2. The assumption that characters are signed.

3. The assumption that a pointer to any one type can freely be cast

into a pointer to any other type. A stronger form of this is the

assumption that all pointers are the same size and format, which

means you don't have to worry about getting the types correct in

calls. Problem: this fails on word-oriented machines or others

with multiple pointer formats.

4. The assumption that the parameters of a routine are stored in

memory, contiguously, and in strictly ascending or descending

order. Problem: this fails on many RISC architectures.

5. The assumption that pointer and integer types are the same size,

and that pointers can be stuffed into integer variables (and

vice-versa) and drawn back out without being truncated or mangled.

Problem: this fails on segmented architectures or word-oriented

machines with funny pointer formats.

6. The assumption that a data type of any size may begin at any byte

address in memory (for example, that you can freely construct and

dereference a pointer to a word- or greater-sized object at an odd

char address). Problem: this fails on many (esp. RISC)

architectures better optimized for {HLL} execution speed, and can

cause an illegal address fault or bus error.

7. The (related) assumption that there is no padding at the end of

types and that in an array you can thus step right from the last

byte of a previous component to the first byte of the next one.

This is not only machine- but compiler-dependent.

8. The assumption that memory address space is globally flat and that

the array reference `foo[-1]' is necessarily valid. Problem: this

fails at 0, or other places on segment-addressed machines like

Intel chips (yes, segmentation is universally considered a

{brain-damaged} way to design machines (see {moby}), but that is a

separate issue).

9. The assumption that objects can be arbitrarily large with no

special considerations. Problem: this fails on segmented

architectures and under non-virtual-addressing environments.

10. The assumption that the stack can be as large as memory. Problem:

this fails on segmented architectures or almost anything else

without virtual addressing and a paged stack.

11. The assumption that bits and addressable units within an object are

ordered in the same way and that this order is a constant of

nature. Problem: this fails on {big-endian} machines.

12. The assumption that it is meaningful to compare pointers to

different objects not located within the same array, or to objects

of different types. Problem: the former fails on segmented

architectures, the latter on word-oriented machines or others with

multiple pointer formats.

13. The assumption that an `int' is 32 bits, or (nearly equivalently)

the assumption that `sizeof(int) == sizeof(long)'. Problem: this

fails on PDP-11s, 286-based systems and even on 386 and 68000

systems under some compilers.

14. The assumption that `argv[]' is writable. Problem: this fails in

many embedded-systems C environments and even under a few flavors

of UNIX.

Note that a programmer can validly be accused of vaxocentrism

even if he or she has never seen a VAX. Some of these assumptions

(esp. 2--5) were valid on the PDP-11, the original C machine, and

became endemic years before the VAX. The terms `vaxocentricity'

and `all-the-world's-a-VAX syndrome' have been used synonymously.

:vdiff: /vee'dif/ v.,n. Visual diff. The operation of finding

differences between two files by {eyeball search}. The term

`optical diff' has also been reported, and is sometimes more

specifically used for the act of superimposing two nearly identical

printouts on one another and holding them up to a light to spot

differences. Though this method is poor for detecting omissions in

the `rear' file, it can also be used with printouts of graphics, a

claim few if any diff programs can make. See {diff}.

:veeblefester: /vee'b*l-fes`tr/ [from the "Born Loser"

comix via Commodore; prob. originally from `Mad' Magazine's

`Veeblefeetzer' parodies ca. 1960] n. Any obnoxious person engaged

in the (alleged) professions of marketing or management. Antonym

of {hacker}. Compare {suit}, {marketroid}.

:Venus flytrap: [after the insect-eating plant] n. See {firewall

machine}.

:verbage: /ver'b*j/ n. A deliberate misspelling and mispronunciation of

{verbiage} that assimilates it to the word `garbage'. Compare

{content-free}. More pejorative than `verbiage'.

:verbiage: n. When the context involves a software or hardware

system, this refers to {{documentation}}. This term borrows the

connotations of mainstream `verbiage' to suggest that the

documentation is of marginal utility and that the motives behind

its production have little to do with the ostensible subject.

:Version 7: alt. V7 /vee' se'vn/ n. The 1978 unsupported release of

{{UNIX}} ancestral to all current commercial versions. Before

the release of the POSIX/SVID standards, V7's features were often

treated as a UNIX portability baseline. See {BSD}, {USG UNIX},

{{UNIX}}. Some old-timers impatient with commercialization and

kernel bloat still maintain that V7 was the Last True UNIX.

:vgrep: /vee'grep/ v.,n. Visual grep. The operation of finding

patterns in a file optically rather than digitally (also called an

`optical grep'). See {grep}; compare {vdiff}.

