Chapter L (1)

lowercase l

shift-L
uppercase L

front-L
lowercase lambda

front-shift-L
uppercase lambda

top-L
two-way arrow
(front and shift are ignored)

And of course each of these might also be typed with any
combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this
keyboard, you could type over 8000 different characters! This
allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and
also to have thousands of single-character commands at his
disposal. Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the
command meanings of that many characters if it reduced typing time
(this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other
hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill,
and objected that such a keyboard can require three or four hands
to operate. See {bucky bits}, {cokebottle}, {double bucky},
{meta bit}, {quadruple bucky}.

Note: early versions of this entry incorrectly identified the
space-cadet keyboard with the `Knight keyboard'. Though both
were designed by Tom Knight, the latter term was properly applied
only to a keyboard used for ITS on the PDP-10 and modeled
on the Stanford keyboard (as described under {bucky bits}). The
true space-cadet keyboard evolved from the Knight keyboard.

:SPACEWAR: n. A space-combat simulation game, inspired by
E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensman" books, in which two spaceships
duel around a central sun, shooting torpedoes at each other and
jumping through hyperspace. This game was first implemented on the
PDP-1 at MIT in 1960--61. SPACEWAR aficionados formed the core of
the early hacker culture at MIT. Nine years later, a descendant
of the game motivated Ken Thompson to build, in his spare time on a
scavenged PDP-7, the operating system that became {{UNIX}}. Less
than nine years after that, SPACEWAR was commercialized as one of
the first video games; descendants are still {feep}ing in video
arcades everywhere.

:spaghetti code: n. Code with a complex and tangled control
structure, esp. one using many GOTOs, exceptions, or other
`unstructured' branching constructs. Pejorative. The synonym
`kangaroo code' has been reported, doubtless because such code
has many jumps in it.

:spaghetti inheritance: n. [encountered among users of object-oriented
languages that use inheritance, such as Smalltalk] A convoluted
class-subclass graph, often resulting from carelessly deriving
subclasses from other classes just for the sake of reusing their
code. Coined in a (successful) attempt to discourage such
practice, through guilt-by-association with {spaghetti code}.

:spam: [from the {MUD} community] vt. To crash a program by overrunning
a fixed-size buffer with excessively large input data. See also
{buffer overflow}, {overrun screw}, {smash the stack}.

:special-case: vt. To write unique code to handle input to or
situations arising in program that are somehow distinguished from
normal processing. This would be used for processing of mode
switches or interrupt characters in an interactive interface (as
opposed, say, to text entry or normal commands), or for processing
of {hidden flag}s in the input of a batch program or {filter}.

:speedometer: n. A pattern of lights displayed on a linear set of
LEDs (today) or nixie tubes (yesterday, on ancient mainframes).
The pattern is shifted left every N times the software goes
through its main loop. A swiftly moving pattern indicates that the
system is mostly idle; the speedometer slows down as the system
becomes overloaded. The speedometer on Sun Microsystems hardware
bounces back and forth like the eyes on one of the Cylons from the
wretched "Battlestar Galactica" TV series.

Historical note: One computer, the Honeywell 6000 (later GE 600)
actually had an *analog* speedometer on the front panel,
calibrated in instructions executed per second.

:spell: n. Syn. {incantation}.

:spiffy: /spi'fee/ adj. 1. Said of programs having a pretty,
clever, or exceptionally well-designed interface. "Have you seen
the spiffy {X} version of {empire} yet?" 2. Said
sarcastically of a program that is perceived to have little more
than a flashy interface going for it. Which meaning should be
drawn depends delicately on tone of voice and context. This word
was common mainstream slang during the 1940s, in a sense close to #1.

:spike: v. To defeat a selection mechanism by introducing a
(sometimes temporary) device which forces a specific result. The
word is used in several industries; telephone engineers refer to
spiking a relay by inserting a pin to hold the relay in either the
closed or open state, and railroaders refer to spiking a
track switch so that it cannot be moved. In programming
environments it normally refers to a temporary change, usually for
testing purposes (as opposed to a permanent change which would be
called {hardwired}).

:spin: vi. Equivalent to {buzz}. More common among C and UNIX
programmers.

:spl: /S-P-L/ [abbrev, from Set Priority Level] The way
traditional UNIX kernels implement mutual exclusion by running code
at high interrupt levels. Used in jargon to describe the act of
tuning in or tuning out ordinary communication. Classically, spl
levels run from 1 to 7; "Fred's at spl 6 today." would mean
that he is very hard to interrupt. "Wait till I finish this; I'll
spl down then." See also {interrupts locked out}.

:splat: n. 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for
the asterisk (`*') character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive
from the `squashed-bug' appearance of the asterisk on many early
line printers. 2. [MIT] Name used by some people for the
`#' character (ASCII 0100011). 3. [Rochester Institute of
Technology] The {feature key} on a Mac (same as {alt},
sense 2). 4. [Stanford] Name used by some people for the
Stanford/ITS extended ASCII
circle-x
character. This character is also called `blobby' and `frob',
among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a
notation for `tensor product'. 5. [Stanford] Name for the
semi-mythical extended ASCII
circle-plus
character. 6. Canonical name for an output routine that outputs
whatever the local interpretation of `splat' is.

With ITS and WAITS gone, senses 4--6 are now nearly obsolete. See
also {{ASCII}}.

:spod: [Great Britain] n. A lower form of life found on {talker
system}s and {MUD}s. The spod has few friends in {RL} and
uses talkers instead, finding communication easier and preferable
over the net. He has all the negative traits of the {computer
geek} without having any interest in computers per se. Lacking any
knowledge of or interest in how networks work, and considering his
access a God-given right, he is a major irritant to sysadmins,
clogging up lines in order to reach new MUDs, following passed-on
instructions on how to sneak his way onto Internet ("Wow! It's in
America!") and complaining when he is not allowed to use busy
routes. A true spod will start any conversation with "Are you
male or female?" (and follow it up with "Got any good
numbers/IDs/passwords?") and will not talk to someone physically
present in the same terminal room until they log onto the same
machine that he is using and enter talk mode. Compare {newbie},
{tourist}, {weenie}, {twink}, {terminal junkie}.

