see, is clearly THE WRONG THING. It worked fine the second
time. There isn't space to describe all the features of TECO, but I
will note that " ^ P" means "sort" and "J <.-Z; ... L>" is an idiomatic
series of commands for "do once for every line".
2. verb. To edit using the TECO editor in one of its infinite
forms; sometimes used to mean "to edit" even when not using TECO!
Mark Crispin provided these historical notes:
Historical note (1): DEC grabbed an ancient version of MIT TECO
many years ago when it was still a TTY-oriented editor (that is, didn't
make use of display screens). By now, TECO at MIT is highly dis-
play-oriented and is actually a programming language for writing
editors such as EMACS, rather than being used as an editor itself.
Meanwhile, the outside world's various versions of TECO remain almost
the same as the MIT version of 1970 or so. DEC recently tried to
discourage its use, but an underground movement of sorts kept it alive.
Historical note (2): Since note (1) was written, I found out that
DEC tried to force their programmers by administrative decision to use
a hacked-up and generally lobotomized version of SOS instead of TECO,
and they revolted.
TENSE adjective.
Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code
often got that way because it was highly BUMMED, but sometimes it was
just based on a great idea. As an example, this comment was found in a
clever display routine by Mike Kazar, a student hacker at CMU: "This
routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes. Much thanks to
Craig Everhart and James Gosling for inspiring this HACK ATTACK."
A tense programmer is one who produces tense code. They say that
PDP-10 code flows from the pencil of hacker Bill Gosper in a maximally
tense state. I don't waste my time trying to bum even one instruction
from a PDP-10 program if I learn that Gosper wrote it.
TENURED GRADUATE STUDENT noun.
One who has been in graduate school for ten years (the usual
maximum is five or six): a "ten-yeared" student. (Get it?) 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 nontenured professor.
TERPRI (tur'pree, t:r'pree) verb.
To output a CRLF; to terminate a line of text and start the next
line.
This comes from the name of the LISP routine that performs this
action. It is a contraction of "TERminate PRInt line".
THEORY noun.
Any idea, plan, story, policy, or set of rules. This is a
generalization and abuse of the technical meaning. Examples: "What's
the theory on fixing this TECO loss?" "What's the theory on dinner
tonight?" ("Chinatown, I guess.") "What's the current theory on letting
LOSERS on during the day?" "The theory behind this change is to fix the
following well-known screw..."
THRASH verb.
To move wildly or violently without accomplishing anything useful.
The connotation is of a maximum of motion with a minimum of ef-
fectiveness. Computer systems that are overloaded waste most of their
time SWAPPING information between disk and memory rather than per-
forming useful computation, and are therefore said to "trash". Someone
who keeps changing his mind is said to be trashing.
TIME T noun.
A time or instant unspecified but understandable from context.
Often used in conjunction with a later time, "T+1" or "T+N".
Example: "We'll meet on campus at time T or at Louie's at time T
plus one" means, in the context of going out for dinner, "If we meet at
Louie's directly, we can meet there a little later than if we meet on
campus and the have to travel to Louie's". (Louie's is a Chinese
restaurant in Palo Alto that is a favorite with hackers. Louie makes
the best potstickers I've ever tasted. See RAV). Had "thirty" been used
instead of "one", it would have implied that the travel time from
campus to Louie's is thirty minutes. Whatever time "T" is (and that
hasn't been decided yet), you can meet half an hour later at Louie's
than you could on campus and end up eating at the same time.
SINCE (OR AT) TIME T EQUALS MINUS INFINITY. A long time ago; for
as long as anyone can remember; at the time that some particular FROB
was first designed. "That feature has been BROKEN since time T equals
minus infinity".
Sometimes the word "time" is omitted if there is no danger of
confusing T as a time with T meaning "yes". See T.
TOGGLE verb.
To change a BIT from whatever state it is in to the other state:
to change from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1. This probably comes from "toggle
switches", such as standard light switches -- though the word toggle
apparently originally referred to the mechanism that keeps the switch
in the position to which it is flipped, rather than to the fact that
the switch has two positions.
There are four things you can do to a bit: set it (force it to be
1), clear (or zero) it, leave it alone, or toggle it. (Mathematically,
one would say that there are four distinct boolean-valued functions of
one boolean argument, but saying that is much less fun than talking
about toggling bits.)
TOOL
1. verb. To work hard; to study; to "cram" for an exam. This is an
antonym of sorts for HACK: "tooling" is working without enjoying it.
The distinction is useful to hackers who are also students: tooling is
programming or other work done for courses. Example: "I have to tool
chemistry for a while before I GRONK OUT".