:vi: /V-I/, *not* /vi:/ and *never* /siks/ [from

`Visual Interface'] n. A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy

for an early {BSD} release. Became the de facto standard

UNIX editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT

until the rise of {EMACS} after about 1984. Tends to frustrate

new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting

input text nor vice versa, and the default setup provides no

indication of which mode one is in (one correspondent accordingly

reports that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced

/vi:l/). Nevertheless it is still widely used (about half the

respondents in a 1991 USENET poll preferred it), and even EMACS

fans often resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs

(mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of

EMACS). See {holy wars}.

:videotex: n. obs. An electronic service offering people the

privilege of paying to read the weather on their television screens

instead of having somebody read it to them for free while they

brush their teeth. The idea bombed everywhere it wasn't

government-subsidized, because by the time videotex was practical

the installed base of personal computers could hook up to

timesharing services and do the things for which videotex might

have been worthwhile better and cheaper. Videotex planners badly

overestimated both the appeal of getting information from a

computer and the cost of local intelligence at the user's end.

Like the {gorilla arm} effect, this has been a cautionary tale

to hackers ever since. See also {vannevar}.

:virgin: adj. Unused; pristine; in a known initial state. "Let's

bring up a virgin system and see if it crashes again." (Esp.

useful after contracting a {virus} through {SEX}.) Also, by

extension, buffers and the like within a program that have not yet

been used.

:virtual: [via the technical term `virtual memory', prob. from

the term `virtual image' in optics] adj. 1. Common alternative

to {logical}; often used to refer to the artificial objects

created by a computer system to help the system control access to

shared resources. 2. Simulated; performing the functions of

something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may

be a virtual playmate. Oppose {real}.

:virtual Friday: n. The last day before an extended weekend, if

that day is not a `real' Friday. For example, the U.S. holiday

Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. The next day is often also a

holiday or taken as an extra day off, in which case Wednesday of

that week is a virtual Friday (and Thursday is a virtual Saturday,

as is Friday). There are also `virtual Mondays' that are

actually Tuesdays, after the three-day weekends associated with

many national holidays in the U.S.

:virtual reality: n. 1. Computer simulations that use 3-D graphics

and devices such as the Dataglove to allow the user to interact

with the simulation. See {cyberspace}. 2. A form of network

interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing games,

interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and `true confessions'

magazines. In a virtual reality forum (such as USENET's

alt.callahans newsgroup or the {MUD} experiments on Internet),

interaction between the participants is written like a shared novel

complete with scenery, `foreground characters' that may be

personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and common

`background characters' manipulable by all parties. The one

iron law is that you may not write irreversible changes to a

character without the consent of the person who `owns' it.

Otherwise anything goes. See {bamf}, {cyberspace}.

:virus: [from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF]

n. A cracker program that searches out other programs and `infects'

them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become

{Trojan Horse}s. When these programs are executed, the embedded

virus is executed too, thus propagating the `infection'. This

normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a {worm}, a

virus cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is

propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their

friends (see {SEX}). The virus may do nothing but propagate

itself and then allow the program to run normally. Usually,

however, after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing

things like writing cute messages on the terminal or playing

strange tricks with your display (some viruses include nice

{display hack}s). Many nasty viruses, written by particularly

perversely minded {cracker}s, do irreversible damage, like

nuking all the user's files.

In the 1990s, viruses have become a serious problem, especially

among IBM PC and Macintosh users (the lack of security on these

machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the

operating system). The production of special anti-virus software

has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports

have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many

{luser}s tend to blame *everything* that doesn't work as

they had expected on virus attacks. Accordingly, this sense of

`virus' has passed not only into techspeak but into also popular

usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote a {worm} or

even a {Trojan horse}). Compare {back door}; see also

{UNIX conspiracy}.

:visionary: n. 1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an

Artificial Intelligence researcher working on the problem of

getting computers to `see' things using TV cameras. (There isn't

any problem in sending information from a TV camera to a computer.

The problem is, how can the computer be programmed to make use of

the camera information? See {SMOP}, {AI-complete}.) 2. [IBM]

One who reads the outside literature. At IBM, apparently, such a

penchant is viewed with awe and wonder.

:VMS: /V-M-S/ n. DEC's proprietary operating system for its VAX

minicomputer; one of the seven or so environments that loom largest

in hacker folklore. Many UNIX fans generously concede that VMS

would probably be the hacker's favorite commercial OS if UNIX

didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious. One major

hacker gripe with VMS concerns its slowness --- thus the following

limerick:

There once was a system called VMS

Of cycles by no means abstemious.

It's chock-full of hacks

And runs on a VAX

And makes my poor stomach all squeamious.

--- The Great Quux

See also {VAX}, {{TOPS-10}}, {{TOPS-20}}, {{UNIX}}, {runic}.

:voice: vt. To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or

connecting in {talk mode}. "I'm busy now; I'll voice you later."

:voice-net: n. Hackish way of referring to the telephone system,

analogizing it to a digital network. USENET {sig block}s not

uncommonly include the sender's phone next to a "Voice:" or

"Voice-Net:" header; common variants of this are "Voicenet" and

"V-Net". Compare {paper-net}, {snail-mail}.

