egosurf vi.
To search the net for your name or links to your web pages.
Perhaps connected to long-established SF-fan slang `egoscan', to
search for one's name in a fanzine.
Node:eighty-column mind,
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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 was thought by most hackers to dominate
IBM's customer base and its thinking. This only began to change
in the mid-1990s when IBM began to reinvent itself after the
triumph of the killer micro.
See IBM, fear and loathing, card walloper. A copy of "The Last
Bug" lives on the the GNU site at http://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/last.bug.html.
Node:El Camino Bignum, Next:elder days, Previous:eighty-column mind,
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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.)
[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story
was in fact himself --ESR]
In recent years, the synonym `El Camino Virtual' has been
reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.
Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been
heard to refer to some major cross-street intersecting El Camino
Real as "El Camino Imaginary". One popular theory is that the
intersection is located near Moffett Field - where they keep all
those complex planes.