Double Bucky_The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0, 24 Jul 1996

Double bucky, you're the one!

You make my keyboard lots of fun.

Double bucky, an additional bit or two:

(Vo-vo-de-o!)

Control and meta, side by side,

Augmented ASCII, nine bits wide!

Double bucky! Half a thousand glyphs, plus a few!

Oh,

I sure wish that I

Had a couple of

Bits more!

Perhaps a

Set of pedals to

Make the number of

Bits four:

Double double bucky!

Double bucky, left and right

OR'd together, outta sight!

Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of

Double bucky, I'm happy I heard of

Double bucky, I'd like a whole word of you!

--- The Great Quux (with apologies to Jeffrey Moss)

[This, by the way, is an excellent example of computer {filk}

--ESR] See also {meta bit}, {cokebottle}, and {quadruple

bucky}.

:double DECkers: /n./ Used to describe married couples in which

both partners work for Digital Equipment Corporation.

:doubled sig: [Usenet] /n./ A {sig block} that has been

included twice in a {Usenet} article or, less commonly, in an

electronic mail message. An article or message with a doubled sig

can be caused by improperly configured software. More often,

however, it reveals the author's lack of experience in electronic

communication. See {B1FF}, {pseudo}.

:down: 1. /adj./ Not operating. "The up escalator is down"

is considered a humorous thing to say (unless of course you were

expecting to use it), and "The elevator is down" always means

"The elevator isn't working" and never refers to what floor the

elevator is on. With respect to computers, this term has passed

into the mainstream; the extension to other kinds of machine is

still confined to techies (e.g. boiler mechanics may speak of a

boiler being down). 2. `go down' /vi./ To stop functioning;

usually said of the {system}. The message from the {console}

that every hacker hates to hear from the operator is "System going

down in 5 minutes". 3. `take down', `bring down' /vt./ To

deactivate purposely, usually for repair work or {PM}. "I'm

taking the system down to work on that bug in the tape drive."

Occasionally one hears the word `down' by itself used as a verb

in this /vt./ sense. See {crash}; oppose {up}.

:download: /vt./ To transfer data or (esp.) code from a

larger `host' system (esp. a {mainframe}) over a digital

comm link to a smaller `client' system, esp. a microcomputer

or specialized peripheral. Oppose {upload}.

However, note that ground-to-space communications has its own usage

rule for this term. Space-to-earth transmission is always `down'

and the reverse `up' regardless of the relative size of the

computers involved. So far the in-space machines have invariably

been smaller; thus the upload/download distinction has been

reversed from its usual sense.

:DP: /D-P/ /n./ 1. Data Processing. Listed here because,

according to hackers, use of the term marks one immediately as a

{suit}. See {DPer}. 2. Common abbrev for {Dissociated

Press}.

:DPB: /d*-pib'/ /vt./ [from the PDP-10 instruction set] To

plop something down in the middle. Usage: silly. "DPB yourself

into that couch there." The connotation would be that the couch

is full except for one slot just big enough for one last person to

sit in. DPB means `DePosit Byte', and was the name of a PDP-10

instruction that inserts some bits into the middle of some other

bits. Hackish usage has been kept alive by the Common LISP

function of the same name.

:DPer: /dee-pee-er/ /n./ Data Processor. Hackers are

absolutely amazed that {suit}s use this term self-referentially.

*Computers* process data, not people! See {DP}.

:dragon: /n./ [MIT] A program similar to a {daemon}, except

that it is not invoked at all, but is instead used by the system to

perform various secondary tasks. A typical example would be an

accounting program, which keeps track of who is logged in,

accumulates load-average statistics, etc. Under ITS, many

terminals displayed a list of people logged in, where they were,

what they were running, etc., along with some random picture (such

as a unicorn, Snoopy, or the Enterprise), which was generated by

the `name dragon'. Usage: rare outside MIT -- under Unix and most

other OSes this would be called a `background demon' or

{daemon}. The best-known Unix example of a dragon is

`cron(1)'. At SAIL, they called this sort of thing a

`phantom'.