:voodoo programming: [from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] n.

The use by guess or cookbook of an {obscure} or {hairy} system,

feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The

implication is that the technique may not work, and if it doesn't,

one will never know why. Almost synonymous with {black magic},

except that black magic typically isn't documented and

*nobody* understands it. Compare {magic}, {deep magic},

{heavy wizardry}, {rain dance}, {cargo cult programming},

{wave a dead chicken}.

:VR: // [MUD] n. On-line abbrev for {virtual reality}, as

opposed to {RL}.

:Vulcan nerve pinch: n. [from the old "Star Trek" TV series via

Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a

soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a

feature). On many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns, L1-A; on

some Macintoshes, it is <Cmd>-<Power switch>! Also called

{three-finger salute}. Compare {quadruple bucky}.

:vulture capitalist: n. Pejorative hackerism for `venture

capitalist', deriving from the common practice of pushing contracts

that deprive inventors of control over their own innovations and

most of the money they ought to have made from them.

= W =

=====

:wabbit: /wab'it/ [almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal

line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 1. A legendary early hack

reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may

have descended (if only by inspiration) from hack called RABBITS

reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 55000 at the University of

Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of

itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system.

2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication

but is not a {virus} or {worm}. See {fork bomb}, see also

{cookie monster}.

:WAITS:: /wayts/ n. The mutant cousin of {{TOPS-10}} used on a

handful of systems at {{SAIL}} up to 1990. There was never an

`official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived

at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed as

`West-coast Alternative to ITS'. Though WAITS was less visible

than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between

the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted

enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of {EMACS},

for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's `E' editor --- one

of a family of editors that were the first to do `real-time

editing', in which the editing commands were invisible and where

one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern

style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there,

and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in

the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the

Sun workstations. {Bucky bits} were also invented there ---

thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One notable

WAITS feature seldom duplicated elsewhere was a news-wire interface

that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI

dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a

still-unusual level of support for what is now called `multimedia'

computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched

to programming terminals.

:waldo: /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"]

1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human

limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the

mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein

in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more

generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense

interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At

Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used

instead of {foobar} as a metasyntactic variable and general

nonsense word. See {foo}, {bar}, {foobar}, {quux}.

:walk: n.,vt. Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or

linked-list data structure in {core}. See also {codewalker},

{silly walk}, {clobber}.

:walk off the end of: vt. To run past the end of an array, list, or

medium after stepping through it --- a good way to land in trouble.

Often the result of an {off-by-one error}. Compare

{clobber}, {roach}, {smash the stack}.

:walking drives: n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk

drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky {washing

machine}s. Those old {dinosaur} parts carried terrific angular

momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings

and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to

`walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple

of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that

walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it

shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at

it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive

access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by

a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time

hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that

would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.

:wall: [WPI] interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken

with a quizzical tone: "Wall??" 2. A request for further

explication. Compare {octal forty}. 3. [UNIX] v. To send a message

to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall(8) utility.

It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom `like talking to a

blank wall'. It was originally used in situations where, after you

had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you

blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You

would then throw out a "Hello, wall?" to elicit some sort of

response from the questioner. Later, confused questioners began

voicing "Wall?" themselves.

:wall follower: n. A person or algorithm that compensates for lack

of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some

simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of

an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls

`Harvey Wallbanger', the winning robot in an early AI contest

(named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved

mazes by keeping a `finger' on one wall and running till it came

out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically

guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazes --- and, in fact,

Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to

`learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it.

Used of humans, the term *is* pejorative and implies an

uncreative, bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See also {code

grinder}, {droid}.

:wall time: n. (also `wall clock time') 1. `Real world' time (what

the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea

of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the

number of {clocks} required to execute it (on a timesharing

system these will differ, as no one program gets all the

{clocks}, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support

one may get more processor clocks than real-time clocks).

:wallpaper: n. 1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly

listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of

all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for

such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced

at Stanford, where it was used to cover windows.) Now rare,

esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g.,

PHOTO on TWENEX). However, the UNIX world doesn't have an

equivalent term, so perhaps {wallpaper} will take hold there.

The term probably originated on ITS, where the commands to begin

and end transcript files were `:WALBEG' and `:WALEND',

with default file `WALL PAPER' (the space was a path

delimiter). 2. The background pattern used on graphical

workstations (this is techspeak under the `Windows' graphical user

interface to MS-DOS). 3. `wallpaper file' n. The file that

contains the wallpaper information before it is actually printed on

paper. (Even if you don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy

of the file, it is still called a wallpaper file.)

:wango: /wang'goh/ n. Random bit-level {grovel}ling going on in

a system during some unspecified operation. Often used in

combination with {mumble}. For example: "You start with the `.o'

file, run it through this postprocessor that does mumble-wango ---

and it comes out a snazzy object-oriented executable."