2. noun. A person who (seemingly) always tools and never hacks; a
nerd (or nurd). This term is used throughout MIT: Students refer to
themselves with more or less pride as "Tech tools".
TRASH-80 noun.
A Radio Shack TRS-80 personal computer.
Hackers are accustomed to using powerful, million-dollar com-
puters, and tend to look down a little on itty-bitty computers that
can't deliver enough CYCLES for their purposes. This is not to say that
personal computers can't be useful , or that some hackers don't enjoy
working with them. Personal computers are getting better all the time.
Observe, however, that many programs being sold for personal computers
are developed on much larger computers that provide a better pro-
gramming environment.
The name "Trash-80" is used more as a play on the name of the
product than as a judgment on the product as compared to its com-
petitors. The term is used in good spirit by TRS-80 owners as well.
TTY (tit'ee) noun.
1. A computers terminal of the Teletype variety, characterized by
a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor
print quality. This term is antiquated (like the TTYs themselves). The
definition must be considered relative to modern terminals. In their
heyday, TTYs were useful and fairly reliable workhorses.
2. Any computer terminal at all, especially the one that is
controlling a computer program under discussion, or that the program
can display information on. Example: "This program lists the current
file directory on the TTY".
TWEAK verb.
To change slightly, relative to some reference point; to adjust
finely. If a program is almost correct, rather than figuring out the
precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works.
Synonym: TWIDDLE. See also FROBNICATE and FUDGE FACTOR.
TWENEX (twen'eks) noun.
The TOPS-20 operating system distributed by DEC for the
DECSYSTEM-20 computer, a successor to the PDP-10. There was an
operating system for the PDP-10 called TOPS-10, so TOPS-20 is an
obvious name for a DECSYSTEM-20 operating system, event though TOPS-20
is nothing like TOPS-10. TOPS-10 was a typically CRUFTY operating
system produced by DEC itself. The firm Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN)
developed its own operating system, called TENEX (for "TEN EXecutive
system"). DEC obtained the right to use TENEX and extended it to create
TOPS-20. The term "TWENEX" is therefore a contraction of "twenty
TENEX". DEC people tend to cringe when they hear TOPS-20 referred to as
"TWENEX", but the term seems to be catching on nevertheless. The
abbreviation "20x" is also used and also pronounced "TWENEX".
TWIDDLE (twid':l)
1. noun. The tilde character "~". See CHARACTERS.
2. noun. A small and insignificant change to a program. A twiddle
usually fixes one BUG and generates several new ones.
3. verb. To change something in a small way. BITS, for example,
are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knob implies much less sense
of purpose than TOGGLING or TWEAKING it: see FROBNICATE. To speak of
twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify what
you're doing to the bit; by contrast, toggling a bit has a more
specific meaning.
UP adjective.
Working; in order. Example: "The Down escalator is up". Antonym:
DOWN.
BRING UP verb. To create a working version and start it. Examples:
"They just brought up the system". "JONL is going to bring up a new
LISP compiler tonight". Antonym: TAKE DOWN.
USER noun.
1. Someone doing "real work" with the computer, who uses a
computer as a means rather than an end. Someone who pays to use a
computer. See REAL USER.
2. A programmer who will believe anything you tell him. One who
asks silly questions. See LUSER.
3. Someone who uses a program from the outside, however skill-
fully, without getting into the internals of the program. One who
reports BUGS instead of just going ahead and fixing them.
Basically, there are two classes of people who work with a
program: there are implementors (HACKERS) and users (LOSERS). The users
are looked down on by hackers to a mild degree because they don't
understand the full ramifications of the SYSTEM in all its glory. (The
few users who do are known as REAL WINNERS).
The term is a relative one: A consummate hacker may be a user with
respect to some program he himself does not hack. A LISP hacker might
be one who maintains LISP or one who uses LISP (but with the skill of a
hacker). A LISP user is one who uses LISP, whether skillfully or not.
Thus there is some overlap between the two terms; the subtle
distinctions must be resolved by context.
It is true that users ask questions (of necessity). Sometimes they
are thoughtful or deep. Very often they are annoying or downright
stupid, apparently because the user failed to think for two seconds or
to look in the documentation before bothering the maintainer.
VANILLA adjective.
Standard, usual, of ordinary FLAVOR. "It's just a vanilla
terminal; it doesn't have any interesting FEATURES".
When used of food, this term very often does not mean that the
food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, "vanilla-flavored
wonton soup" (or simply "vanilla wonton soup") means ordinary wonton
soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup.