:sponge: [UNIX] n. A special case of a {filter} that reads its
entire input before writing any output; the canonical example is a
sort utility. Unlike most filters, a sponge can conveniently
overwrite the input file with the output data stream. If your file
system has versioning (as ITS did and VMS does now) the
sponge/filter distinction loses its usefulness, because directing
filter output would just write a new version. See also {slurp}.

:spooge: /spooj/ 1. n. Inexplicable or arcane code, or random
and probably incorrect output from a computer program. 2. vi. To
generate spooge (sense 1).

:spool: [from early IBM `Simultaneous Peripheral Operation
On-Line', but this acronym is widely thought to have been contrived
for effect] vt. To send files to some device or program (a
`spooler') that queues them up and does something useful with
them later. The spooler usually understood is the `print
spooler' controlling output of jobs to a printer, but the term has
been used in connection with other peripherals (especially plotters
and graphics devices) and occasionally even for input devices. See
also {demon}.

:spool file: n. Any file to which data is {spool}ed to await the
next stage of processing. Especially used in circumstances where
spooling the data copes with a mismatch between speeds in two
devices or pieces of software. For example, when you send mail
under UNIX, it's typically copied to a spool file to await a
transport {demon}'s attentions. This is borderline techspeak.

:square tape: n. Mainframe magnetic tape cartridges for use with IBM 3480
or compatible tape drives. The term comes from the square (actually
rectangular) shape of the cartridges; contrast {round tape}.

:stack: n. A person's stack is the set of things he or she has to do
in the future. One speaks of the next project to be attacked as
having risen to the top of the stack. "I'm afraid I've got real
work to do, so this'll have to be pushed way down on my stack."
"I haven't done it yet because every time I pop my stack something
new gets pushed." If you are interrupted several times in the
middle of a conversation, "My stack overflowed" means "I
forget what we were talking about." The implication is that more
items were pushed onto the stack than could be remembered, so the
least recent items were lost. The usual physical example of a
stack is to be found in a cafeteria: a pile of plates or trays
sitting on a spring in a well, so that when you put one on the top
they all sink down, and when you take one off the top the rest
spring up a bit. See also {push} and {pop}.

At MIT, {pdl} used to be a more common synonym for {stack} in
all these contexts, and this may still be true. Everywhere else
{stack} seems to be the preferred term. {Knuth}
(`The Art of Computer Programming', second edition, vol. 1,
p. 236) says:

Many people who realized the importance of stacks and queues
independently have given other names to these structures:
stacks have been called push-down lists, reversion storages,
cellars, nesting stores, piles, last-in-first-out ("LIFO")
lists, and even yo-yo lists!

:stack puke: n. Some processor architectures are said to `puke their
guts onto the stack' to save their internal state during exception
processing. The Motorola 68020, for example, regurgitates up to
92 bytes on a bus fault. On a pipelined machine, this can take a
while.

:stale pointer bug: n. Synonym for {aliasing bug} used esp. among
microcomputer hackers.

:state: n. 1. Condition, situation. "What's the state of your
latest hack?" "It's winning away." "The system tried to read
and write the disk simultaneously and got into a totally wedged
state." The standard question "What's your state?" means
"What are you doing?" or "What are you about to do?" Typical
answers are "about to gronk out", or "hungry". Another
standard question is "What's the state of the world?", meaning
"What's new?" or "What's going on?". The more terse and
humorous way of asking these questions would be "State-p?".
Another way of phrasing the first question under sense 1 would be
"state-p latest hack?". 2. Information being maintained in
non-permanent memory (electronic or human).

:steam-powered: adj. Old-fashioned or underpowered; archaic. This
term does not have a strong negative loading and may even be used
semi-affectionately for something that clanks and wheezes a lot
but hangs in there doing the job.

:stiffy: [University of Lowell, Massachusetts.] n. 3.5-inch
{microfloppies}, so called because their jackets are more firm
than those of the 5.25-inch and the 8-inch floppy. Elsewhere this
might be called a `firmy'.

:stir-fried random: alt. `stir-fried mumble' n. Term used for the
best dish of many of those hackers who can cook. Consists of
random fresh veggies and meat wokked with random spices. Tasty and
economical. See {random}, {great-wall}, {ravs}, {{laser
chicken}}, {{oriental food}}; see also {mumble}.

:stomp on: vt. To inadvertently overwrite something important, usually
automatically. "All the work I did this weekend got
stomped on last night by the nightly server script." Compare
{scribble}, {mangle}, {trash}, {scrog}, {roach}.

:Stone Age: n., adj. 1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period
from ENIAC (ca. 1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of
electromechanical {dinosaur}s. Sometimes used for the entire
period up to 1960--61 (see {Iron Age}); however, it is funnier
and more descriptive to characterize the latter period in terms of
a `Bronze Age' era of transistor-logic, pre-ferrite-{core}
machines with drum or CRT mass storage (as opposed to just mercury
delay lines and/or relays). See also {Iron Age}. 2. More
generally, a pejorative for any crufty, ancient piece of hardware
or software technology. Note that this is used even by people who
were there for the {Stone Age} (sense 1).

:stone knives and bearskins: [ITS, prob. from the Star Trek Classic
episode "The City on the Edge of Forever"] n. A term traditionally
used by {ITS} fans to describe (and deprecate) computing
environments they regard as less advanced, with the (often
correct) implication that said environments were grotesquely
primitive in light of what is known about good ways to design
things. As in "Don't get too used to the facilities here. Once
you leave MIT it's stone knives and bearskins as far as the eye can
see". Compare {steam-powered}.