:wank: /wangk/ [Columbia University: prob. by mutation from

Commonwealth slang v. `wank', to masturbate] n.,v. Used much as

{hack} is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever technique or

person or the result of such cleverness. May describe (negatively)

the act of hacking for hacking's sake ("Quit wanking, let's go get

supper!") or (more positively) a {wizard}. Adj. `wanky'

describes something particularly clever (a person, program, or

algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when there are too

many wanks involved. This excess wankiness is signalled by an

overload of the `wankometer' (compare {bogometer}). When the

wankometer overloads, the conversation's subject must be changed,

or all non-wanks will leave. Compare `neep-neeping' (under

{neep-neep}). Usage: U.S. only. In Britain and the Commonwealth

this word is *extremely* rude and is best avoided unless one

intends to give offense.

:wannabee: /won'*-bee/ (also, more plausibly, spelled

`wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans

who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from

biker slang] n. A would-be {hacker}. The connotations of this

term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the

subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering

{larval stage}, it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be

annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such

creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic,

writer, or {suit}, it is derogatory, implying that said person

is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't,

fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about.

Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication of the

{wannabee} nature. Compare {newbie}.

Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different

flavor now (1991) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the

people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in {larval

stage}, the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious

and unaffected by models known in popular culture --- communities

formed spontaneously around people who, *as individuals*, felt

irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees

experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become

similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever;

society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980

included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of folk hero,

and the result is that some people semi-consciously set out to

*be hackers* and borrow hackish prestige by fitting the

popular image of hackers. Fortunately, to do this really well, one

has to actually become a wizard. Nevertheless, old-time hackers

tend to share a poorly articulated disquiet about the change; among

other things, it gives them mixed feelings about the effects of

public compendia of lore like this one.

:warlording: [from the USENET group alt.fan.warlord] v. The act

of excoriating a bloated, ugly, or derivative {sig block}.

Common grounds for warlording include the presence of a signature

rendered in a {BUAF}, over-used or cliched {sig quote}s, ugly

{ASCII art}, or simply excessive size. The original `Warlord'

was a {BIFF}-like {newbie} c.1991 who featured in his sig a

particularly large and obnoxious ASCII graphic resembling the sword

of Conan the Barbarian in the 1981 John Milius movie; the group

name alt.fan.warlord was sarcasm, and the characteristic mode

of warlording is devastatingly sarcastic praise.

:warm boot: n. See {boot}.

:wart: n. A small, {crock}y {feature} that sticks out of an

otherwise {clean} design. Something conspicuous for localized

ugliness, especially a special-case exception to a general rule.

For example, in some versions of `csh(1)', single quotes

literalize every character inside them except `!'. In ANSI C,

the `??' syntax used obtaining ASCII characters in a foreign

environment is a wart. See also {miswart}.

:washing machine: n. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing

cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the

`top-loading' access to the media packs --- and, of course, they

were always set on `spin cycle'. The washing-machine idiom

transcends language barriers; it is even used in Russian hacker

jargon. See also {walking drives}. The thick channel cables

connecting these were called `bit hoses' (see {hose}).

:water MIPS: n. (see {MIPS}, sense 2) Large, water-cooled

machines of either today's ECL-supercomputer flavor or yesterday's

traditional {mainframe} type.

:wave a dead chicken: v. To perform a ritual in the direction of

crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but

is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an

appropriate degree of effort has been expended. "I'll wave a dead

chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an

OS bug." Compare {voodoo programming}, {rain dance}.

:weasel: n. [Cambridge] A na"ive user, one who deliberately or

accidentally does things that are stupid or ill-advised. Roughly

synonymous with {loser}.

:wedged: [from a common description of recto-cranial inversion]

adj. 1. To be stuck, incapable of proceeding without help. This

is different from having crashed. If the system has crashed, then

it has become totally non-functioning. If the system is wedged, it

is trying to do something but cannot make progress; it may be

capable of doing a few things, but not be fully operational. For

example, a process may become wedged if it {deadlock}s with

another (but not all instances of wedging are deadlocks). See also

{gronk}, {locked up}, {hosed}. Describes a

{deadlock}ed condition. 2. Often refers to humans suffering

misconceptions. "He's totally wedged --- he's convinced that he

can levitate through meditation." 3. [UNIX] Specifically used to

describe the state of a TTY left in a losing state by abort of a

screen-oriented program or one that has messed with the line

discipline in some obscure way.

:wedgie: [Fairchild] n. A bug. Prob. related to {wedged}.

:wedgitude: /wedj'i-t[y]ood/ n. The quality or state of being

{wedged}.

:weeble: /weeb'l/ [Cambridge] interj. Used to denote frustration,

usually at amazing stupidity. "I stuck the disk in upside down."

