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 Lisp 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 absently respond “T”, meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be brought a cup of tea instead. Fortunately, 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. (There is an intended allusion to NIL, “New Implementation of Lisp”, another dialect of Lisp developed for the VAX)
If you aren’t sick of it already, see tail recursion.
A feature supported by Unix 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.
| AFAIAC | as far as I am concerned |
| AFAIK | as far as I know |
| 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 &ellipsis;” (linker) or “What’s up?” (linkee)) |
| FWIW | for what it’s worth |
| 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) |
| IIRC | if I recall correctly |
| JAM | just a minute (equivalent to SEC....) |
| MIN | same as JAM |
| NIL | no (see NIL) |
| NP | no problem |
| 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 |
| OTOH | on the other hand |
| R U THERE? | are you there? |
| SEC | wait a second (sometimes written SEC...) |
| SYN | Are you busy? (expects ACK, SYN|ACK, or RST in return; this is modeled on the TCP/IP handshake sequence) |
| T | yes (see the main entry for T) |
| TNX | thanks |
| TNX 1.0E6 | thanks a million (humorous) |
| TNXE6 | another form of “thanks a million” |
| TTBOMK | to the best of my knowledge |
| 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. |
| YHTBT | You Had To Be There. Used of a situation which loses significant meaning in the telling, usually because it’s difficult to convey tone and timing. |
| <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'. |
| <g> | grin |
| <gd&r> | grinning, ducking, and running |
| BBL | be back later |
| BRB | be right back |
| HHOJ | ha ha only joking |
| HHOK | ha ha only kidding |
| HHOS | 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:
| CU l8er | see you later (mutant of CU l8tr) |
| FOAD | fuck off and die (use of this is generally OTT) |
| OTT | over the top (excessive, uncalled for) |
| ppl | abbrev for “people” |
| THX | thanks (mutant of TNX; clearly this comes in batches of 1138 (the Lucasian K)). |
| UOK? | are you OK? |
Some B1FFisms (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.
British hackerism for software that enables real-time chat or talk mode.
[Usenet, particularly rec.arts.sf.written.robert-jordan] Abbrev. of “tangent”, as in “off on a tangent”, and synonym for OT. A number of hacker-humor synonyms are used for TAN in some newsgroups. Instances such as BEIGE, OFF-WHITE, BROWNISH-GRAY, and LIGHT BROWN have been observed. It is generally understood on newsgroups with this convention that any color descriptor is a TAN synonym if (a) used as the first word(s) of the topic of a Usenet post, (b) written in ALL CAPS, and (c) followed immediately by a colon. Usage: “OFF-WHITE: 2000 Presidential candidates” on an SF newsgroup.
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.
[acronym, from Robert Heinlein’s classic SF novel The Moon is a Harsh Mistress.] “There Ain’t No Such Thing As A Free Lunch”, often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of software, or at the signal-to-noise ratio of unmoderated Usenet newsgroups. “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 for discussion).
Outside hacker circles the variant TINSTAAFL (“There is No Such Thing...”) is apparently more common, and can be traced back to 1952 in the writings of ethicist Alvin Hansen. TANSTAAFL may well have arisen from it by mutation.
A junior system administrator, one who might plausibly be assigned to do physical swapping of tapes and subsequent storage. When a backup needs to be restored, one might holler “Tape monkey!” (Compare one-banana problem) Also used to dismiss jobs not worthy of a highly trained sysadmin’s ineffable talents: “Cable up her PC? You must be joking – I’m no tape monkey.”
[from Unix tar(1)] 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” partly for euphony and (if only for contrived effect) 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. Compare the more common tarball. Earlier, the phrase referred to a punishment in which the victims had tar being poured upon them and then, whilst the tar was still sticky, having a pillow full of feathers – or other material – thrown at them. See http://www.nwta.com/Spy/spring99/tar.html.
[very common; prob. based on the “tar baby” in the Uncle Remus folk tales] An archive, created with the Unix tar(1) utility, containing myriad related files. “Here, I’ll just ftp you a tarball of the whole project.” Tarballs have been the standard way to ship around source-code distributions since the mid-1980s; in retrospect it seems odd that this term did not enter common usage until the late 1990s.
[deliberate mangling of “tragedy”] An incident in which someone who clearly deserves to be selected out of the gene pool on grounds of extreme stupidity meets with a messy end. Coined on the Darwin list, which is dedicated to chronicling such incidents; but almost all hackers would instantly recognize the intention of the term and laugh.
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 “tasty” 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 has the additional meaning of “kind” or “variety” not shared by “taste”. The marked sense of flavor is more popular than “taste”, though both are widely used. See also elegant.
2. Alt. sp. of tayste.
n. Two bits; also as taste. Syn. crumb, nybble.
