The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon
from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI
lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10
communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN),
Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic
Institute (WPI).
The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as `jargon-1' or `the
File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this
time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in
1991, the File was named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. Some terms in
it date back considerably earlier (frob and some senses of moby, for instance, go back to the Tech Model
Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to date at least back to
the early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered
and may be collectively considered `Version 1'.
In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the
File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy
of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to
`AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL
JARGON.
The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the `>' caused
versioning under ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by
Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this
activity, nobody thought of correcting the term `jargon' to
`slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as
the Jargon File.
Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly
thereafter and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File
(which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with
periodic resynchronizations).
The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard
Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT
and ITS-related coinages.
In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large
chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand's "CoEvolution
Quarterly" (issue 29, pages 26-35) with illustrations by Phil
Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly
cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper
publication.
A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the
mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in
1983 as "The Hacker's Dictionary" (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN
0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don
Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did
Richard M. Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now out of
print) is hereafter referred to as `Steele-1983' and those six as
the Steele-1983 coauthors.
Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File
effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was
due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to facilitate the
production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the
`temporary' freeze to become permanent.
The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by
funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use
vendor-supported hardware and software instead of homebrew
whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated
LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI
technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to
startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West
in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the
central MIT-AI computer became a TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI
hackers' beloved ITS.
The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980,
although the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science
Department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more
than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the
interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD Unix
standard.
In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished
the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the
Jupiter project at Digital Equipment Corporation. The File's
compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things.
Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was
a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how
wide its influence was to be.
By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend
that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and
softcopies obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures
far removed from MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong
and continuing influence on hacker language and humor. Even as
the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a
tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related
materials such as the Some AI
Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred
epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic
exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in
hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously -- but the Jargon
File, having passed from living document to icon, remained
essentially untouched for seven years.
This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late
version of jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were
dropped after careful consultation with the editors of
Steele-1983). It merges in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text,
omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced
in Steele-1983 that are now also obsolete.
This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File;
its aim is to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all
the technical computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature
is manifested. More than half of the entries now derive from
Usenet and represent jargon now
current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts have
been made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC
programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM
mainframe world.
Eric S. Raymond maintains the new File with assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr.;
these are the persons primarily reflected in the File's editorial
`we', though we take pleasure in acknowledging the special
contribution of the other coauthors of Steele-1983. Please email
all additions, corrections, and correspondence relating to the
Jargon File to jargon@thyrsus.com.
(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file but
are not guaranteed to be correct later than the revision
date on the first line. Don't email us if an attempt to
reach your idol bounces -- we have no magic way of checking
addresses or looking up people.)
The 2.9.6 version became the main text of "The New Hacker's
Dictionary", by Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN
0-262-68069-6.
The 3.0.0 version was published in September 1993 as the
second edition of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", again from MIT
Press (ISBN 0-262-18154-1).
If you want the book, you should be able to find it at any of
the major bookstore chains. Failing that, you can order by mail
from