:Dragon Book: /n./ The classic text "Compilers:

Principles, Techniques and Tools", by Alfred V. Aho, Ravi Sethi,

and Jeffrey D. Ullman (Addison-Wesley 1986; ISBN 0-201-10088-6),

so called because of the cover design featuring a dragon labeled

`complexity of compiler design' and a knight bearing the lance

`LALR parser generator' among his other trappings. This one is

more specifically known as the `Red Dragon Book' (1986); an earlier

edition, sans Sethi and titled "Principles Of Compiler Design"

(Alfred V. Aho and Jeffrey D. Ullman; Addison-Wesley, 1977; ISBN

0-201-00022-9), was the `Green Dragon Book' (1977). (Also `New

Dragon Book', `Old Dragon Book'.) The horsed knight and the

Green Dragon were warily eying each other at a distance; now the

knight is typing (wearing gauntlets!) at a terminal showing a

video-game representation of the Red Dragon's head while the rest

of the beast extends back in normal space. See also {{book

titles}}.

:drain: /v./ [IBM] Syn. for {flush} (sense 2). Has a

connotation of finality about it; one speaks of draining a device

before taking it offline.

:dread high-bit disease: /n./ A condition endemic to some

now-obsolete computers and peripherals (including ASR-33 teletypes

and PRIME minicomputers) that results in all characters having

their high (0x80) bit forced on. This of course makes transporting

files to other systems much more difficult, not to mention the

problems these machines have talking with true 8-bit devices.

This term was originally used specifically of PRIME (a.k.a. PR1ME)

minicomputers. Folklore has it that PRIME adopted the

reversed-8-bit

convention in order to save 25 cents per serial line per machine;

PRIME old-timers, on the other hand, claim they inherited the

disease from Honeywell via customer NASA's compatibility

requirements and struggled heroically to cure it. Whoever was

responsible, this probably qualifies as one of the most

{cretinous} design tradeoffs ever made. See {meta bit}.

:DRECNET: /drek'net/ /n./ [from Yiddish/German `dreck',

meaning filth] Deliberate distortion of DECNET, a networking

protocol used in the {VMS} community. So called because DEC

helped write the Ethernet specification and then (either stupidly

or as a malignant customer-control tactic) violated that spec in

the design of DRECNET in a way that made it incompatible. See also

{connector conspiracy}.

:driver: /n./ 1. The {main loop} of an event-processing

program; the code that gets commands and dispatches them for

execution. 2. [techspeak] In `device driver', code designed to

handle a particular peripheral device such as a magnetic disk or

tape unit. 3. In the TeX world and the computerized typesetting

world in general, a program that translates some device-independent

or other common format to something a real device can actually

understand.

:droid: /n./ [from `android', SF terminology for a humanoid

robot of essentially biological (as opposed to

mechanical/electronic) construction] A person (esp. a

low-level bureaucrat or service-business employee) exhibiting most

of the following characteristics: (a) naive trust in the wisdom of

the parent organization or `the system'; (b) a blind-faith

propensity to believe obvious nonsense emitted by authority figures

(or computers!); (c) a rule-governed mentality, one unwilling or

unable to look beyond the `letter of the law' in exceptional

situations; (d) a paralyzing fear of official reprimand or worse if

Procedures are not followed No Matter What; and (e) no interest in

doing anything above or beyond the call of a very

narrowly-interpreted duty, or in particular in fixing that which is

broken; an "It's not my job, man" attitude.

Typical droid positions include supermarket checkout assistant and

bank clerk; the syndrome is also endemic in low-level government

employees. The implication is that the rules and official

procedures constitute software that the droid is executing;

problems arise when the software has not been properly debugged.

The term `droid mentality' is also used to describe the mindset

behind this behavior. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}; see

{-oid}.

:drool-proof paper: /n./ Documentation that has been

obsessively {dumbed down}, to the point where only a {cretin}

could bear to read it, is said to have succumbed to the

`drool-proof paper syndrome' or to have been `written on

drool-proof paper'. For example, this is an actual quote from

Apple's LaserWriter manual: "Do not expose your LaserWriter to

open fire or flame."

:drop on the floor: /vt./ To react to an error condition by

silently discarding messages or other valuable data. "The gateway

ran out of memory, so it just started dropping packets on the

floor." Also frequently used of faulty mail and netnews relay

sites that lose messages. See also {black hole}, {bit

bucket}.