:stoppage: /sto'p*j/ n. Extreme {lossage} that renders
something (usually something vital) completely unusable. "The
recent system stoppage was caused by a {fried} transformer."

:store: [prob. from techspeak `main store'] n. Preferred Commonwealth
synonym for {core}. Thus, `bringing a program into store' means
not that one is returning shrink-wrapped software but that a
program is being {swap}ped in.

:stroke: n. Common name for the slant (`/', ASCII 0101111)
character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.

:strudel: n. Common (spoken) name for the at-sign (`@', ASCII
1000000) character. See {ASCII} for other synonyms.

:stubroutine: /stuhb'roo-teen/ [contraction of `stub
subroutine'] n. Tiny, often vacuous placeholder for a subroutine
that is to be written or fleshed out later.

:studlycaps: /stuhd'lee-kaps/ n. A hackish form of silliness
similar to {BiCapitalization} for trademarks, but applied
randomly and to arbitrary text rather than to trademarks. ThE
oRigiN and SigNificaNce of thIs pRacTicE iS oBscuRe.

:stunning: adj. Mind-bogglingly stupid. Usually used in sarcasm.
"You want to code *what* in ADA? That's ... a stunning
idea!"

:stupid-sort: n. Syn. {bogo-sort}.

:Stupids: n. Term used by {samurai} for the {suit}s who
employ them; succinctly expresses an attitude at least as common,
though usually better disguised, among other subcultures of
hackers. There may be intended reference here to an SF story
originally published in 1952 but much anthologized since, Mark
Clifton's `Star, Bright'. In it, a super-genius child
classifies humans into a very few `Brights' like herself, a huge
majority of `Stupids', and a minority of `Tweens', the merely
ordinary geniuses.

:subshell: /suhb'shel/ [UNIX, MS-DOS] n. An OS command interpreter
(see {shell}) spawned from within a program, such that exit from
the command interpreter returns one to the parent program in a
state that allows it to continue execution. Compare {shell out};
oppose {chain}.

:sucking mud: [Applied Data Research] adj. (also `pumping
mud') Crashed or wedged. Usually said of a machine that provides
some service to a network, such as a file server. This Dallas
regionalism derives from the East Texas oilfield lament, "Shut
'er down, Ma, she's a-suckin' mud". Often used as a query. "We
are going to reconfigure the network, are you ready to suck mud?"

:sufficiently small: adj. Syn. {suitably small}.

:suit: n. 1. Ugly and uncomfortable `business clothing' often
worn by non-hackers. Invariably worn with a `tie', a
strangulation device that partially cuts off the blood supply to
the brain. It is thought that this explains much about the
behavior of suit-wearers. Compare {droid}. 2. A person who
habitually wears suits, as distinct from a techie or hacker. See
{loser}, {burble}, {management}, {Stupids}, {SNAFU
Principle}, and {brain-damaged}. English, by the way, is
relatively kind; our Moscow correspondent informs us that the
corresponding idiom in Russian hacker jargon is `sovok', lit. a
tool for grabbing garbage.

:suitable win: n. See {win}.

:suitably small: [perverted from mathematical jargon] adj. An
expression used ironically to characterize unquantifiable
behavior that differs from expected or required behavior. For
example, suppose a newly created program came up with a correct
full-screen display, and one publicly exclaimed: "It works!"
Then, if the program dumps core on the first mouse click, one might
add: "Well, for suitably small values of `works'." Compare
the characterization of pi under {{random numbers}}.

:sun lounge: [Great Britain] n. The room where all the Sun
workstations live. The humor in this term comes from the fact
that it's also in mainstream use to describe a solarium, and all
those Sun workstations clustered together give off an amazing
amount of heat.

:sun-stools: n. Unflattering hackerism for SunTools, a pre-X
windowing environment notorious in its day for size, slowness, and
misfeatures. {X}, however, is larger and slower; see
{second-system effect}.

:sunspots: n. 1. Notional cause of an odd error. "Why did the
program suddenly turn the screen blue?" "Sunspots, I guess."
2. Also the cause of {bit rot} --- from the myth that sunspots
will increase {cosmic rays}, which can flip single bits in memory.
See {cosmic rays}, {phase of the moon}.

:superprogrammer: n. A prolific programmer; one who can code
exceedingly well and quickly. Not all hackers are
superprogrammers, but many are. (Productivity can vary from one
programmer to another by three orders of magnitude. For example,
one programmer might be able to write an average of 3 lines of
working code in one day, while another, with the proper tools,
might be able to write 3,000. This range is astonishing; it is
matched in very few other areas of human endeavor.) The term
`superprogrammer' is more commonly used within such places as IBM
than in the hacker community. It tends to stress na"ive measures
of productivity and to underweight creativity, ingenuity, and
getting the job *done* --- and to sidestep the question of
whether the 3,000 lines of code do more or less useful work than
three lines that do the {Right Thing}. Hackers tend to prefer
the terms {hacker} and {wizard}.

:superuser: [UNIX] n. Syn. {root}, {avatar}. This usage has
spread to non-UNIX environments; the superuser is any account with
all {wheel} bits on. A more specific term than {wheel}.

:support: n. After-sale handholding; something many software
vendors promise but few deliver. To hackers, most support people
are useless --- because by the time a hacker calls support he or
she will usually know the relevant manuals better than the support
people (sadly, this is *not* a joke or exaggeration). A
hacker's idea of `support' is a t^ete-`a-t^ete with the
software's designer.

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

:swab: /swob/ [From the mnemonic for the PDP-11 `SWAp Byte'
instruction, as immortalized in the `dd(1)' option `conv=swab'
(see {dd})] 1. vt. To solve the {NUXI problem} by swapping
bytes in a file. 2. n. The program in V7 UNIX used to perform this
action, or anything functionally equivalent to it. See also
{big-endian}, {little-endian}, {middle-endian},
{bytesexual}.