[IBM] 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to neglect or shotgun debugging. Compare heisenbug. Not to be confused with:
2. Trusted Computing Base, an “official” jargon term from the Orange Book.
1. [Transmission Control Protocol/Internet Protocol] The wide-area-networking protocol that makes the Internet work, and the only one most hackers can speak the name of without laughing or retching. Unlike such allegedly “standard” competitors such as X.25, DECnet, and the ISO 7-layer stack, TCP/IP evolved primarily by actually being used, rather than being handed down from on high by a vendor or a heavily-politicized standards committee. Consequently, it (a) works, (b) actually promotes cheap cross-platform connectivity, and (c) annoys the hell out of corporate and governmental empire-builders everywhere. Hackers value all three of these properties. See creationism.
2. [Amateur Packet Radio] Formerly expanded as “The Crap Phil Is Pushing”. The reference is to Phil Karn, KA9Q, and the context was an ongoing technical/political war between the majority of sites still running AX.25 and the TCP/IP relays. TCP/IP won.
1. [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 may 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 game used to be mentally working out what the TECO commands corresponding to human names did.
2. vt. Originally, to edit using the TECO editor in one of its infinite variations (see below).
3. vt.,obs. To edit even when TECO is not the editor being used! This usage is rare and now primarily historical.
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.
[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”.
[German for “tar pit”] A trap set to punish spammers who use an address harvester; a mail server deliberately set up to be really, really slow. To activate it, scatter addresses that look like users on the teergrube’s host in places where the address harvester will be trolling (one popular way is to embed the fake address in a Usenet sig block next to a human-readable warning not to send mail to it). The address harvester will dutifully collect the address. When the spammer tries to mailbomb it, his mailer will get stuck.
Sex in a computer simulated virtual reality, esp. computer-mediated sexual interaction between the VR presences of two humans. This practice is not yet possible except in the rather limited form of erotic conversation on MUDs and the like. The term, however, is widely recognized in the VR community as a ha ha only serious projection of things to come. “When we can sustain a multi-sensory surround good enough for teledildonics, then we’ll know we’re getting somewhere.” See also hot chat.
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.
Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got that way because it was highly tuned, 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.
A covert pseudo, sense 1. An artificial identity created in cyberspace for nefarious and deceptive purposes. The implication is that a single person may have multiple tentacles. This term was originally floated in some paranoid ravings on the cypherpunks list (see cypherpunk), and adopted in a spirit of irony by other, saner members. It has since shown up, used seriously, in the documentation for some remailer software, and is now (1994) widely recognized on the net. Compare astroturfing, sock puppet.
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.
[SI] See quantifiers.
[FLOP = Floating Point Operation] A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder. Compare Knights of the Lambda Calculus.
[Caltech, ca. 1979] 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.” Compare dread high-bit disease, frogging; see also HP-SUX, Slowlaris.
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.
1. Syn. raster burn.
2. The “burn-in” condition your CRT tends to get if you don’t have a screen saver.
[UK] 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. Appropriately, this term was used in the works of William S. Burroughs to describe a heroin addict with an unlimited supply.
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.
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, 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. See also CrApTeX.
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 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 is not expected to appear until 2007. 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 toolsmithing 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 offers a monetary award to anyone who found and reported bugs dating from before the 1989 code freeze; 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 system it has been compiled with.
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 EBCDIC representation (see flat-ASCII). “Those are text files; you can review them using the editor.”
These two contradictory senses confuse hackers, too.
[Usenet] Conventional net.politeness ending a posted request for information or assistance. Sometimes written “advTHANKSance” or “aTdHvAaNnKcSe” or abbreviated “TIA”. See netiquette.
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.
Computer-science journals and other publications, vaguely gestured at to answer a question that the speaker believes is trivial. Thus, one might answer an annoying question by saying “It’s in the literature.” Oppose Knuth, which has no connotation of triviality.
1. Historically, the union of all the major noncommercial, academic, and hacker-oriented networks, such as Internet, the pre-1990 ARPANET, NSFnet, BITNET, and the virtual UUCP and Usenet “networks”, plus the corporate in-house networks and commercial timesharing services (such as CompuServe, GEnie and AOL) that gateway to them. A site is generally considered “on the network” if it can be reached through some combination of Internet-style (@-sign) and UUCP (bang-path) addresses. See bang path, network address.
2. Following the mass-culture discovery of the Internet in 1994 and subsequent proliferation of cheap TCP/IP connections, “the network” is increasingly synonymous with the Internet itself (as it was before the second wave of wide-area computer networking began around 1980).
3. A fictional conspiracy of libertarian hacker-subversives and anti-authoritarian monkeywrenchers described in Robert Anton Wilson’s novel Schrödinger’s Cat, to which many hackers have subsequently decided they belong (this is an example of ha ha only serious).
In sense 1, “the network” is often abbreviated to “the net”. “Are you on the net?” is a frequent question when hackers first meet face to face, and “See you on the net!” is a frequent goodbye.
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.
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.
The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently being used to inform a behavior. This usage is a generalization and (deliberate) 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...”
