UTSL // n.
[Unix] On-line acronym for `Use the Source, Luke' (a pun on
Obi-Wan Kenobi's "Use the Force, Luke!" in "Star Wars") --
analogous to RTFS (sense 1), but more
polite. This is a common way of suggesting that someone would be
better off reading the source code that supports whatever feature
is causing confusion, rather than making yet another futile pass
through the manuals, or broadcasting questions on Usenet that
haven't attracted wizards to answer
them.
Once upon a time in elder
days, everyone running Unix had source. After 1978,
AT&T's policy tightened up, so this objurgation was in theory
appropriately directed only at associates of some outfit with a
Unix source license. In practice, bootlegs of Unix source code
(made precisely for reference purposes) were so ubiquitous that
one could utter it at almost anyone on the network without
concern.
Nowadays, free Unix clones have become widely enough
distributed that anyone can read source legally. The most widely
distributed is certainly Linux, with variants of the NET/2 and
4.4BSD distributions running second. Cheap commercial Unixes with
source such as BSD/OS are accelerating this trend.
Node:UUCPNET, Next:V7, Previous:UTSL,
Up:= U =
UUCPNET n. obs.
The store-and-forward network consisting of all the world's
connected Unix machines (and others running some clone of the
UUCP (Unix-to-Unix CoPy) software). Any machine reachable only
via a bang path is on UUCPNET.
This term has been rendered obsolescent by the spread of cheap
Internet connections in the 1990s; the few remaining UUCP links
are essentially slow channels to the Internet rather than an
autonomous network. See network
address.