:drop-ins: /n./ [prob. by analogy with {drop-outs}]

Spurious characters appearing on a terminal or console as a result

of line noise or a system malfunction of some sort. Esp. used

when these are interspersed with one's own typed input. Compare

{drop-outs}, sense 2.

:drop-outs: /n./ 1. A variety of `power glitch' (see

{glitch}); momentary 0 voltage on the electrical mains.

2. Missing characters in typed input due to software malfunction or

system saturation (one cause of such behavior under Unix when a bad

connection to a modem swamps the processor with spurious character

interrupts; see {screaming tty}). 3. Mental glitches; used as a

way of describing those occasions when the mind just seems to shut

down for a couple of beats. See {glitch}, {fried}.

:drugged: /adj./ (also `on drugs') 1. Conspicuously stupid,

heading toward {brain-damaged}. Often accompanied by a

pantomime of toking a joint. 2. Of hardware, very slow relative to

normal performance.

:drum: adj, /n./ Ancient techspeak term referring to slow,

cylindrical magnetic media that were once state-of-the-art storage

devices. Under BSD Unix the disk partition used for swapping is

still called `/dev/drum'; this has led to considerable humor

and not a few straight-faced but utterly bogus `explanations'

getting foisted on {newbie}s. See also "{The Story of Mel, a

Real Programmer}" in Appendix A.

:drunk mouse syndrome: /n./ (also `mouse on drugs') A malady

exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The

typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in

random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual

mouse. Can usually be corrected by unplugging the mouse and

plugging it back again. Another recommended fix for optical mice

is to rotate your mouse pad 90 degrees.

At Xerox PARC in the 1970s, most people kept a can of copier

cleaner (isopropyl alcohol) at their desks. When the steel ball on

the mouse had picked up enough {cruft} to be unreliable, the

mouse was doused in cleaner, which restored it for a while.

However, this operation left a fine residue that accelerated the

accumulation of cruft, so the dousings became more and more

frequent. Finally, the mouse was declared `alcoholic' and sent

to the clinic to be dried out in a CFC ultrasonic bath.

:Duff's device: /n./ The most dramatic use yet seen of {fall

through} in C, invented by Tom Duff when he was at Lucasfilm.

Trying to {bum} all the instructions he could out of an inner

loop that copied data serially onto an output port, he decided to

unroll it. He then realized that the unrolled version could be

implemented by *interlacing* the structures of a switch and a

loop:

switch (count % 8)

{

case 0: do { *to = *from++;

case 7: *to = *from++;

case 6: *to = *from++;

case 5: *to = *from++;

case 4: *to = *from++;

case 3: *to = *from++;

case 2: *to = *from++;

case 1: *to = *from++;

} while (--n > 0);

}

Shocking though it appears to all who encounter it for the first

time, the device is actually perfectly valid, legal C. C's default

{fall through} in case statements has long been its most

controversial single feature; Duff observed that "This code forms

some sort of argument in that debate, but I'm not sure whether it's

for or against."

[For maximal obscurity, the outermost pair of braces above could be

actually be removed -- GLS]

:dumb terminal: /n./ A terminal that is one step above a

{glass tty}, having a minimally addressable cursor but no

on-screen editing or other features normally supported by a

{smart terminal}. Once upon a time, when glass ttys were common

and addressable cursors were something special, what is now called

a dumb terminal could pass for a smart terminal.

:dumbass attack: /duhm'as *-tak'/ /n./ [Purdue] Notional

cause of a novice's mistake made by the experienced, especially one

made while running as {root} under Unix, e.g., typing `rm

-r *' or `mkfs' on a mounted file system. Compare {adger}.

:dumbed down: /adj./ Simplified, with a strong connotation of

*over*simplified. Often, a {marketroid} will insist that

the interfaces and documentation of software be dumbed down after

the designer has burned untold gallons of midnight oil making it

smart. This creates friction. See {user-friendly}.

