sidecar n.
1. Syn. slap on the
side. Esp. used of add-ons for the late and unlamented
IBM PCjr. 2. The IBM PC compatibility box that could be bolted
onto the side of an Amiga. Designed and produced by Commodore, it
broke all of the company's own design rules. If it worked with
any other peripherals, it was by magic. 3. More generally, any of various devices
designed to be connected to the expansion slot on the left side
of the Amiga 500 (and later, 600 & 1200), which included a
hard drive controller, a hard drive, and additional memory.
Node:SIG, Next:sig block, Previous:sidecar, Up:= S
=
SIG /sig/ n.
(also common as a prefix in combining forms) A Special
Interest Group, in one of several technical areas, sponsored by
the Association for Computing Machinery; well-known ones include
SIGPLAN (the Special Interest Group on Programming Languages),
SIGARCH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Architecture)
and SIGGRAPH (the Special Interest Group for Computer Graphics).
Hackers, not surprisingly, like to overextend this naming
convention to less formal associations like SIGBEER (at ACM
conferences) and SIGFOOD (at University of Illinois).
Node:sig block, Next:sig quote, Previous:SIG, Up:= S
=
sig block /sig blok/ n.
[Unix; often written `.sig' there] Short for `signature', used
specifically to refer to the electronic signature block that most
Unix mail- and news-posting software will automagically append to outgoing mail
and news. The composition of one's sig can be quite an art form,
including an ASCII logo or one's choice of witty sayings (see
sig quote, fool file); but many consider large sigs a
waste of bandwidth, and it has
been observed that the size of one's sig block is usually
inversely proportional to one's longevity and level of prestige
on the net. See also doubled
sig.