[by analogy with “typo”] 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 mouso.
Less clipped variant of can’t happen.
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 hacker humor.
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.
[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 can present news in thread order automatically. Not to be confused with the techspeak sense of “thread”, e.g. a lightweight process.
Interestingly, this is far from a neologism. The OED says: “That which connects the successive points in anything, esp. a narrative, train of thought, or the like; the sequence of events or ideas continuing throughout the whole course of anything;” Citations are given going back to 1642!
Syn. Vulcan nerve pinch.
1. An inexpensive Internet account purchased on a legitimate ISP for the sole purpose of spewing spam.
2. An inexpensive Internet account obtained for the sole purpose of doing something which requires a valid email address but being able to ignore spam since the user will not look at the account again.
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.
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.
Scheduler thrashing. This can happen under Unix when you have a number of processes that are waiting on a single event. When that event (a connection to the web server, say) happens, every process which could possibly handle the event is awakened. In the end, only one of those processes will actually be able to do the work, but, in the meantime, all the others wake up and contend for CPU time before being put back to sleep. Thus the system thrashes briefly while a herd of processes thunders through. If this starts to happen many times per second, the performance impact can be significant.
1. [obs.]“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 which computes the expression and leaves 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. Microsoft and IBM have both defined, in their Intel-based systems, a “16-bit environment” (with bletcherous segment registers and 64K address limits) and a “32-bit environment” (with flat addressing and semi-real memory management). The two environments can both be running on the same computer and OS (thanks to what is called, in the Microsoft world, WOW which stands for Windows On Windows). MS and IBM have both decided that the process of getting from 16- to 32-bit and vice versa is called a “thunk”; for Windows 95, there is even a tool THUNK.EXE called a “thunk compiler”.
5. A person or activity 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 suggests 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”.
[Acorn Computers] Features in software or hardware that customers insist on but never use (calculators in desktop TSRs and that sort of thing). The American equivalent would be “checklist features”, but this jargon sense of the phrase has not been reported.
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 handwaved.
3. In the FORTH language, a single quote character.
To cause a normally hidden bug to manifest itself 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.”
[U.S. military jargon]
1. Originally, a team (of sneakers) 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 crackers, 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.
A subspecies of logic bomb that is triggered by reaching some preset time, either once or periodically. There are numerous legends about time bombs set up by programmers in their employers' machines, to go off if the programmer is fired or laid off and is not present to perform the appropriate suppressing action periodically.
Interestingly, the only such incident for which we have been pointed to documentary evidence took place in the Soviet Union in 1986! A disgruntled programmer at the Volga Automobile Plant (where the Fiat clones called Ladas were manufactured) planted a time bomb which, a week after he’d left on vacation, stopped the entire main assembly line for a day. The case attracted lots of attention in the Soviet Union because it was the first cracking case to make it to court there. The perpetrator got a suspended sentence of 3 years in jail and was barred from future work as a programmer.
[poss.: by analogy with “heat sink” or “current sink”] A project that consumes unbounded amounts of time.
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.
[by analogy with “plus-or-minus”] 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.
[now primarily historical] Timesharing is the technique of scheduling a computer’s time so that they are shared across multiple tasks and multiple users, with each user having the illusion that his or her computation is going on continuously. John McCarthy, the inventor of LISP, first imagined this technique in the late 1950s. The first timesharing operating systems, BBN’s "Little Hospital" and CTSS, were deplayed in 1962-63. The early hacker culture of the 1960s and 1970s grew up around the first generation of relatively cheap timesharing computers, notably the VAX lines. But these were only cheap in a relative sense; though quite a bit less powerful than today’s personal computers, they had to be shared by dozens or even hundreds of people each. The early hacker comunities nucleated around places where it was relatively easy to get access to a timesharing account.
Nowadays, communications bandwidth is usually the most important constraint on what you can do with your computer. Not so back then; timesharing machines were often loaded to capacity, and it was not uncommon for everyone’s work to grind to a halt while the machine scheduler thrashed, trying to figure out what to do next. Early hacker slang was replete with terms like “cycle crunch” and “cycle drought” for describing the consequences of too few instructions-per-second spread among too many users. As GLS has noted, this sort of problem influenced the tendency of many hackers to work odd schedules.
One reason this is worth noting here is to make the point that the earliest hacker communities were physical, not distributed via networks; they consisted of hackers who shared a machine and therefore had to deal with many of the same problems with respect to it. A system crash could idle dozens of eager programmers, all sitting in the same terminal room and with little to do but talk with each other until normal operation resumed.
Timesharing moved from being the luxury of a few large universities runing semi-experimental operating systems to being more generally available about 1975-76. Hackers in search of more cycles and more control over their programming environment began to migrate off timesharing machines and onto what are now called “workstations” around 1983. It took another ten years, the development of powerful 32-bit personal micros, the Great Internet Explosion before the migration was complete. It is no coincidence that the last stages of this migration coincided with the development of the first open-source operating systems.