"Weeble...." Compare {gurfle}.

:weeds: n. 1. Refers to development projects or algorithms that have

no possible relevance or practical application. Comes from `off in

the weeds'. Used in phrases like "lexical analysis for microcode

is serious weeds...." 2. At CDC/ETA before its demise, the

phrase `go off in the weeds' was equivalent to IBM's {branch to

Fishkill} and mainstream hackerdom's {jump off into never-never

land}.

:weenie: n. 1. [on BBSes] Any of a species of luser resembling a

less amusing version of {BIFF} that infests many {BBS}

systems. The typical weenie is a teenage boy with poor social

skills travelling under a grandiose {handle} derived from

fantasy or heavy-metal rock lyrics. Among sysops, `the weenie

problem' refers to the marginally literate and profanity-laden

{flamage} weenies tend to spew all over a newly-discovered BBS.

Compare {spod}, {computer geek}, {terminal junkie}.

2. [Among hackers] When used with a qualifier (for example, as in

{UNIX weenie}, VMS weenie, IBM weenie) this can be either an

insult or a term of praise, depending on context, tone of voice,

and whether or not it is applied by a person who considers him or

herself to be the same sort of weenie. Implies that the weenie has

put a major investment of time, effort, and concentration into the

area indicated; whether this is positive or negative depends on the

hearer's judgment of how the speaker feels about that area. See

also {bigot}. 3. The semicolon character, `;' (ASCII

0111011).

:Weenix: /wee'niks/ [ITS] n. A derogatory term for {{UNIX}},

derived from {UNIX weenie}. According to one noted ex-ITSer, it

is "the operating system preferred by Unix Weenies: typified by

poor modularity, poor reliability, hard file deletion, no file

version numbers, case sensitivity everywhere, and users who believe

that these are all advantages". Some ITS fans behave as though

they believe UNIX stole a future that rightfully belonged to them.

See {{ITS}}, sense 2.

:well-behaved: adj. 1. [primarily {{MS-DOS}}] Said of software

conforming to system interface guidelines and standards.

Well-behaved software uses the operating system to do chores such

as keyboard input, allocating memory and drawing graphics. Oppose

{ill-behaved}. 2. Software that does its job quietly and

without counterintuitive effects. Esp. said of software having

an interface spec sufficiently simple and well-defined that it can

be used as a {tool} by other software. See {cat}.

:well-connected: adj. Said of a computer installation, this means

that it has reliable email links with the network and/or that

it relays a large fraction of available {USENET} newsgroups.

`Well-known' can be almost synonymous, but also implies that the

site's name is familiar to many (due perhaps to an archive service

or active USENET users).

:wetware: /wet'weir/ [prob. from the novels of Rudy Rucker] n.

1. The human nervous system, as opposed to computer hardware or

software. "Wetware has 7 plus or minus 2 temporary registers."

2. Human beings (programmers, operators, administrators) attached

to a computer system, as opposed to the system's hardware or

software. See {liveware}, {meatware}.

:whack: v. According to arch-hacker James Gosling, to "...modify a

program with no idea whatsoever how it works." (See {whacker}.)

It is actually possible to do this in nontrivial circumstances if

the change is small and well-defined and you are very good at

{glark}ing things from context. As a trivial example, it is

relatively easy to change all `stderr' writes to `stdout'

writes in a piece of C filter code which remains otherwise

mysterious.

:whacker: [University of Maryland: from {hacker}] n. 1. A person,

similar to a {hacker}, who enjoys exploring the details of

programmable systems and how to stretch their capabilities.

Whereas a hacker tends to produce great hacks, a whacker only ends

up whacking the system or program in question. Whackers are often

quite egotistical and eager to claim {wizard} status,

regardless of the views of their peers. 2. A person who is good at

programming quickly, though rather poorly and ineptly.

:whales: n. See {like kicking dead whales down the beach}.

:whalesong: n. The peculiar clicking and whooshing sounds made by a

PEP modem such as the Telebit Trailblazer as it tries to

synchronize with another PEP modem for their special high-speed

mode. This sound isn't anything like the normal two-tone handshake

between conventional modems and is instantly recognizable to anyone

who has heard it more than once. It sounds, in fact, very much

like whale songs. This noise is also called "the moose call" or

"moose tones".

:What's a spline?: [XEROX PARC] This phrase expands to: "You have

just used a term that I've heard for a year and a half, and I feel

I should know, but don't. My curiosity has finally overcome my

guilt." The PARC lexicon adds "Moral: don't hesitate to ask

questions, even if they seem obvious."

:wheel: [from slang `big wheel' for a powerful person] n. A

person who has an active {wheel bit}. "We need to find a

wheel to unwedge the hung tape drives." (see {wedged}, sense

1.)