This word differs from CANONICAL in that the latter means "the
thing you always use (or the way you always do it) unless you have some
strong reason to do otherwise", whereas "vanilla" simply means
"ordinary". For example, when MIT hackers go to Colleen's Chinese
Cuisine, hot-and-sour wonton soup is the canonical wonton soup to get
(because that is what most of them usually order) even though it isn't
the vanilla wonton soup.
VAXEN (vaks':n)
The plural usually used among hackers for the DEC VAX computers.
"Our installation has four PDP-10's and twenty vaxen".
The DEC operating system for the VAX is called VMS (for Virtual
Memory System). It has its advantages, but sometimes it seems to run
rather slowly. Hence this limerick:
There once was a system called VMS
Of cycles by no means abstemious
It's chock-full of hacks
And runs on a VAX
And makes my poor stomach all squeamious.
-- The Great QUUX
VIRTUAL adjective.
Performing the functions of. Virtual memory acts like real memory
but isn't. (A virtual memory system uses a combination of a small main
memory plus a magnetic disk to give the illusion that a computer has a
large main memory and the disk as needed).
The term is synonymous with LOGICAL, except that "virtual" is
never used with compass directions.
VISIONARY noun.
One who HACKS vision, in the sense of an artificial intelligence
researcher working on the problem of getting computers to "see" things
using TV cameras. (There isn't any problem in sending information from
a TV camera to a computer. The problem is, how can the computer be
programmed to make use of the camera information? See SMOP).
WALL interjection.
An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone.
"Wall?" A request for further explication.
This seems to be a shortened form of "Hello, wall", apparently
from the phrase "up against a blank wall". This term is used primarily
at WPI.
WALLPAPER noun.
A program listing or, especially, a transcript of all or part of a
login session, showing everything that ever appeared on the terminal.
(The idea was that the LPT paper for such listings was essentially good
only for wallpaper to cover windows to keep the light out).
WALLPAPER FILE noun. The file that contains the wallpaper
information before it is actually printed on paper. (Sometimes you
don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy of the file, because you
can look at the file directly on your terminal, but it is still called
a "wallpaper file").
This term is used infrequently nowadays, especially since other
SYSTEMS have developed other terms for the concept (for example: PHOTO
on TWENEX). This term possibly originated on the ITS system at MIT,
where the commands to begin and end transcript files are still
":WALBEG" and ":WALEND", which produce a file named "WALL PAPER".
WEDGED adjective.
1. To be stuck, incapable of proceeding without help. This is
different from having CRASHED. If the system has crashed, then it has
become totally nonfunctioning. If the system is "wedged", it is trying
to do something but cannot make progress. It may be capable of doing a
few things, but not be fully operational. For example, the system may
become wedged if the disk controller FRIES; there are some things you
can do without using the disks, but not many. Being wedged is slightly
milder than being "hung". This term is sometimes used as a synonym for
DEADLOCKED. See also HANG, LOSING, CATATONIA, and BUZZ.
2. Of a person, suffering severely from misconceptions. Example:
"He's totally wedged -- he's convinced that he can levitate through
meditation". "I'm sorry. I had a BIT set that you were responsible for
TECO, but I was wedged".
WEDGITUDE (wedj'i-tood). The quality or state of being wedged.
WHEEL noun.
1. A "privilege" BIT that, when set, CANONICALLY allows the
possessor to perform any operation whatsoever on a timesharing system,
such as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections,
change or look at any address in the running monitor, CRASH or reload
the SYSTEM, and kill or create jobs and USER accounts. The term was
invented on the TENEX operating system and carried over to TOPS-20 and
others. See TWENEX.
2. A person who possesses a set wheel bit (and who therefore has
great privilege and power on that system). "We need to find a wheel to
unwedge the hung tape drives".
WHEEL WARS. A period during which student wheels HACK each other
by attempting to log each other our of the system, delete each other's
files, or otherwise wreak havoc -- usually at the expense of the lesser
USERS.
WIN
1. verb. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected conditions
arise. Antonym: LOSE.
2. noun. Success, or a specific instance thereof. A pleasing
outcome. A FEATURE. Emphatic forms: MOBY win, super win, hyper-win. For
some reason "suitable win" is also common at MIT, usually in reference
to a satisfactory solution to a problem. Antonym: LOSS.
BIG WIN noun. The results of serendipity.
WIN BIG verb. The experience serendipity. "I went shopping and won
big; there was a two-for-one sale".
WIN, WIN interjection.