[Usenet] Abbreviation: “There Is No Cabal”. See NANA, but note that this abbreviation did not enter use until long after the dispersal of the backbone cabal.
[Great Britain] A monitoring program used to scan incoming network calls and generate alerts when calls are received from particular sites, or when logins are attempted using certain IDs. Named after “Project Tinkerbell”, an experimental phone-tapping program developed by British Telecom in the early 1980s.
Abbreviation: “There Is No Lumber Cartel”. See Lumber Cartel. TINLC is a takeoff on TINC.
[IBM] 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.
[IBM] 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.
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 older Macs (like pre-PC electric typewriters) had them on the D and K keys (this changed in 1999).
[Three-Letter Acronym]
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 terms “SFLA” (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym), “LFLA” (Longer Four Letter Acronym), and “VLFLA” (Very Long Five Letter Acronym) have 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.) There is probably some karmic justice in the fact that Paul Boutin subsequently became a journalist.
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 that became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. mung, and frob).
By 1962, TMRC’s legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity and has grown in the years since. All the features described here were still present when the old layout was decommissioned in 1998 just before the demolition of MIT Building 20, and will almost certainly be retained when the old layout is rebuilt (expected in 2003). The control system alone featured about 1200 relays. There were scram switches located at numerous places around the room that could be thwacked if something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going full-bore at an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a digital clock on the dispatch board, which was itself something of a wonder in those bygone days before cheap LEDs and seven-segment displays. When someone hit a scram switch the clock stopped and the display was replaced with the word “FOO”; at TMRC the scram switches are therefore called “foo switches”.
Steven Levy, in his book Hackers, gives a stimulating account of those early years. TMRC’s Signals and Power Committee included many of the early PDP-1 hackers and the people who later became the core of the MIT AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that connection is still very much alive, and this lexicon accordingly includes a number of entries from a recent revision of the TMRC dictionary.
TMRC has a web page at http://tmrc-www.mit.edu/. The TMRC Dictionary is available there, at http://tmrc-www.mit.edu/dictionary.html.
[MIT] A denizen of TMRC.
There’s More Than One Way To Do It. This abbreviation of the official motto of Perl is frequently used on newsgroups and mailing lists related to that language.
1. [techspeak] When one is doing certain numerical computations, an approximate solution may be computed by any of several heuristic methods, then refined to a final value. By using the starting point of a first approximation of the answer, one can write an algorithm that converges more quickly to the correct result.
2. In jargon, a preface to any comment that indicates that the comment is only approximately true. The remark “To a first approximation, I feel good” might indicate that deeper questioning would reveal that not all is perfect (e.g., a nagging cough still remains after an illness).
[from “to a first approximation”] A really sloppy approximation; a wild guess. Compare social science number.
1. Notionally, to change a MUD player into a toad.
2. To permanently and totally exile a player from the MUD. A very serious action, which can only be done by a MUD wizard; often involves a lot of debate among the other characters first. See also frog, FOD.
1. n. Any completely inoperable system or component, esp. one that has just crashed and burned: “Uh, oh – I think the serial board is toast.” (This sense went mainstream around 1993.)
2. vt. To cause a system to crash accidentally, especially in a manner that requires manual rebooting. “Rick just toasted the firewall machine again.” Compare fried.
1. The archetypal really stupid application for an embedded microprocessor controller; often used in comments that imply that a scheme is inappropriate technology (but see “DWIM for an assembler? That’d be as silly as running Unix on your toaster!” (And then some marketroid came up with the so-called “internet of things” and now you really can run UNIX on your toaster.)
2. A very, very dumb computer. “You could run this program on any dumb toaster.” See bitty box, toy, beige toaster.
3. A Macintosh, esp. a Mac in the original unitary case. Some hold that this is implied by sense 2.
4. A peripheral device. “I bought my box without toasters, but since then I’ve added two boards and a second disk drive.”
5. A specialized computer used as an appliance. See video toaster.
A footprint of especially small size.
Text Over, Fullquote Under; see top-post.
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.
1. This comes from “toggle switches”, such as standard light switches, though the word “toggle” actually refers 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.)
1. n. A program used primarily to create, manipulate, modify, or analyze other programs, such as a compiler or an editor or a cross-referencing program. Oppose operating system; see also toolchain.
2. [Unix] An application program with a simple, “transparent” (typically text-stream) interface designed specifically to be used in programmed combination with other tools (see plumbing).
3. [MIT: general to students there] vi. To work; to study (connotes tedium). The TMRC Dictionary defined this as “to set one’s brain to the grindstone”. See hack.
4. n. [MIT] A student who studies too much and hacks too little. (MIT’s student humor magazine rejoices in the name Tool and Die.)