:dump: /n./ 1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information

about a problem or the state of a system, especially one routed to

the slowest available output device (compare {core dump}), and

most especially one consisting of hex or octal {runes}

describing the byte-by-byte state of memory, mass storage, or some

file. In {elder days}, debugging was generally done by

`groveling over' a dump (see {grovel}); increasing use of

high-level languages and interactive debuggers has made such tedium

uncommon, and the term `dump' now has a faintly archaic flavor.

2. A backup. This usage is typical only at large timesharing

installations.

:dumpster diving: /dump'-ster di:'-ving/ /n./ 1. The practice

of sifting refuse from an office or technical installation to

extract confidential data, especially security-compromising

information (`dumpster' is an Americanism for what is elsewhere

called a `skip'). Back in AT&T's monopoly days, before paper

shredders became common office equipment, phone phreaks (see

{phreaking}) used to organize regular dumpster runs against

phone company plants and offices. Discarded and damaged copies of

AT&T internal manuals taught them much. The technique is still

rumored to be a favorite of crackers operating against careless

targets. 2. The practice of raiding the dumpsters behind buildings

where producers and/or consumers of high-tech equipment are

located, with the expectation (usually justified) of finding

discarded but still-valuable equipment to be nursed back to health

in some hacker's den. Experienced dumpster-divers not infrequently

accumulate basements full of moldering (but still potentially

useful) {cruft}.

:dup killer: /d[y]oop kill'r/ /n./ [FidoNet] Software that is

supposed to detect and delete duplicates of a message that may have

reached the FidoNet system via different routes.

:dup loop: /d[y]oop loop/ (also `dupe loop') /n./ [FidoNet]

An infinite stream of duplicated, near-identical messages on a

FidoNet {echo}, the only difference being unique or mangled

identification information applied by a faulty or incorrectly

configured system or network gateway, thus rendering {dup

killer}s ineffective. If such a duplicate message eventually

reaches a system through which it has already passed (with the

original identification information), all systems passed on the way

back to that system are said to be involved in a {dup loop}.

:dusty deck: /n./ Old software (especially applications) which

one is obliged to remain compatible with, or to maintain ({DP}

types call this `legacy code', a term hackers consider smarmy and

excessively reverent). The term implies that the software in

question is a holdover from card-punch days. Used esp. when

referring to old scientific and {number-crunching} software,

much of which was written in FORTRAN and very poorly documented but

is believed to be too expensive to replace. See {fossil};

compare {crawling horror}.

:DWIM: /dwim/ [acronym, `Do What I Mean'] 1. /adj./ Able to

guess, sometimes even correctly, the result intended when bogus

input was provided. 2. /n. obs./ The BBNLISP/INTERLISP function

that

attempted to accomplish this feat by correcting many of the more

common errors. See {hairy}. 3. Occasionally, an interjection

hurled at a balky computer, esp. when one senses one might be

tripping over legalisms (see {legalese}).

Warren Teitelman originally wrote DWIM to fix his typos and

spelling errors, so it was somewhat idiosyncratic to his style, and

would often make hash of anyone else's typos if they were

stylistically different. Some victims of DWIM thus claimed that

the acronym stood for `Damn Warren's Infernal Machine!'.

In one notorious incident, Warren added a DWIM feature to the

command interpreter used at Xerox PARC. One day another hacker

there typed `delete *$' to free up some disk space. (The

editor there named backup files by appending `$' to the

original file name, so he was trying to delete any backup files

left over from old editing sessions.) It happened that there

weren't any editor backup files, so DWIM helpfully reported

`*$ not found, assuming you meant 'delete *'.' It then started

to delete all the files on the disk! The hacker managed to stop it

with a {Vulcan nerve pinch} after only a half dozen or so files

were lost.

The disgruntled victim later said he had been sorely tempted to go

to Warren's office, tie Warren down in his chair in front of his

workstation, and then type `delete *$' twice.

DWIM is often suggested in jest as a desired feature for a complex

program; it is also occasionally described as the single

instruction the ideal computer would have. Back when proofs of

program correctness were in vogue, there were also jokes about

`DWIMC' (Do What I Mean, Correctly). A related term, more often

seen as a verb, is DTRT (Do The Right Thing); see {Right

Thing}.

:dynner: /din'r/ /n./ 32 bits, by analogy with {nybble} and

{{byte}}. Usage: rare and extremely silly. See also {playte},

{tayste}, {crumb}. General discussion of such terms is under

{nybble}.

