Eric Conspiracy n.
A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers named Eric first
pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous
_talk.bizarre_ posting ca. 1987; this was doubtless
influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python
oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed
Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can
account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way.
Well-known examples include Eric Allman (he of the `Allman style'
described under indent
style) and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor has
heard from more than sixty others by email, and the organization
line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly
from more than one site. See the Eric Conspiracy Web Page at http://www.ccil.org/~esr/ecsl/
for full details.