A collection of tools used to develop for a particular hardware target, or to work with a particular data format (thus “the Crusoe development toolchain”, or the “DocBook toolchain”). Often used in the context of building software on one system which will be installed or run on some other device; in that case the chain of tools usually consists of such items as a particular version of a compiler, libraries, special headers, etc. May also be used of text-formatting, page layout, or multimedia tools which render from some markup to a variety of production formats. Differs from “toolkit” in that the former implies a collection of semi-independent tools with complementary functions, while “toolchain” implies that each of the parts is a serial stage in a rather tightly bound pipeline. Seems to have become current in early 1999 and 2000; now common.
The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes in making the tools with which other programmers create applications. Many hackers consider this more fun than applications per se; to understand why, see uninteresting. Jon Bentley, in the “Bumper-Sticker Computer Science” chapter of his book More Programming Pearls, quotes Dick Sites from DEC as saying “I’d rather write programs to write programs than write programs”.
The Bourne-Again Super-user. An alternate account with UID of 0, created on Unix machines where the root user has an inconvenient choice of shell. Compare avatar.
[common] To put the newly-added portion of an email or Usenet response before the quoted part, as opposed to the more logical sequence of quoted portion first with original following. The problem with this practice is neatly summed up by the following FAQ entry:
A: No. Q: Should I include quotations after my reply? |
This term is generally used pejoratively with the implication that the offending person is a newbie, a Microsoft addict (Microsoft mail tools produce a similar format by default), or simply a common-and-garden-variety idiot.
One major problem with top-posting is that people who do it all too frequently quote the entire parent message rather than trimming it down to those portions relevent to their reply – this makes threads bulky and unnecessarily difficult to read and arouses the righteous ire of experienced Internet residents (this style is called “TOFU” for “text over, fullquote under”, or sometimes “jeopardy-style quoting”). Another problem is that top-posters often word their replies on the assumption that you just read the previous message, even though their perversity has put it further down the page than you have yet read. Oppose bottom-post.
Term used on GEnie, Usenet and other electronic fora to describe the tendency of a thread to drift away from the original subject of discussion (and thus, from the Subject header of the originating message), or the results of that tendency. The header in each post can be changed to keep current with the posts, but usually isn’t due to forgetfulness or laziness. A single post may often result in several posts each responding to a different point in the original. Some subthreads will actually be in response to some off-the-cuff side comment, possibly degenerating into a flame war, or just as often evolving into a separate discussion. Hence, discussions aren’t really so much threads as they are trees. Except that they don’t really have leaves, or multiple branching roots; usually some lines of discussion will just sort of die off after everyone gets tired of them. This could take anywhere from hours to weeks, or even longer.
The term “topic drift” is often used in gentle reminders that the discussion has strayed off any useful track. “I think we started with a question about Niven’s last book, but we’ve ended up discussing the sexual habits of the common marmoset. Now that’s topic drift!”
Syn. forum.
DEC’s proprietary OS for the fabled PDP-10 machines, long a favorite of hackers but now long extinct. A fountain of hacker folklore; see Appendix A. See also TOPS-20, TWENEX, VMS, operating system. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from “bottoms-ten”) as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything.
See TWENEX.
[from the acronym for “Terms Of Service” playing on the verb “toss”]
1. The act of terminating an Internet access account because the owner breached the terms of service (e.g. by spamming).
2. To successfully complain to the ISP for that reason so that they then close the account.
Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer’s gestalt of what’s going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The “bytes free” information at the bottom of an MS-DOS or Windows dir display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a Unix ps(1) display.
1. [ITS] A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for comm mode, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below luser. ITS hackers often used to spell this turist, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with luser (this usage may also have expressed the ITS culture’s penchant for six-letterisms, and/or been some sort of tribute to Alan Turing). Compare twink, read-only user.
2. [IRC] An IRC user who goes from channel to channel without saying anything; see channel hopping.
Having the quality of a tourist. Often used as a pejorative, as in “losing touristic scum”. Often spelled “turistic” or “turistik”, so that phrase might be more properly rendered “lusing turistic scum”.
A language useful for instructional purposes or as a proof-of-concept for some aspect of computer-science theory, but inadequate for general-purpose programming. Bad Things can result when a toy language is promoted as a general purpose solution for programming (see bondage-and-discipline language); the classic example is Pascal. Several moderately well-known formalisms for conceptual tasks such as programming Turing machines also qualify as toy languages in a less negative sense. See also MFTL.
[AI] A deliberately oversimplified case of a challenging problem used to investigate, prototype, or test algorithms for a real problem. Sometimes used pejoratively. See also gedanken, toy program.
1. One that can be readily comprehended; hence, a trivial program (compare noddy).
2. One for which the effort of initial coding dominates the costs through its life cycle. See also noddy.
A computer system; always used with qualifiers.
1. “nice toy”: One that supports the speaker’s hacking style adequately.