= E =

=====

:earthquake: /n./ [IBM] The ultimate real-world shock test for

computer hardware. Hackish sources at IBM deny the rumor that the

Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by the company to test

quality-assurance procedures at its California plants.

:Easter egg: /n./ [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt

observed in the U.S. and many parts of Europe] 1. A message hidden

in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by

persons disassembling or browsing the code. 2. A message, graphic,

or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in

response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes,

intended as a joke or to display program credits. One well-known

early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond

to the command `make love' with `not war?'. Many

personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM,

including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations,

snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire

development team.

:Easter egging: /n./ [IBM] The act of replacing unrelated

components more or less at random in hopes that a malfunction will

go away. Hackers consider this the normal operating mode of

{field circus} techs and do not love them for it. See also the

jokes under {field circus}. Compare {shotgun debugging}.

:eat flaming death: /imp./ A construction popularized among

hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive from

a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic

that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something

of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign

Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own"

included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this

may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown

expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, {{EBCDIC}} users!"

:EBCDIC:: /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see`dik/, or /eb'k*-dik/ /n./

[abbreviation, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] An

alleged character set used on IBM {dinosaur}s. It exists in at

least six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such

delights as non-contiguous letter sequences and the absence of

several ASCII punctuation characters fairly important for modern

computer languages (exactly which characters are absent varies

according to which version of EBCDIC you're looking at). IBM

adapted EBCDIC from {{punched card}} code in the early 1960s and

promulgated it as a customer-control tactic (see {connector

conspiracy}), spurning the already established ASCII standard.

Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own

description of the EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them

is still internally classified top-secret, burn-before-reading.

Hackers blanch at the very *name* of EBCDIC and consider it a

manifestation of purest {evil}. See also {fear and

loathing}.

:echo: [FidoNet] /n./ A {topic group} on {FidoNet}'s

echomail system. Compare {newsgroup}.

:eighty-column mind: /n./ [IBM] The sort said to be possessed by

persons for whom the transition from {punched card} to tape was

traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet). It is said

that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder

of IBM, will be buried `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being

the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402

and 1622 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel

called "The Last Bug", the climactic lines of which are as

follows:

He died at the console

Of hunger and thirst.

Next day he was buried,

Face down, 9-edge first.

The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's

customer base and its thinking. See {IBM}, {fear and

loathing}, {card walloper}.

:El Camino Bignum: /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ /n./ The road

mundanely called El Camino Real, running along San Francisco

peninsula. It originally extended all the way down to Mexico City;

many portions of the old road are still intact. Navigation on the

San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real,

which defines {logical} north and south even though it isn't

really north-south in many places. El Camino Real runs right past

Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.

The Spanish word `real' (which has two syllables: /ray-ahl'/)

means `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'. In the FORTRAN

language, a `real' quantity is a number typically precise to seven

significant digits, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger

floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant

digits (other languages have similar `real' types).

When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a

long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on `real', he started

calling it `El Camino Double Precision' -- but when the hacker

was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it

`El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck. (See {bignum}.)

In recent years, the synonym `El Camino Virtual' has been

reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.

[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was

in fact he --ESR]

:elder days: /n./ The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly,

pre-1980); the era of the {PDP-10}, {TECO}, {{ITS}}, and the

ARPANET. This term has been rather consciously adopted from

J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings".

Compare {Iron Age}; see also {elvish} and {Great Worm,

the}.

:elegant: /adj./ [from mathematical usage] Combining

simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher

praise than `clever', `winning', or even {cuspy}.

The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de

Saint-Exup'ery, probably best known for his classic children's

book "The Little Prince", was also an aircraft designer. He

gave us perhaps the best definition of engineering elegance when he

said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there

is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take

away."

:elephantine: /adj./ Used of programs or systems that are both

conspicuous {hog}s (owing perhaps to poor design founded on

{brute force and ignorance}) and exceedingly {hairy} in

source form. An elephantine program may be functional and even

friendly, but (as in the old joke about being in bed with an

elephant) it's tough to have around all the same (and, like a

pachyderm, difficult to maintain). In extreme cases, hackers have

been known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive

proboscatory mime at the mention of the offending program. Usage:

semi-humorous. Compare `has the elephant nature' and the

somewhat more pejorative {monstrosity}. See also

{second-system effect} and {baroque}.

