bang on vt.
To stress-test a piece of hardware or software: "I banged on
the new version of the simulator all day yesterday and it didn't
crash once. I guess it is ready for release." The term pound on is synonymous.
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B =
bang path n.
[now historical] An old-style UUCP electronic-mail address
specifying hops to get from some assumed-reachable location to
the addressee, so called because each hop is signified by a bang sign. Thus, for example, the path
_...!bigsite!foovax!barbox!me_ directs people to route their
mail to machine _bigsite_ (presumably a well-known location
accessible to everybody) and from there through the machine
_foovax_ to the account of user _me_ on
_barbox_.
In the bad old days of not so long ago, before autorouting
mailers became commonplace, people often published compound bang
addresses using the { } convention (see glob) to give paths from several big
machines, in the hopes that one's correspondent might be able to
get mail to one of them reliably (example: _...!{seismo,
ut-sally, ihnp4}!rice!beta!gamma!me_). Bang paths of 8 to 10
hops were not uncommon in 1981. Late-night dial-up UUCP links
would cause week-long transmission times. Bang paths were often
selected by both transmission time and reliability, as messages
would often get lost. See Internet address, the network, and sitename.