2. “just a toy”: A machine that yields insufficient computrons for the speaker’s preferred uses. This is not condemnatory, as is bitty box; toys can at least be fun. It is also strongly conditioned by one’s expectations; Cray XMP users sometimes consider the Cray-1 a “toy”, and certainly all RISC boxes and mainframes are toys by their standards. See also Get a real computer!.
An incredibly hairy technique, found in some HLL and program-overlay implementations (e.g., on the Macintosh), that involves on-the-fly generation of small executable (and, likely as not, self-modifying) code objects to do indirection between code sections. Under BSD and possibly in other Unixes, trampoline code is used to transfer control from the kernel back to user mode when a signal (which has had a handler installed) is sent to a process. These pieces of live data are called “trampolines”. Trampolines are notoriously difficult to understand in action; in fact, it is said by those who use this term that the trampoline that doesn’t bend your brain is not the true trampoline. See also snap.
(alt.: "trapdoor")
1. Syn. back door – a Bad Thing.
2. [techspeak] A “trap-door function” is one which is easy to compute but very difficult to compute the inverse of. Such functions are Good Things with important applications in cryptography, specifically in the construction of public-key cryptosystems.
1. n. A program interrupt, usually an interrupt caused by some exceptional situation in the user program. In most cases, the OS performs some action, then returns control to the program.
2. vi. To cause a trap. “These instructions trap to the monitor.” Also used transitively to indicate the cause of the trap. “The monitor traps all input/output instructions.”
This term is associated with assembler programming (“interrupt” or “exception” is more common among HLL programmers) and appears to be fading into history among programmers as the role of assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to computer architects and systems hackers (see system, sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts).
To destroy the contents of (said of a data structure). The most common of the family of near-synonyms including mangle, roach.
To sift through large volumes of data (e.g., Usenet postings, FTP archives, or the Jargon File) looking for something of interest.
[Sun]
1. A printer.
2. A person who wastes paper. This epithet should be interpreted in a broad sense; “wasting paper” includes the production of content-free documents. Thus, most suits are tree-killers.
It is likely that both senses derive their flavor from the epithet “tree-killer” applied by Treebeard the Ent to the Orcs in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. See also elder days, and especially dead-tree version.
Printouts, books, and other information media made from pulped dead trees. Compare tree-killer, see documentation.
[by analogy with "bit"] One base-3 digit; the amount of information conveyed by a selection among one of three equally likely outcomes (see also bit). Trits arise, for example, in the context of a flag that should actually be able to assume three values – such as yes, no, or unknown. Trits are sometimes jokingly called “3-state bits”. A trit may be semi-seriously referred to as “a bit and a half”, although it is linearly equivalent to 1.5849625 bits (that is, log_{2$(3)} bits).
1. Too simple to bother detailing.
2. Not worth the speaker’s time.
3. Complex, but solvable by methods so well known that anyone not utterly cretinous would have thought of them already.
4. Any problem one has already solved (some claim that hackish “trivial” usually evaluates to “I’ve seen it before”). Hackers’ notions of triviality may be quite at variance with those of non-hackers. See nontrivial, uninteresting.
The physicist Richard Feynman, who had the hacker nature to an amazing degree (see his essay “Los Alamos From Below” in Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!), defined “trivial theorem” as “one that has already been proved”.
[Unix] The gray eminence of Unix text processing; a formatting and phototypesetting program, written originally in PDP-11 assembler and then in barely-structured early C by the late Joseph Ossanna, modeled after the earlier ROFF which was in turn modeled after the CTSS program RUNOFF by Jerome Saltzer (that name came from the expression "to run off a copy"). A companion program, nroff, formats output for terminals and line printers.
In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified troff so that it could drive phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His paper describing that work (“A Typesetter-independent troff,” AT&T CSTR #97) explains troff’s durability. After discussing the program’s “obvious deficiencies – a rebarbative input syntax, mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a voracious appetite for computer resources” and noting the ugliness and extreme hairiness of the code and internals, Kernighan concludes:
None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating Ossanna’s accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a remarkably robust tool, taking unbelievable abuse from a variety of preprocessors and being forced into uses that were never conceived of in the original design, all with considerable grace under fire.
The success of TeX and desktop publishing systems have reduced troff's relative importance, but this tribute perfectly captures the strengths that secured troff a place in hacker folklore; indeed, it could be taken more generally as an indication of those qualities of good programs that, in the long run, hackers most admire.
[Rice University] Programming with the lights turned off, sunglasses on, and the terminal inverted (black on white) because you’ve been up for so many days straight that your eyes hurt (see raster burn). Loud music blaring from a stereo stacked in the corner is optional but recommended. See larval stage, hack mode.
[Commodore]
1. A hacker who never leaves his cubicle. The term “gnoll” (from Dungeons & Dragons) is also reported.
2. A curmudgeon attached to an obsolescent computing environment. The combination “ITS troglodyte” was flung around some during the Usenet and email wringle-wrangle attending the 2.x.x revision of the Jargon File; at least one of the people it was intended to describe adopted it with pride.