:elevator controller: /n./ An archetypal dumb embedded-systems

application, like {toaster} (which superseded it). During one

period (1983--84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C

standardization committee) this was the canonical example of a

really stupid, memory-limited computation environment. "You can't

require `printf(3)' to be part of the default runtime library

-- what if you're targeting an elevator controller?" Elevator

controllers became important rhetorical weapons on both sides of

several {holy wars}.

:elite: /adj./ Clueful. Plugged-in. One of the cognoscenti.

Also used as a general positive adjective. This term is not

actually hacker slang in the strict sense; it is used primarily by

crackers and {warez d00dz}. Cracker usage is probably related to

a 19200cps modem called the `Courier Elite' that was widely popular

on pirate boards before the V.32bis standard. A true hacker would

be more likely to use `wizardly'. Oppose {lamer}.

:ELIZA effect: /*-li:'z* *-fekt'/ /n./ [AI community] The

tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior

experience. For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol

`+' that makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's just

that people associate it with addition. Using `+' or `plus'

to mean addition in a computer language is taking advantage of the

ELIZA effect.

This term comes from the famous ELIZA program by Joseph Weizenbaum,

which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing many of

the patient's statements as questions and posing them to the

patient. It worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution

of key words into canned phrases. It was so convincing, however,

that there are many anecdotes about people becoming very

emotionally caught up in dealing with ELIZA. All this was due to

people's tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer

never put there. The ELIZA effect is a {Good Thing} when

writing a programming language, but it can blind you to serious

shortcomings when analyzing an Artificial Intelligence system.

Compare {ad-hockery}; see also {AI-complete}.

:elvish: /n./ 1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms

resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the "Book

of Kells". Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in "The

Lord of The Rings" as an orthography for his fictional `elvish'

languages, this system (which is both visually and phonetically

{elegant}) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be intrigued

by artificial languages in general). It is traditional for

graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to

support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items. See also

{elder days}. 2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface

produced by a graphics device. 3. The typeface mundanely called

`B"ocklin', an art-decoish display font.

:EMACS: /ee'maks/ /n./ [from Editing MACroS] The ne plus

ultra of hacker editors, a programmable text editor with an entire

LISP system inside it. It was originally written by Richard

Stallman in {TECO} under {{ITS}} at the MIT AI lab; AI Memo 554

described it as "an advanced, self-documenting, customizable,

extensible real-time display editor". It has since been

reimplemented any number of times, by various hackers, and versions

exist that run under most major operating systems. Perhaps the

most widely used version, also written by Stallman and now called

"{GNU} EMACS" or {GNUMACS}, runs principally under Unix.

It includes facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and

receive mail; many hackers spend up to 80% of their {tube time}

inside it. Other variants include {GOSMACS}, CCA EMACS,

UniPress EMACS, Montgomery EMACS, jove, epsilon, and MicroEMACS.

Some EMACS versions running under window managers iconify as an

overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the

editor does not (yet) include. Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too

{heavyweight} and {baroque} for their taste, and expand the

name as `Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its heavy reliance

on keystrokes decorated with {bucky bits}. Other spoof

expansions include `Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping',

`Eventually `malloc()'s All Computer Storage', and `EMACS

Makes A Computer Slow' (see {{recursive acronym}}). See

also {vi}.

:email: /ee'mayl/ (also written `e-mail' and `E-mail')

1. /n./ Electronic mail automatically passed through computer

networks and/or via modems over common-carrier lines. Contrast

{snail-mail}, {paper-net}, {voice-net}. See {network

address}. 2. /vt./ To send electronic mail.

Oddly enough, the word `emailed' is actually listed in the OED;

it means "embossed (with a raised pattern) or perh. arranged in a

net or open work". A use from 1480 is given. The word is probably

derived from French `'emaill'e' (enameled) and related to Old

French `emmaille"ure' (network). A French correspondent tells

us that in modern French, `email' is a hard enamel obtained by

heating special paints in a furnace; an `emailleur' (no final e) is

a craftsman who makes email (he generally paints some objects

(like, say, jewelry) and cooks them in a furnace).