:swap: vt. 1. [techspeak] To move information from a fast-access
memory to a slow-access memory (`swap out'), or vice versa
(`swap in'). Often refers specifically to the use of disks as
`virtual memory'. As pieces of data or program are needed, they
are swapped into {core} for processing; when they are no longer
needed they may be swapped out again. 2. The jargon use of these
terms analogizes people's short-term memories with core. Cramming
for an exam might be spoken of as swapping in. If you temporarily
forget someone's name, but then remember it, your excuse is that it
was swapped out. To `keep something swapped in' means to keep it
fresh in your memory: "I reread the TECO manual every few months
to keep it swapped in." If someone interrupts you just as you got
a good idea, you might say "Wait a moment while I swap this
out", implying that the piece of paper is your extra-somatic
memory and if you don't swap the info out by writing it down it
will get overwritten and lost as you talk. Compare {page in},
{page out}.

:swap space: n. Storage space, especially temporary storage space
used during a move or reconfiguration. "I'm just using that corner
of the machine room for swap space."

:swapped in: n. See {swap}. See also {page in}.

:swapped out: n. See {swap}. See also {page out}.

:swizzle: v. To convert external names, array indices, or references
within a data structure into address pointers when the data
structure is brought into main memory from external storage (also
called `pointer swizzling'); this may be done for speed in
chasing references or to simplify code (e.g., by turning lots of
name lookups into pointer dereferences). The converse operation is
sometimes termed `unswizzling'. See also {snap}.

:sync: /sink/ (var. `synch') n., vi. 1. To synchronize, to
bring into synchronization. 2. [techspeak] To force all pending
I/O to the disk; see {flush}, sense 2. 3. More generally, to
force a number of competing processes or agents to a state that
would be `safe' if the system were to crash; thus, to checkpoint
(in the database-theory sense).

:syntactic sugar: [coined by Peter Landin] n. Features added to a
language or other formalism to make it `sweeter' for humans,
that do not affect the expressiveness of the formalism (compare
{chrome}). Used esp. when there is an obvious and trivial
translation of the `sugar' feature into other constructs already
present in the notation. C's `a[i]' notation is syntactic
sugar for `*(a + i)'. "Syntactic sugar causes cancer of the
semicolon." --- Alan Perlis.

The variants `syntactic saccharine' and `syntactic syrup' are
also recorded. These denotes something even more gratuitous, in
that syntactic sugar serves a purpose (making something more
acceptable to humans) but syntactic saccharine or syrup serves no
purpose at all. Compare {candygrammar}.

:sys-frog: /sis'frog/ [the PLATO system] n. Playful variant of
`sysprog', which is in turn short for `systems programmer'.

:sysadmin: /sis'ad-min/ n. Common contraction of `system
admin'; see {admin}.

:sysape: /sysape/ n. A rather derogatory term for a computer
operator; a play on {sysop} common at sites that use the banana
hierarchy of problem complexity (see {one-banana
problem}).

:sysop: /sis'op/ n. [esp. in the BBS world] The operator (and
usually the owner) of a bulletin-board system. A common neophyte
mistake on {FidoNet} is to address a message to `sysop' in an
international {echo}, thus sending it to hundreds of sysops
around the world.

:system: n. 1. The supervisor program or OS on a computer. 2. The
entire computer system, including input/output devices, the
supervisor program or OS, and possibly other software. 3. Any
large-scale program. 4. Any method or algorithm. 5. `System
hacker': one who hacks the system (in senses 1 and 2 only; for
sense 3 one mentions the particular program: e.g., `LISP
hacker')

:systems jock: n. See {jock}, (sense 2).

:system mangler: n. Humorous synonym for `system manager', poss.
from the fact that one major IBM OS had a {root} account called
SYSMANGR. Refers specifically to a systems programmer in charge of
administration, software maintenance, and updates at some site.
Unlike {admin}, this term emphasizes the technical end of the
skills involved.

:SysVile: /sis-vi:l'/ n. See {Missed'em-five}.

= T = =====

:T: /T/ 1. [from LISP terminology for `true'] Yes. Used in
reply to a question (particularly one asked using the `-P'
convention). In LISP, the constant T means `true', among other
things. Some hackers use `T' and `NIL' instead of `Yes' and `No'
almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. When
a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he
may well respond `T', meaning that he wants coffee; but of course
he will be brought a cup of tea instead. As it happens, most
hackers (particularly those who frequent Chinese restaurants) like
tea at least as well as coffee --- so it is not that big a problem.
2. See {time T} (also {since time T equals minus infinity}).
3. [techspeak] In transaction-processing circles, an abbreviation
for the noun `transaction'. 4. [Purdue] Alternate spelling of
{tee}. 5. A dialect of {LISP} developed at Yale.

:tail recursion: n. If you aren't sick of it already, see {tail
recursion}.

:talk mode: n. A feature supported by UNIX, ITS, and some other
OSes that allows two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time
on-line conversation. It combines the immediacy of talking with
all the precision (and verbosity) that written language entails.
It is difficult to communicate inflection, though conventions have
arisen for some of these (see the section on writing style in the
Prependices for details).

Talk mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing,
which are not used orally. Some of these are identical to (and
probably derived from) Morse-code jargon used by ham-radio amateurs
since the 1920s.

