lurker n.
One of the `silent majority' in a electronic forum; one who
posts occasionally or not at all but is known to read the group's
postings regularly. This term is not pejorative and indeed is
casually used reflexively: "Oh, I'm just lurking." Often used in
`the lurkers', the hypothetical audience for the group's flamage-emitting regulars. When a lurker
speaks up for the first time, this is called `delurking'.
The creator of the popular science-fiction TV series "Babylon
5" has ties to SF fandom and the hacker culture. In that series,
the use of the term `lurker' for a homeless or displaced person
is a conscious reference to the jargon term.
Node:luser, Next:M, Previous:lurker,
Up:= L =
luser /loo'zr/ n.
[common] A user; esp. one who is
also a loser. (luser and loser are
pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT.
Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and
typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out
some status information, including how many people were already
using the computer; it might print "14 users", for example.
Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to
print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a great controversy, as
some of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to
their faces every time they used the computer. For a while
several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the message
behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the
computer it was even money whether it would say "users" or
"losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise "lusers", and it
stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported luser
as a request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990,
except as a museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the
term `luser' is often seen in program comments and on Usenet.
Compare mundane, muggle.