:wheel bit: n. A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform

some restricted operation on a timesharing system, such as read or

write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or

look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the

system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts. The term was

invented on the TENEX operating system, and carried over to

TOPS-20, XEROX-IFS, and others. The state of being in a privileged

logon is sometimes called `wheel mode'. This term entered the

UNIX culture from TWENEX in the mid-1980s and has been gaining

popularity there (esp. at university sites). See also {root}.

:wheel wars: [Stanford University] A period in {larval stage}

during which student hackers hassle each other by attempting to log

each other out of the system, delete each other's files, and

otherwise wreak havoc, usually at the expense of the lesser users.

:White Book: n. 1. Syn. {K&R}. 2. Adobe's fourth book in the

PostScript series, describing the previously-secret format of Type

1 fonts; `Adobe Type 1 Font Format, version 1.1',

(Addison-Wesley, 1990, ISBN 0-201-57044-0). See also {Red Book},

{Green Book}, {Blue Book}.

:whizzy: [Sun] adj. (alt. `wizzy') Describes a {cuspy} program;

one that is feature-rich and well presented.

:WIBNI: // [Bell Labs: Wouldn't It Be Nice If] n. What most

requirements documents and specifications consist entirely of.

Compare {IWBNI}.

:widget: n. 1. A meta-thing. Used to stand for a real object in

didactic examples (especially database tutorials). Legend has it

that the original widgets were holders for buggy whips. "But

suppose the parts list for a widget has 52 entries...."

2. [poss. evoking `window gadget'] A user interface object in

{X} graphical user interfaces.

:wiggles: n. [scientific computation] In solving partial differential

equations by finite difference and similar methods, wiggles are

sawtooth (up-down-up-down) oscillations at the shortest wavelength

representable on the grid. If an algorithm is unstable, this is

often the most unstable waveform, so it grows to dominate the

solution. Alternatively, stable (though inaccurate) wiggles can be

generated near a discontinuity by a Gibbs phenomenon.

:WIMP environment: n. [acronymic from `Window, Icon, Menu, Pointing

device (or Pull-down menu)'] A graphical-user-interface-based

environment such as {X} or the Macintosh interface, as described

by a hacker who prefers command-line interfaces for their superior

flexibility and extensibility. See {menuitis},

{user-obsequious}.

:win: [MIT] 1. vi. To succeed. A program wins if no unexpected

conditions arise, or (especially) if it sufficiently {robust} to

take exceptions in stride. 2. n. Success, or a specific instance

thereof. A pleasing outcome. A {feature}. Emphatic forms:

`moby win', `super win', `hyper-win' (often used

interjectively as a reply). For some reason `suitable win' is

also common at MIT, usually in reference to a satisfactory solution

to a problem. Oppose {lose}; see also {big win}, which isn't

quite just an intensification of `win'.

:win big: vi. To experience serendipity. "I went shopping and won

big; there was a 2-for-1 sale." See {big win}.

:win win: interj. Expresses pleasure at a {win}.

:Winchester:: n. Informal generic term for `floating-head'

magnetic-disk drives in which the read-write head planes over the

disk surface on an air cushion. The name arose because the

original 1973 engineering prototype for what later became the

IBM 3340 featured two 30-megabyte volumes; 30--30 became

`Winchester' when somebody noticed the similarity to the common

term for a famous Winchester rifle (in the latter, the first 30

referred to caliber and the second to the grain weight of the

charge).

:winged comments: n. Comments set on the same line as code, as

opposed to {boxed comments}. In C, for example:

d = sqrt(x*x + y*y); /* distance from origin */

Generally these refer only to the action(s) taken on that line.

:winkey: n. (alt. `winkey face') See {emoticon}.

:winnage: /win'*j/ n. The situation when a lossage is corrected, or

when something is winning.

:winner: 1. n. An unexpectedly good situation, program, programmer,

or person. "So it turned out I could use a {lexer} generator

instead of hand-coding my own pattern recognizer. What a win!"

2. `real winner': Often sarcastic, but also used as high praise

(see also the note under {user}). "He's a real winner --- never

reports a bug till he can duplicate it and send in an

example."

:winnitude: /win'*-t[y]ood/ n. The quality of winning (as opposed

to {winnage}, which is the result of winning). "Guess what?

They tweaked the microcode and now the LISP interpreter runs twice

as fast as it used to." "That's really great! Boy, what

winnitude!" "Yup. I'll probably get a half-hour's winnage on the

next run of my program." Perhaps curiously, the obvious antonym

`lossitude' is rare.

:wired: n. See {hardwired}.

:wirehead: /wi:r'hed/ n. [prob. from SF slang for an

electrical-brain-stimulation addict] 1. A hardware hacker,

especially one who concentrates on communications hardware. 2. An

expert in local-area networks. A wirehead can be a network

software wizard too, but will always have the ability to deal with

network hardware, down to the smallest component. Wireheads are

known for their ability to lash up an Ethernet terminator from

spare resistors, for example.