BCNU
be seeing you
BTW
by the way
BYE?
are you ready to unlink? (this is the standard way to end a
talk-mode conversation; the other person types `BYE' to
confirm, or else continues the conversation)
CUL
see you later
ENQ?
are you busy? (expects `ACK' or `NAK' in return)
FOO?
are you there? (often used on unexpected links, meaning also
"Sorry if I butted in ..." (linker) or "What's up?" (linkee))
FYI
for your information
FYA
for your amusement
GA
go ahead (used when two people have tried to type
simultaneously; this cedes the right to type to the other)
GRMBL
grumble (expresses disquiet or disagreement)
HELLOP
hello? (an instance of the `-P' convention)
JAM
just a minute (equivalent to `SEC....')
MIN
same as `JAM'
NIL
no (see {NIL})
O
over to you
OO
over and out
/
another form of "over to you" (from x/y as "x over y")
\
lambda (used in discussing LISPy things)
OBTW
oh, by the way
R U THERE?
are you there?
SEC
wait a second (sometimes written `SEC...')
T
yes (see the main entry for {T})
TNX
thanks
TNX 1.0E6
thanks a million (humorous)
TNXE6
another form of "thanks a million"
WRT
with regard to, or with respect to.
WTF
the universal interrogative particle; WTF knows what it means?
WTH
what the hell?
<double newline>
When the typing party has finished, he/she types two newlines
to signal that he/she is done; this leaves a blank line
between `speeches' in the conversation, making it easier to
reread the preceding text.
<name>:
When three or more terminals are linked, it is conventional
for each typist to {prepend} his/her login name or handle and
a colon (or a hyphen) to each line to indicate who is typing
(some conferencing facilities do this automatically). The
login name is often shortened to a unique prefix (possibly a
single letter) during a very long conversation.
/\/\/\
A giggle or chuckle. On a MUD, this usually means `earthquake
fault'.

Most of the above sub-jargon is used at both Stanford and MIT.
Several of these expressions are also common in {email}, esp.
FYI, FYA, BTW, BCNU, WTF, and CUL. A few other abbreviations have
been reported from commercial networks, such as GEnie and
CompuServe, where on-line `live' chat including more than two
people is common and usually involves a more `social' context,
notably the following:

<g>
grin
<gr&d>
grinning, running, and ducking
BBL
be back later
BRB
be right back
HHOJ
ha ha only joking
HHOK
ha ha only kidding
HHOS
{ha ha only serious}
IMHO
in my humble opinion (see {IMHO})
LOL
laughing out loud
NHOH
Never Heard of Him/Her (often used in {initgame})
ROTF
rolling on the floor
ROTFL
rolling on the floor laughing
AFK
away from keyboard
b4
before
CU l8tr
see you later
MORF
male or female?
TTFN
ta-ta for now
TTYL
talk to you later
OIC
oh, I see
rehi
hello again

Most of these are not used at universities or in the UNIX world,
though ROTF and TTFN have gained some currency there and IMHO is
common; conversely, most of the people who know these are
unfamiliar with FOO?, BCNU, HELLOP, {NIL}, and {T}.

The {MUD} community uses a mixture of USENET/Internet emoticons,
a few of the more natural of the old-style talk-mode abbrevs, and
some of the `social' list above; specifically, MUD respondents
report use of BBL, BRB, LOL, b4, BTW, WTF, TTFN, and WTH. The use
of `rehi' is also common; in fact, mudders are fond of re-
compounds and will frequently `rehug' or `rebonk' (see
{bonk/oif}) people. The word `re' by itself is taken as
`regreet'. In general, though, MUDders express a preference for
typing things out in full rather than using abbreviations; this may
be due to the relative youth of the MUD cultures, which tend to
include many touch typists and to assume high-speed links. The
following uses specific to MUDs are reported:

UOK?
are you OK?
THX
thanks (mutant of `TNX'; clearly this comes in batches of 1138
(the Lucasian K)).
CU l8er
see you later (mutant of `CU l8tr')
OTT
over the top (excessive, uncalled for)
FOAD
fuck off and die (use of this is often OTT)

Some {BIFF}isms (notably the variant spelling `d00d')
appear to be passing into wider use among some subgroups of
MUDders.

One final note on talk mode style: neophytes, when in talk mode,
often seem to think they must produce letter-perfect prose because
they are typing rather than speaking. This is not the best
approach. It can be very frustrating to wait while your partner
pauses to think of a word, or repeatedly makes the same spelling
error and backs up to fix it. It is usually best just to leave
typographical errors behind and plunge forward, unless severe
confusion may result; in that case it is often fastest just to type
"xxx" and start over from before the mistake.

See also {hakspek}, {emoticon}, {bonk/oif}.

:talker system: n. British hackerism for software that enables
real-time chat or {talk mode}.

:tall card: n. A PC/AT-size expansion card (these can be larger
than IBM PC or XT cards because the AT case is bigger). See also
{short card}. When IBM introduced the PS/2 model 30 (its last
gasp at supporting the ISA) they made the case lower and many
industry-standard tall cards wouldn't fit; this was felt to be a
reincarnation of the {connector conspiracy}, done with less
style.

:tanked: adj. Same as {down}, used primarily by UNIX hackers. See
also {hosed}. Popularized as a synonym for `drunk' by Steve
Dallas in the late lamented "Bloom County" comic strip.

:TANSTAAFL: /tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's
classic `The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'.] "There Ain't No
Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking
at an ugly design requirement or the prospect of using an
unpleasantly {heavyweight} technique. "What? Don't tell me I
have to implement a database back end to get my address book
program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes
some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction
fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see Appendix
B).

:tar and feather: [from UNIX `tar(1)'] vt. To create a
transportable archive from a group of files by first sticking them
together with `tar(1)' (the Tape ARchiver) and then
compressing the result (see {compress}). The latter action is
dubbed `feathering' by analogy to what you do with an airplane
propeller to decrease wind resistance, or with an oar to reduce
water resistance; smaller files, after all, slip through comm links
more easily.

:taste: [primarily MIT] n. 1. The quality in a program that tends
to be inversely proportional to the number of features, hacks, and
kluges programmed into it. Also `tasty', `tasteful',
`tastefulness'. "This feature comes in N tasty flavors."
Although `tasteful' and `flavorful' are essentially
synonyms, `taste' and {flavor} are not. Taste refers to
sound judgment on the part of the creator; a program or feature
can *exhibit* taste but cannot *have* taste. On the other
hand, a feature can have {flavor}. Also, {flavor} has the
additional meaning of `kind' or `variety' not shared by
`taste'. {Flavor} is a more popular word than `taste',
though both are used. See also {elegant}. 2. Alt. sp. of
{tayste}.