WINNER noun. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer,
or person. Albert Einstein was a winner. Antonym: LOSER.
REAL WINNER noun. This term is often used sarcastically, but is
also used as high praise.
WINNAGE (win':j) noun. The situation when a LOSSAGE is corrected
or when something is winning. Quire rare. Usage: also quite rare.
WINNITUDE (win':-tood) noun. The quality of winning (as opposed to
WINNAGE, which is the result of winning).
WIZARD noun.
1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software or hardware
works (that is, who GROKS it); someone who can find and fix BUGS
quickly in an emergency. This term differs somewhat from HACKER.
Someone is a hacker if he has general hacking ability, but is only a
wizard with respect to something if he has specific, detailed knowledge
of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard of something, given
the time to study it.
2. A person who is permitted to do things forbidden to ordinary
people. For example, an Adventure wizard at Stanford may play the
Adventure game during the day, which is forbidden (the program simply
refuses to play) to most people because it uselessly consumer to many
CYCLES.
WIZARDLY adjective. Pertaining to wizards. A wizardly FEATURE is
one that only a wizard could understand or use properly.
WOW
The exclamation point character "!". Synonyms: BANG, EXCL, SHRIEK.
See CHARACTERS.
WRONG THING, THE noun.
The opposite of THE RIGHT THING; more generally, anything that is
not the right thing. In cases where "the good is the enemy of the
best", the merely good, while good, is nevertheless the wrong thing.
XOR (eks'ohr) conjunction.
Exclusive or. "A xor B" means "A or B, but definitely not both".
Example: "I want to get cherry pie xor a banana split". This derives
from the technical use of the term as a function on truth-values that
is true if either of two arguments is true but not both.
XYZZY (eks'wie'zee'zee'wie, zi'zee)
The CANONICAL "magic word". This comes from the Adventure game, in
which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms to
collect treasure. If you type XYZZY at the appropriate time, you can
move instantly between two otherwise distant points.
If, therefore, you encounter some bit of MAGIC, or more precisely
some technique for accomplishing magic, you might remark on this quite
succinctly by saying simply "XYZZY!". This may be translated roughly as
"Wow! Magic!" Example: "Ordinarily you can't look at someone else's
screen if he has protected it, but if you type quadruple-bucky-CLEAR
the system will let you do it anyway" "XYZZY!".
YOYO MODE noun.
A state in which the system is said to be when it rapidly
alternates several times between being UP and being DOWN.
YU-SHIANG WHOLE FISH (yoo'hsyang', yoo'shang') noun.
The Greek letter lower-case gamma when written with a loop in its
tail, making it look like a little fish swimming down the page. The
term is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked
whole (not PARSED) and covered with Yu Shiang sauce. This bit of slang
is used primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine computers, which
can display this character on their screens. The term also tends to
elicit incredulity from people who hear about it secondhand. See
CHARACTERS.
ZAP
1. noun. Spiciness.
2. verb. To make food spicy.
3. verb. To make someone "suffer" by making his food spicy. (Most
hackers love spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is wimpy unless it makes you
blow your nose for the rest of the meal).
ZAPPED adjective. Of food, spicy. "Watch out -- than bean curd disk is
really zapped tonight". Of people, wiped out of GRONKED because of
eating spicy food. "I ate the bean curd and got totally zapped. I used
up two boxes of Kleenex. It was great."
This term is used to distinguish between food that is hot (in
temperature) and food that is "hot", that is, spicy. For example, the
Chinese appetizer Bon Bon Chicken is a kind of chicken salad that is
cold but zapped.
Hacker Bill Gosper has one of the highest tolerances for zapped
food. He frequently eats at Louie's, a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto
(actually called "Hsi Nan", but hackers who know the owner refer to it
simply as Louie's); and Louie will frequently try to out-zap him. When
he does, you don't want to get caught in the cross fire. The food is
absolutely delicious, but you would think that the sauce contains
nitric acid.
ZERO verb.
1. To set to zero. Usually said of small pieces of data such as
BITS or words.
2. By extension, to erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks
and directories, where "zeroing" need not involve actually writing
zeroes throughout the area being zeroed. One may speak of something
being LOGICALLY zeroed (forgotten) rather than being physically zeroed
(erased).
ZORCH (zorch)
1. verb. To move quickly, like a rocket ship training fire behind
it. "This file transfer program is very fast; it really zorches those
files through the network".
2. noun. Influence, "brownie points"; that intangible and fuzzy
currency in which favors are measured. "I'd rather not ask him for that
just yet; I think I've used up my quota of zorch with him for the
week".