:wirewater: n. Syn. {programming fluid}. This melds the

mainstream slang adjective `wired' (stimulated, up, hyperactive)

with `firewater'.

:wish list: n. A list of desired features or bug fixes that probably

won't get done for a long time, usually because the person

responsible for the code is too busy or can't think of a clean way

to do it. "OK, I'll add automatic filename completion to the wish

list for the new interface." Compare {tick-list features}.

:within delta of: adj. See {delta}.

:within epsilon of: adj. See {epsilon}.

:wizard: n. 1. A person who knows how a complex piece of software

or hardware works (that is, who {grok}s it); esp. someone who

can find and fix bugs quickly in an emergency. Someone is a

{hacker} if he or she has general hacking ability, but is a wizard

with respect to something only if he or she has specific detailed

knowledge of that thing. A good hacker could become a wizard for

something given the time to study it. 2. A person who is permitted

to do things forbidden to ordinary people; one who has {wheel}

privileges on a system. 3. A UNIX expert, esp. a UNIX systems

programmer. This usage is well enough established that `UNIX

Wizard' is a recognized job title at some corporations and to most

headhunters. See {guru}, {lord high fixer}. See also

{deep magic}, {heavy wizardry}, {incantation}, {magic},

{mutter}, {rain dance}, {voodoo programming}, {wave a

dead chicken}.

:Wizard Book: n. Hal Abelson and Jerry Sussman's `Structure

and Interpretation of Computer Programs' (MIT Press, 1984; ISBN

0-262-01077-1, an excellent computer science text used in

introductory courses at MIT. So called because of the wizard on

the jacket. One of the {bible}s of the LISP/Scheme

world. Also, less commonly, known as the {Purple Book}.

:wizard mode: [from {rogue}] n. A special access mode of a program or

system, usually passworded, that permits some users godlike

privileges. Generally not used for operating systems themselves

(`root mode' or `wheel mode' would be used instead).

:wizardly: adj. Pertaining to wizards. A wizardly {feature} is one

that only a wizard could understand or use properly.

:womb box: n. 1. [TMRC] Storage space for equipment. 2. [proposed]

A variety of hard-shell equipment case with heavy interior padding

and/or shaped carrier cutouts in a foam-rubber matrix; mundanely

called a `flight case'. Used for delicate test equipment,

electronics, and musical instruments.

:WOMBAT: [Waste Of Money, Brains, And Time] adj. Applied to problems

which are both profoundly {uninteresting} in themselves and

unlikely to benefit anyone interesting even if solved. Often used

in fanciful constructions such as `wrestling with a wombat'. See

also {crawling horror}, {SMOP}. Also note the rather different

usage as a metasyntactic variable in {{Commonwealth Hackish}}.

:wonky: /wong'kee/ [from Australian slang] adj. Yet another

approximate synonym for {broken}. Specifically connotes a

malfunction that produces behavior seen as crazy, humorous, or

amusingly perverse. "That was the day the printer's font logic

went wonky and everybody's listings came out in Tengwar." Also in

`wonked out'. See {funky}, {demented}, {bozotic}.

:woofer: [University of Waterloo] n. Some varieties of wide paper

for printers have a perforation 8.5 inches from the left margin

that allows the excess on the right-hand side to be torn off when

the print format is 80 columns or less wide. The right-hand excess

may be called `woofer'. This term (like {tweeter}, which see)

has been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown.

In audio jargon, the word refers to the bass speaker(s) on a

hi-fi.

:workaround: n. A temporary {kluge} inserted in a system under

development or test in order to avoid the effects of a {bug} or

{misfeature} so that work can continue. Theoretically,

workarounds are always replaced by {fix}es; in practice,

customers often find themselves living with workarounds in the

first couple of releases. "The code died on NUL characters in the

input, so I fixed it to interpret them as spaces." "That's not a

fix, that's a workaround!"

:working as designed: [IBM] adj. 1. In conformance to a wrong or

inappropriate specification; useful, but misdesigned.

2. Frequently used as a sardonic comment on a program's utility.

3. Unfortunately also used as a bogus reason for not accepting a

criticism or suggestion. At {IBM}, this sense is used in

official documents! See {BAD}.

:worm: [from `tapeworm' in John Brunner's novel `The

Shockwave Rider', via XEROX PARC] n. A program that propagates

itself over a network, reproducing itself as it goes. Compare

{virus}. Nowadays the term has negative connotations, as it is

assumed that only {cracker}s write worms. Perhaps the

best-known example was Robert T. Morris's `Internet Worm' of 1988,

a `benign' one that got out of control and hogged hundreds of

Suns and VAXen across the U.S. See also {cracker}, {RTM},

{Trojan horse}, {ice}, and {Great Worm, the}.

:wound around the axle: adj. In an infinite loop. Often used by older

computer types.