:tayste: /tayst/ n. Two bits; also as {taste}. Syn. {crumb},
{quarter}. Compare {{byte}}, {dynner}, {playte},
{nybble}, {quad}.

:TCB: /T-C-B/ [IBM] n. 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or
difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to
neglect. Compare {heisenbug}. Not to be confused with:
2. Trusted Computing Base, an `official' jargon term from the
{Orange Book}.

:tea, ISO standard cup of: [South Africa] n. A cup of tea with milk
and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup
before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with
two spoons of sugar; and so on.

Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North
America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice
of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and
prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were
feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous `ANSI
standard cup of tea' and wind up with a political situation
distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious
technical contexts. Milk and lemon don't mix very well.

:TechRef: /tek'ref/ [MS-DOS] n. The original `IBM PC
Technical Reference Manual', including the BIOS listing and
complete schematics for the PC. The only PC documentation in the
issue package that's considered serious by real hackers.

:TECO: /tee'koh/ obs. 1. vt. Originally, to edit using the TECO
editor in one of its infinite variations (see below). 2. vt.,obs.
To edit even when TECO is *not* the editor being used! This
usage is rare and now primarily historical. 2. [originally an
acronym for `[paper] Tape Editor and COrrector'; later, `Text
Editor and COrrector'] n. A text editor developed at MIT and
modified by just about everybody. With all the dialects included,
TECO might have been the most prolific editor in use before
{EMACS}, to which it was directly ancestral. Noted for its
powerful programming-language-like features and its unspeakably
hairy syntax. It is literally the case that every string of
characters is a valid TECO program (though probably not a useful
one); one common hacker game used to be mentally working out what
the TECO commands corresponding to human names did. As an example
of TECO's obscurity, here is a TECO program that takes a list of
names such as:

Loser, J. Random
Quux, The Great
Dick, Moby

sorts them alphabetically according to surname, and then puts the
surname last, removing the comma, to produce the following:

Moby Dick
J. Random Loser
The Great Quux

The program is

[1 J^P$L$$
J <.-Z; .,(S,$ -D .)FX1 @F^B $K :L I $ G1 L>$$

(where ^B means `Control-B' (ASCII 0000010) and $ is actually
an {alt} or escape (ASCII 0011011) character).

In fact, this very program was used to produce the second, sorted
list from the first list. The first hack at it had a {bug}: GLS
(the author) had accidentally omitted the `@' in front
of `F^B', which as anyone can see is clearly the {Wrong Thing}. It
worked fine the second time. There is no space to describe all the
features of TECO, but it may be of interest that `^P' means
`sort' and `J<.-Z; ... L>' is an idiomatic series of commands
for `do once for every line'.

In mid-1991, TECO is pretty much one with the dust of history,
having been replaced in the affections of hackerdom by {EMACS}.
Descendants of an early (and somewhat lobotomized) version adopted
by DEC can still be found lurking on VMS and a couple of crufty
PDP-11 operating systems, however, and ports of the more advanced
MIT versions remain the focus of some antiquarian interest. See
also {retrocomputing}, {write-only language}.

:tee: n.,vt. [Purdue] A carbon copy of an electronic transmission.
"Oh, you're sending him the {bits} to that? Slap on a tee for
me." From the UNIX command `tee(1)', itself named after a
pipe fitting (see {plumbing}). Can also mean `save one for me',
as in "Tee a slice for me!" Also spelled `T'.

:Telerat: /tel'*-rat/ n. Unflattering hackerism for `Teleray', a
line of extremely losing terminals. Compare {AIDX}, {terminak},
{Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap},
{ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}.

:TELNET: /tel'net/ vt. To communicate with another Internet host
using the {TELNET} protocol (usually using a program of the same
name). TOPS-10 people used the word IMPCOM, since that was the
program name for them. Sometimes abbreviated to TN /T-N/. "I
usually TN over to SAIL just to read the AP News."

:ten-finger interface: n. The interface between two networks that
cannot be directly connected for security reasons; refers to the
practice of placing two terminals side by side and having an
operator read from one and type into the other.

:tense: adj. Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece
of code often got that way because it was highly {bum}med, but
sometimes it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever
routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student hacker at CMU: "This
routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes." A tense
programmer is one who produces tense code.

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

:tera-: /te'r*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.

:teraflop club: /te'r*-flop kluhb/ [FLOP = Floating Point
Operation] n. A mythical association of people who consume
outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few
simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing
techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been
the founder.

:terminak: /ter'mi-nak`/ [Caltech, ca. 1979] n. Any
malfunctioning computer terminal. A common failure mode of
Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the `L' key to produce the
`K' code instead; complaints about this tended to look like
"Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease fix." See {AIDX},
{Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS},
{sun-stools}, {Telerat}, {HP-SUX}.

:terminal brain death: n. The extreme form of {terminal illness}
(sense 1). What someone who has obviously been hacking
continuously for far too long is said to be suffering from.

:terminal illness: n. 1. Syn. {raster burn}. 2. The `burn-in'
condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a screen saver.

:terminal junkie: [UK] n. A {wannabee} or early
{larval stage} hacker who spends most of his or her time wandering
the directory tree and writing {noddy} programs just to get
a fix of computer time. Variants include `terminal
jockey', `console junkie', and {console jockey}. The term
`console jockey' seems to imply more expertise than the other
three (possibly because of the exalted status of the {{console}}
relative to an ordinary terminal). See also {twink},
{read-only user}.

:terpri: /ter'pree/ [from LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP)] vi. To
output a {newline}. Now rare as jargon, though still used as
techspeak in Common LISP. It is a contraction of `TERminate PRInt
line', named for the fact that, on some early OSes and hardware, no
characters would be printed until a complete line was formed, so
this operation terminated the line and emitted the output.