[coined by MIT-hacker-turned-NSA-spook Dan Edwards] A malicious security-breaking program that is disguised as something benign, such as a directory lister, archiver, game, or (in one notorious 1990 case on the Mac) a program to find and destroy viruses! See virus, phage, mockingbird.
Common Usenet jargon for a notional instrument used to measure the provocation level of a Usenet troll. “Come on, everyone! If the above doesn’t set off the Troll-O-Meter, we’re going to have to get him to run around with a big blinking sign saying ‘I am a troll, I’m only in it for the controversy and flames’, and shooting random gobs of Jell-O(tm) at us before the point is proven.” Mentions of the Troll-O-Meter are often accompanied by an ASCII picture of an arrow pointing at a numeric scale. Compare bogometer, Indent-o-Meter.
1. v., n. [From the Usenet group alt.folklore.urban] To utter a posting on Usenet designed to attract predictable responses or flames; or, the post itself. Derives from the phrase “trolling for newbies” which in turn comes from mainstream “trolling”, a style of fishing in which one trails bait through a likely spot hoping for a bite. The well-constructed troll is a post that induces lots of newbies and flamers to make themselves look even more clueless than they already do, while subtly conveying to the more savvy and experienced that it is in fact a deliberate troll. If you don’t fall for the joke, you get to be in on it. See also YHBT.
2. n. An individual who chronically trolls in sense 1; regularly posts specious arguments, flames or personal attacks to a newsgroup, discussion list, or in email for no other purpose than to annoy someone or disrupt a discussion. Trolls are recognizable by the fact that they have no real interest in learning about the topic at hand – they simply want to utter flame bait. Like the ugly creatures they are named after, they exhibit no redeeming characteristics, and as such, they are recognized as a lower form of life on the net, as in, “Oh, ignore him, he’s just a troll.” Compare kook.
3. n. [Berkeley] Computer lab monitor. A popular campus job for CS students. Duties include helping newbies and ensuring that lab policies are followed. Probably so-called because it involves lurking in dark cavelike corners.
Some people claim that the troll (sense 1) is properly a narrower category than flame bait, that a troll is categorized by containing some assertion that is wrong but not overtly controversial. See also Troll-O-Meter.
The use of “troll” in any of these senses is a live metaphor that readily produces elaborations and combining forms. For example, one not infrequently sees the warning “Do not feed the troll” as part of a followup to troll postings.
[NRL, CMU; prob. fr. the movie Tron] To become inaccessible except via email or talk(1), especially when one is normally available via telephone or in person. Frequently used in the past tense, as in: “Ran seems to have tronned on us this week” or “Gee, Ran, glad you were able to un-tron yourself”. One may also speak of “tron mode”; compare spod.
Note that many dialects of BASIC have a TRON/TROFF command pair that enables/disables line number tracing; this has no obvious relationship to the slang usage.
[British BBS scene] Synonym for leech, sense 1. The implied metaphor is that of a pig at a trough.
[analogy with “trufan” from SF fandom] One who exemplifies the primary values of hacker culture, esp. competence and helpfulness to other hackers. A high compliment. “He spent 6 hours helping me bring up UUCP and netnews on my FOOBAR 4000 last week – manifestly the act of a true-hacker.” Compare demigod, oppose munchkin.
The latter pronunciation was primarily ITS, but some Unix people say it this way as well; this pronunciation is not considered to have sexual undertones.
1. A terminal of the teletype variety, characterized by a noisy mechanical printer, a very limited character set, and poor print quality. Usage: antiquated (like the TTYs themselves). See also bit-paired keyboard.
2. [especially Unix] Any terminal at all; sometimes used to refer to the particular terminal controlling a given job.
3. [Unix] Any serial port, whether or not the device connected to it is a terminal; so called because under Unix such devices have names of the form tty*. Ambiguity between senses 2 and 3 is common but seldom bothersome.
Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of one’s environment one uses most heavily. “I find I’m spending too much of my tube time reading mail since I started this revision.”
1. n. A CRT terminal. Never used in the mainstream sense of TV; real hackers don’t watch TV, except for Looney Toons, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Trek Classic, the Simpsons, Babylon 5, and the occasional cheesy old swashbuckler movie.
2. [IBM] To send a copy of something to someone else’s terminal. “Tube me that note?”
1. [Originally from the Xanadu hypertext project] A tumbler is a magic cookie generated as part of a record or message to give it a unique identity. Usually a tumbler includes an encoded form of its creation date, but if a software system has more than one concurrent process that could generate tumblers it must also include an encoding of the process ID. If tumblers will be shared across multiple network hosts, they must also include the host name or network address. Tumblers often include a hash of the rest of the message or record content so that it is possible to verify the correctness of the data the tumbler is attached to.
2. Variant text added to spam instances (often in the Subject line) to make them unique. This kind of tumbler is used to defeat schemes that check an exact hash of an incoming message against known spam signatures; it also compromises some kinds of statistical spam recognition.