There are numerous spelling variants of this word. In Internet

traffic up to 1995, `email' predominates, `e-mail' runs a

not-too-distant second, and `E-mail' and `Email' are a distant

third and fourth.

:emoticon: /ee-moh'ti-kon/ /n./ An ASCII glyph used to

indicate an emotional state in email or news. Although originally

intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some other explicit humor

indication) are virtually required under certain circumstances in

high-volume text-only communication forums such as Usenet; the lack

of verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what were intended to

be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise non-100%-serious

comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even by

{newbie}s), resulting in arguments and {flame war}s.

Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are in

common use. These include:

:-)

`smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness,

occasionally sarcasm)

:-(

`frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset)

;-)

`half-smiley' ({ha ha only serious}); also known as

`semi-smiley' or `winkey face'.

:-/

`wry face'

(These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head

sideways, to the left.)

The first two listed are by far the most frequently encountered.

Hyphenless forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX;

see also {bixie}. On {Usenet}, `smiley' is often used as a

generic term synonymous with {emoticon}, as well as specifically

for the happy-face emoticon.

It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on

the CMU {bboard} systems around 1980. He later wrote: "I wish I

had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date for

posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting something that

would soon pollute all the world's communication channels." [GLS

confirms that he remembers this original posting].

Note for the {newbie}: Overuse of the smiley is a mark of

loserhood! More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that

you've gone over the line.

:empire: /n./ Any of a family of military simulations derived

from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago. Five or six

multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication exist,

and one single-player version implemented for both Unix and VMS;

the latter is even available as MS-DOS freeware. All are

notoriously addictive.

:engine: /n./ 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some

function but can't be used without some kind of {front end}.

Today we have, especially, `print engine': the guts of a laser

printer. 2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that

does a lot of noisy crunching, such as a `database engine'.

The hackish senses of `engine' are actually close to its original,

pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or

instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity'). This sense had

not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of

power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which

explains why he named the stored-program computer that

he designed in 1844 the `Analytical Engine'.

:English: 1. /n. obs./ The source code for a program, which may

be in any language, as opposed to the linkable or executable binary

produced from it by a compiler. The idea behind the term is that

to a real hacker, a program written in his favorite programming

language is at least as readable as English. Usage: mostly by

old-time hackers, though recognizable in context. 2. The official

name of the database language used by the Pick Operating System,

actually a sort of crufty, brain-damaged SQL with delusions of

grandeur. The name permits {marketroid}s to say "Yes, and you

can program our computers in English!" to ignorant {suit}s

without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.

:enhancement: /n./ Common {marketroid}-speak for a bug

{fix}. This abuse of language is a popular and time-tested way

to turn incompetence into increased revenue. A hacker being ironic

would instead call the fix a {feature} -- or perhaps save some

effort by declaring the bug itself to be a feature.

:ENQ: /enkw/ or /enk/ [from the ASCII mnemonic ENQuire

for 0000101] An on-line convention for querying someone's

availability. After opening a {talk mode} connection to someone

apparently in heavy hack mode, one might type `SYN SYN ENQ?'

(the SYNs representing notional synchronization bytes), and expect

a return of {ACK} or {NAK} depending on whether or not the

person felt interruptible. Compare {ping}, {finger}, and the

usage of `FOO?' listed under {talk mode}.

:EOF: /E-O-F/ /n./ [abbreviation, `End Of File']

1. [techspeak] The {out-of-band} value returned by C's

sequential character-input functions (and their equivalents in

other environments) when end of file has been reached. This value

is -1 under C libraries postdating V6 Unix, but was

originally 0. 2. [Unix] The keyboard character (usually control-D,

the ASCII EOT (End Of Transmission) character) that is mapped by

the terminal driver into an end-of-file condition. 3. Used by

extension in non-computer contexts when a human is doing something

that can be modeled as a sequential read and can't go further.

"Yeah, I looked for a list of 360 mnemonics to post as a joke, but

I hit EOF pretty fast; all the library had was a {JCL} manual."