:test: n. 1. Real users bashing on a prototype long enough to get
thoroughly acquainted with it, with careful monitoring and followup
of the results. 2. Some bored random user trying a couple of the
simpler features with a developer looking over his or her shoulder,
ready to pounce on mistakes. Judging by the quality of most
software, the second definition is far more prevalent. See also
{demo}.

:TeX: /tekh/ n. An extremely powerful {macro}-based
text formatter written by Donald E. {Knuth}, very popular in the
computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced
UNIX `troff(1)', the other favored formatter, even at many
UNIX installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural)
pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished
together, with the E depressed below the baseline; the
mixed-case `TeX' is considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only
devices). Fans like to proliferate names from the word `TeX'
--- such as TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX
programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax,
and TeXnique.

Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining
quality of the typesetting in volumes I--III of his monumental
`Art of Computer Programming' (see {Knuth}, also
{bible}). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to
solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his
own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his
sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years. The
language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of `The
Art of Computer Programming' has yet to appear as of mid-1991. The
impact and influence of TeX's design has been such that nobody
minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started as
a bit of tool-building on the way to something else; Knuth's
diversion was simply on a grander scale than most.

TeX{} has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but
high-quality software. Knuth used to offer monetary awards to people
who found and reported bugs in it; as the years wore on and the few
remaining bugs were fixed (and new ones even harder to find), the
bribe went up. Though well-written, TeX{} is so large (and so full of
cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least
one bug in every Pascal it has been compiled with.

:text: n. 1. [techspeak] Executable code, esp. a `pure code'
portion shared between multiple instances of a program running in a
multitasking OS (compare {English}). 2. Textual material in the
mainstream sense; data in ordinary {{ASCII}} or {{EBCDIC}}
representation (see {flat-ASCII}). "Those are text files;
you can review them using the editor." These two contradictory
senses confuse hackers, too.

:thanks in advance: [USENET] Conventional net.politeness ending a
posted request for information or assistance. Sometimes written
`advTHANKSance' or `aTdHvAaNnKcSe' or abbreviated `TIA'. See
{net.-}, {netiquette}.

:That's not a bug, that's a feature!: The {canonical} first
parry in a debate about a purported bug. The complainant, if
unconvinced, is likely to retort that the bug is then at best a
{misfeature}. See also {feature}.

:the X that can be Y is not the true X: Yet another instance of
hackerdom's peculiar attraction to mystical references --- a common
humorous way of making exclusive statements about a class of
things. The template is from the `Tao te Ching': "The
Tao which can be spoken of is not the true Tao." The implication
is often that the X is a mystery accessible only to the
enlightened. See the {trampoline} entry for an example, and
compare {has the X nature}.

:theology: n. 1. Ironically or humorously used to refer to
{religious issues}. 2. Technical fine points of an abstruse
nature, esp. those where the resolution is of theoretical
interest but is relatively {marginal} with respect to actual use of
a design or system. Used esp. around software issues with a
heavy AI or language-design component, such as the smart-data vs.
smart-programs dispute in AI.

:theory: n. The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that
is currently being used to inform a behavior. This is a
generalization and abuse of the technical meaning. "What's the
theory on fixing this TECO loss?" "What's the theory on dinner
tonight?" ("Chinatown, I guess.") "What's the current theory
on letting lusers on during the day?" "The theory behind this
change is to fix the following well-known screw...."

:thinko: /thing'koh/ [by analogy with `typo'] n. A momentary,
correctable glitch in mental processing, especially one involving
recall of information learned by rote; a bubble in the stream of
consciousness. Syn. {braino}; see also {brain fart}.
Compare {mouso}.

:This can't happen: Less clipped variant of {can't happen}.

:This time, for sure!: excl. Ritual affirmation frequently uttered
during protracted debugging sessions involving numerous small
obstacles (e.g., attempts to bring up a UUCP connection). For the
proper effect, this must be uttered in a fruity imitation of
Bullwinkle J. Moose. Also heard: "Hey, Rocky! Watch me pull a
rabbit out of my hat!" The {canonical} response is, of course,
"But that trick *never* works!" See {{Humor, Hacker}}.

:thrash: vi. To move wildly or violently, without accomplishing
anything useful. Paging or swapping systems that are overloaded
waste most of their time moving data into and out of core (rather
than performing useful computation) and are therefore said to
thrash. Someone who keeps changing his mind (esp. about what to
work on next) is said to be thrashing. A person frantically trying
to execute too many tasks at once (and not spending enough time on
any single task) may also be described as thrashing. Compare
{multitask}.

:thread: n. [USENET, GEnie, CompuServe] Common abbreviation of
`topic thread', a more or less continuous chain of postings on a
single topic. To `follow a thread' is to read a series of USENET
postings sharing a common subject or (more correctly) which are
connected by Reference headers. The better newsreaders present
news in thread order.

:three-finger salute: n. Syn. {Vulcan nerve pinch}.

:thud: n. 1. Yet another {metasyntactic variable} (see {foo}).
It is reported that at CMU from the mid-1970s the canonical series of
these was `foo', `bar', `thud', `blat'. 2. Rare term
for the hash character, `#' (ASCII 0100011). See {ASCII} for
other synonyms.

:thumb: n. The slider on a window-system scrollbar. So called
because moving it allows you to browse through the contents of a
text window in a way analogous to thumbing through a book.