3. noun. Energy of ability. "I guess I'll PUNT fixing that bug
until tomorrow. I've been up for thirty hours and I've run out of
zorch".
About the Authors
GLS (gliss) Guy L. Steel Jr.
I earned my A.B. degree (1975) in applied mathematics at Harvard
College, and my S.M. (1977) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in computer
science and artificial intelligence at MIT. Since 1980 I have been an
assistant professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University,
now on leave. Now I am a Senior Scientist at Tartan Laboratories,
Incorporated. I have been hacking computers for fifteen years. I am
married to another hacker, Barbara K. Steele, and we have two children.
I enjoy cooking Chinese food, doing carpentry, cartooning, singing, and
playing piano and guitar. But for real fun, nothing can beat an
all-night hack session, preferably writing hairy TECO code for EMACS.
Synonym: QUUX.
DON (dahn) Donald R. Woods.
My father got me interested in computers at the age of 11, back
when that was still unusual. One of my very first hacks earned me $50
when his company decided to use it as a demonstration at one of the
trade fairs. I studied electrical engineering at Princeton (B.S.E.,
1975), mainly because they didn't have an undergraduate computer
science program. Then I came out to Stanford where, after the obli-
gatory dawdling and hacking, I contrived to earn a Ph.D. (1981) in
computer science. By that time I was working for the Xerox Corporation,
and I've been there ever since. Besides contributing to the "jargon
file", I'm probably best known as coauthor (with Jim Lyon) of the
INTERCAL Programming Language Reference Manual, and as one of the
primary authors of the original Adventure program.
RF (ahr'eff) Raphael A. Finkel.
I received an A.B. degree in mathematics and an M.A.T. degree in
teaching from the University of Chicago in 1972, and in 1976 a Ph.D.
degree in computer science from Stanford University. I am now an
associate professor in the Department of Computer Science, University
of Wisconsin, Madison. Teaching is important to me, and I have received
two teaching awards: the Sperry Univac 1979-1980 Computer Science
Professor of the Year Award, and a 1981 University Distinguished
Teaching Award. My research is in the general area of distribute
algorithms; in particular, I have built several distributed operating
systems. Outside of work, I enjoy studying Judaica (Mishna, Gemorra,
and Yiddish) and playing piano. I don't hack much any more.
MRC (murk, m:rc) Mark R. Crispin.
I earned my B.S. degree (1977) in Technology and Society at
Stevens Institute of Technology. Since graduating I have been a systems
programmer at the Computer Science Department at Stanford University.
I'm married to hacker and aspiring broadcasting personality Lynn Ann
Gold; my BMW 320i's license plate is California ILVLYNN. Besides
hacking, we ice skate, ski, go to punk rock concerts, collect science
fiction artwork, and are dragon lovers and ardent bad movie fanatics.
One recent thrill was seeing Plan Nine from Outer Space, the winner of
the Golden Turkey award at the "worst movie ever made" (I agree with
that assessment). We have several home computers, one of which runs an
X-rated electronic bulletin-board system popular with many of the
perverts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
RMS (ahr'em'ess) Richard M. Stallman.
I was built at a laboratory in Manhattan around 1953, and moved to
the MIT Artificial Intelligence lab in 1971. My hobbies include
affection, international folk dance, flying, cooking, physics,
recorder, puns, science fiction fandom, and programming; I magically
get paid for doing the last one. About a year ago I split up with the
PDP-10 computer to which I was married for the years. We still love
each other, but the world is taking us in different directions. For the
moment I still live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, among our old
memories. "Richard Stallman" is just my mundane name; you can call me
"RMS".
GFF (jef) Geoffrey S. Goodfellow.
I've been a hacker ever since I ran into a model-33 TTY connected
at the lightning speed of 110 bps between my seventh grade school and a
PDP-10 running TENEX at Stanford University. Since my introduction to
the world of hacking, formal education has held no allure for me. Two
weeks into the final quarter of my senior year of high school, I
dropped out and accepted a job at SRI International in Menlo Park,
California. I have not returned to class since I flushed school and
have no degree of any type to my name. Today, my most productive
hacking is accomplished at my residence where I'm connected up to an
ersatz PDP-10, a Foonly-4, running TENEX in SRI's computer science lab
via a 9600 bps leased line. Professionally, my interests are primarily
computer packet-switched networks, security, office automation,
electronic mail, cellular radio, and mobile communications.
Nonprofessionally, I like to hack, travel, eat out at fine restaurants,
collect cars, and watch an occasional movie on my 6-foot projection TV.