[Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 1. Software EXchange. A
technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions
of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly
slow up until then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers
and others (of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges
of genetic software). In general, SEX parties are a Good Thing, but unprotected SEX can
propagate a virus. See also pubic directory. 2. The rather
Freudian mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a machine
instruction found in the PDP-11 and many other architectures. The
RCA 1802 chip used in the early Elf and SuperElf personal
computers had a `SEt X register' SEX instruction, but this seems
to have had little folkloric impact. The Data General instruction
set also had SEX.
DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11
assembler that used the SEX mnemonic out the door at
one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't asleep and forced a
change. That wasn't the last time this happened, either. The
author of "The Intel 8086 Primer", who was one of the original
designers of the 8086, noted that there was originally a
SEX instruction on that processor, too. He says that
Intel management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed,
and thus the instruction was renamed CBW and
CWD (depending on what was being extended).
Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC
keyboards) is also missing straight SEX but has
logical-or and logical-and instructions ORL and
ANL.
The Motorola 6809, used in the Radio Shack Color Computer and
in U.K.'s `Dragon 32' personal computer, actually had an official
SEX instruction; the 6502 in the Apple II with which
it competed did not. British hackers thought this made perfect
mythic sense; after all, it was commonly observed, you could (on
some theoretical level) have sex with a dragon, but you can't
have sex with an apple.