:thunk: /thuhnk/ n. 1. "A piece of coding which provides an
address", according to P. Z. Ingerman, who invented thunks
in 1961 as a way of binding actual parameters to their formal
definitions in Algol-60 procedure calls. If a procedure is called
with an expression in the place of a formal parameter, the compiler
generates a {thunk} to compute the expression and leave the
address of the result in some standard location. 2. Later
generalized into: an expression, frozen together with its
environment, for later evaluation if and when needed (similar to
what in techspeak is called a `closure'). The process of
unfreezing these thunks is called `forcing'. 3. A
{stubroutine}, in an overlay programming environment, that loads
and jumps to the correct overlay. Compare {trampoline}.
4. People and activities scheduled in a thunklike manner. "It
occurred to me the other day that I am rather accurately modeled by
a thunk --- I frequently need to be forced to completion." ---
paraphrased from a {plan file}.

Historical note: There are a couple of onomatopoeic myths
circulating about the origin of this term. The most common is that
it is the sound made by data hitting the stack; another holds that
the sound is that of the data hitting an accumulator. Yet another
holds that it is the sound of the expression being unfrozen at
argument-evaluation time. In fact, according to the inventors, it
was coined after they realized (in the wee hours after hours of
discussion) that the type of an argument in Algol-60 could be
figured out in advance with a little compile-time thought,
simplifying the evaluation machinery. In other words, it had
`already been thought of'; thus it was christened a `thunk',
which is "the past tense of `think' at two in the morning".

:tick: n. 1. A {jiffy} (sense 1). 2. In simulations, the
discrete unit of time that passes between iterations of the
simulation mechanism. In AI applications, this amount of time is
often left unspecified, since the only constraint of interest is
the ordering of events. This sort of AI simulation is often
pejoratively referred to as `tick-tick-tick' simulation,
especially when the issue of simultaneity of events with long,
independent chains of causes is {handwave}d. 3. In the FORTH
language, a single quote character.

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

:tickle a bug: vt. To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest
through some known series of inputs or operations. "You can
tickle the bug in the Paradise VGA card's highlight handling by
trying to set bright yellow reverse video."

:tiger team: [U.S. military jargon] n. 1. Originally, a team whose
purpose is to penetrate security, and thus test security measures.
These people are paid professionals who do hacker-type tricks,
e.g., leave cardboard signs saying "bomb" in critical defense
installations, hand-lettered notes saying "Your codebooks have
been stolen" (they usually haven't been) inside safes, etc. After
a successful penetration, some high-ranking security type shows up
the next morning for a `security review' and finds the sign,
note, etc., and all hell breaks loose. Serious successes of tiger
teams sometimes lead to early retirement for base commanders and
security officers (see the {patch} entry for an example).
2. Recently, and more generally, any official inspection team or
special {firefighting} group called in to look at a problem.

A subset of tiger teams are professional {cracker}s, testing the
security of military computer installations by attempting remote
attacks via networks or supposedly `secure' comm channels. Some of
their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the
greatest hacks of all times. The term has been adopted in
commercial computer-security circles in this more specific sense.

:time sink: [poss. by analogy with `heat sink' or `current sink'] n.
A project that consumes unbounded amounts of time.

:time T: /ti:m T/ n. 1. An unspecified but usually well-understood
time, often used in conjunction with a later time T+1.
"We'll meet on campus at time T or at Louie's at
time T+1" means, in the context of going out for dinner:
"We can meet on campus and go to Louie's, or we can meet at Louie's
itself a bit later." (Louie's was a Chinese restaurant in Palo Alto
that was a favorite with hackers.) Had the number 30 been used instead
of the number 1, it would have implied that the travel time from
campus to Louie's is 30 minutes; whatever time T is (and
that hasn't been decided on yet), you can meet half an hour later at
Louie's than you could on campus and end up eating at the same time.
See also {since time T equals minus infinity}.

:times-or-divided-by: [by analogy with `plus-or-minus'] quant.
Term occasionally used when describing the uncertainty associated
with a scheduling estimate, for either humorous or brutally honest
effect. For a software project, the scheduling uncertainty factor
is usually at least 2.

:tinycrud: /ti:'nee-kruhd/ n. 1. A pejorative used by habitues of older
game-oriented {MUD} versions for TinyMUDs and other
user-extensible {MUD} variants; esp. common among users of the
rather violent and competitive AberMUD and MIST systems. These
people justify the slur on the basis of how (allegedly)
inconsistent and lacking in genuine atmosphere the scenarios
generated in user extensible MUDs can be. Other common knocks on
them are that they feature little overall plot, bad game topology,
little competitive interaction, etc. --- not to mention the alleged
horrors of the TinyMUD code itself. This dispute is one of the MUD
world's hardiest perennial {holy wars}. 2. TinyMud-oriented
chat on the USENET group rec.games.mud and elsewhere,
especially {newbie} questions and flamage.

:tip of the ice-cube: [IBM] n. The visible part of something small and
insignificant. Used as an ironic comment in situations where `tip
of the iceberg' might be appropriate if the subject were at all
important.

:tired iron: [IBM] n. Hardware that is perfectly functional but
far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new
products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that
the old stuff is starting to look a bit like a {dinosaur}.

:tits on a keyboard: n. Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep
touch-typists registered (usually on the `5' of a numeric
keypad, and on the `F' and `J' of a QWERTY keyboard; but
the Mac, perverse as usual, has them on the `D' and `K'
keys).

:TLA: /T-L-A/ [Three-Letter Acronym] n. 1. Self-describing
abbreviation for a species with which computing terminology is
infested. 2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP,
SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like this
looser usage argue that not all TLAs have three letters, just as
not all four-letter words have four letters. One also hears of
`ETLA' (Extended Three-Letter Acronym, pronounced /ee tee el
ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms. The term
`SFLA' (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym) has also been reported. See
also {YABA}.

The self-effacing phrase "TDM TLA" (Too Damn Many...) is
often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a
random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin
"What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in
the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only
17,000 three-letter acronyms." (To be exact, there are 26^3
= 17,576.)

:TMRC: /tmerk'/ n. The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of
the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 `Dictionary of
the TMRC Language' compiled by Peter Samson included several terms
which became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. {foo}
and {frob}).