In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of tunefs(8) in the original BSD 4.2 distribution. The joke was removed in later releases once commercial sites started using 4.2, but apparently restored on the 4.4BSD tape and in {Net,Free,Open}BSD. Tunefs relates to the “tuning” of file-system parameters for optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was a “BUGS” section consisting of the line “You can tune a file system, but you can’t tunafish”. Variants of this can be seen in other BSD versions, though it has been excised from some versions by humorless management droids. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment apparently designed to prevent this: “Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until the time_t's wrap around.”
[It has since been pointed out that indeed you can tunafish. Usually at a canning factory... – ESR]
[from automotive or musical usage] To optimize a program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as hooks for tuning, e.g., by changing #define lines in C. One may “tune for time” (fastest execution), “tune for space” (least memory use), or “tune for configuration” (most efficient use of hardware). See hot spot, hand-hacking.
See geek.
A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly designed computers. However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing’s primitive set has ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A “Turing tar-pit” is any computer language or other tool that shares this property. That is, it’s theoretically universal – but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare holy wars over whether language A or B is the “most powerful”.
Var. sp. of tourist, q.v. Also in adjectival form, “turistic”. Poss. influenced by luser and “Turing”.
Tux the Penguin is the official emblem of Linux, This eventuated after a logo contest in 1996, during which Linus Torvalds endorsed the idea of a penguin logo in a couple of famously funny postings. Linus explained that he was once bitten by a killer penguin in Australia and has felt a special affinity for the species ever since. (Linus has since admitted that he was also thinking of Feathers McGraw, the evil-genius penguin jewel thief who appeared in a Wallace & Grommit feature cartoon, The Wrong Trousers.)
Larry Ewing designed the official Tux logo. It has proved a wise choice, amenable to hundreds of recognizable variations used as emblems of Linux-related projects, products, and user groups. In fact, Tux has spawned an entire mythology, of which the Gospel According to Tux and the mock-epic poem Tuxowolf are among the best-known examples.
There is a “real” Tux – a black-footed penguin resident at the Bristol Zoo. Several friends of Linux bought a zoo sponsorship for Linus as a birthday present in 1996.
To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with twiddle. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See frobnicate and fudge factor; also see tune a program; preferred usage in the U.K.
The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC – the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 – preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not WAITS partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman’s TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when someone objected that “krans” meant “funeral wreath” in Swedish (though some Swedish speakers have since said it means simply “wreath”; this part of the story may be apocryphal). Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it TWENEX (a contraction of “twenty TENEX”), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 Unix and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard “TWENEX”, but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation “20x” was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS – but DEC’s decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX’s brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix. There is a TOPS-20 home page.
1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, ~). Also called “squiggle”, “sqiggle” (sic – pronounced /skig´l/), and “twaddle”, but twiddle is the most common term.
2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also shotgun debugging).
3. vt. To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knobs 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; “toggling a bit” has a more specific meaning (see bit twiddling, toggle). 4. Uncommon name for the twirling baton prompt.
[IRC] Notionally, the area of cyberspace where op is said to have a “connection to the twilight zone”.
1. [Berkeley] A clue-repellant user; the next step beyond a clueless one.
2. [UCSC] A read-only user. Also reported on the Usenet group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream “chick”).
3. On MU* systems that specialize in role-playing, refers to behavior of a (usually inexperienced) player that either ignores rules or social convention, or disrupts the natural flow of a scene to show off super powers.
We are informed that in Indian country, the term twink generally refers to blondes into generic “Native American spirituality”. Signs include Indian jewelry with MADE IN THAILAND stamped on it, crystals, Clairol black hair, wearing swimsuits to powwows, Cherokee princess grandmas, a love of Dances with Wolves, and a fear of AIM and the NCAI. The twink nature is everywhere.
[PLATO] The overstrike sequence -/|\-/|\- which produces an animated twirling baton. If you output it with a single backspace between characters, the baton spins in place. If you output the sequence BS SP between characters, the baton spins from left to right. If you output BS SP BS BS between characters, the baton spins from right to left. This is also occasionally called a twiddle prompt.
The twirling baton was a popular component of animated signature files on the pioneering PLATO educational timesharing system. The archie Internet service is perhaps the best-known baton program today; it uses the twirling baton as an idler indicating that the program is working on a query. The twirling baton is also used as a boot progress indicator on several BSD variants of Unix; if it stops, you’re probably going to have a long and trying day.
The number of years it takes to finish one’s thesis. Occurs in stories in the following form: “He started on his thesis; 2 pi years later...”
An amount much larger than N but smaller than infinity. “I have 2-to-the-N things to do before I can go out for lunch” means you probably won’t show up.
[USENET] A deliberate typo for “typo”. Used in satirical reference. “There’s a tyop in your posting”. Compare hing.