:wrap around: vi. (also n. `wraparound' and v. shorthand

`wrap') 1. [techspeak] The action of a counter that starts over

at zero or at `minus infinity' (see {infinity}) after its

maximum value has been reached, and continues incrementing, either

because it is programmed to do so or because of an overflow (as

when a car's odometer starts over at 0). 2. To change {phase}

gradually and continuously by maintaining a steady wake-sleep cycle

somewhat longer than 24 hours, e.g., living six long (28-hour) days

in a week (or, equivalently, sleeping at the rate of

10 microhertz). See also {phase-wrapping}.

:write-only code: [a play on `read-only memory'] n. Code so

arcane, complex, or ill-structured that it cannot be modified or

even comprehended by anyone but its author, and possibly not even

by him/her. A {Bad Thing}.

:write-only language: n. A language with syntax (or semantics)

sufficiently dense and bizarre that any routine of significant size

is {write-only code}. A sobriquet applied occasionally to C and

often to APL, though {INTERCAL} and {TECO} certainly deserve it

more.

:write-only memory: n. The obvious antonym to `read-only

memory'. Out of frustration with the long and seemingly useless

chain of approvals required of component specifications, during

which no actual checking seemed to occur, an engineer at Signetics

once created a specification for a write-only memory and included

it with a bunch of other specifications to be approved. This

inclusion came to the attention of Signetics {management} only

when regular customers started calling and asking for pricing

information. Signetics published a corrected edition of the data

book and requested the return of the `erroneous' ones. Later,

around 1974, Signetics bought a double-page spread in `Electronics'

magazine's April issue and used the spec as an April Fools' Day

joke. Instead of the more conventional characteristic curves, the

25120 "fully encoded, 9046 x N, Random Access, write-only-memory"

data sheet included diagrams of "bit capacity vs. Temp.",

"Iff vs. Vff", "Number of pins remaining vs. number of socket

insertions", and "AQL vs. selling price". The 25120 required a

6.3 VAC VFF supply, a +10V VCC, and VDD of 0V, +/- 2%.

:Wrong Thing: n. A design, action, or decision that is clearly

incorrect or inappropriate. Often capitalized; always emphasized

in speech as if capitalized. The opposite of the {Right Thing};

more generally, anything that is not the Right Thing. In cases

where `the good is the enemy of the best', the merely good ---

although good --- is nevertheless the Wrong Thing. "In C, the

default is for module-level declarations to be visible everywhere,

rather than just within the module. This is clearly the Wrong

Thing."

:wugga wugga: /wuh'g* wuh'g*/ n. Imaginary sound that a computer

program makes as it labors with a tedious or difficult task.

Compare {cruncha cruncha cruncha}, {grind} (sense 4).

:WYSIAYG: /wiz'ee-ayg/ adj. Describes a user interface under

which "What You See Is *All* You Get"; an unhappy variant of

{WYSIWYG}. Visual, `point-and-shoot'-style interfaces tend to

have easy initial learning curves, but also to lack depth; they

often frustrate advanced users who would be better served by a

command-style interface. When this happens, the frustrated user

has a WYSIAYG problem. This term is most often used of editors,

word processors, and document formatting programs. WYSIWYG

`desktop publishing' programs, for example, are a clear win for

creating small documents with lots of fonts and graphics in them,

especially things like newsletters and presentation slides. When

typesetting book-length manuscripts, on the other hand, scale

changes the nature of the task; one quickly runs into WYSIAYG

limitations, and the increased power and flexibility of a

command-driven formatter like TeX or UNIX's `troff(1)' becomes

not just desirable but a necessity.

:WYSIWYG: /wiz'ee-wig/ adj. Describes a user interface under

which "What You See Is What You Get", as opposed to one that uses

more-or-less obscure commands which do not result in immediate

visual feedback. True WYSIWYG in environments supporting multiple

fonts or graphics is a a rarely-attained ideal; there are variants

of this term to express real-world manifestations including

WYSIAWYG (What You See Is *Almost* What You Get) and

WYSIMOLWYG (What You See Is More or Less What You Get). All these

can be mildly derogatory, as they are often used to refer to

dumbed-down {user-friendly} interfaces targeted at

non-programmers; a hacker has no fear of obscure commands (compare

{WYSIAYG}). On the other hand, {EMACS} was one of the very first

WYSIWYG editors, replacing (actually, at first overlaying) the

extremely obscure, command-based {TECO}. See also {WIMP

environment}. [Oddly enough, WYSIWYG has already made it into the

OED, in lower case yet. --- ESR]

= X =

=====

:X: /X/ n. 1. Used in various speech and writing contexts (also

in lowercase) in roughly its algebraic sense of `unknown within a

set defined by context' (compare {N}). Thus, the abbreviation

680x0 stands for 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030, or 68040, and 80x86

stands for 80186, 80286 80386 or 80486 (note that a UNIX hacker

might write these as 680[0-4]0 and 80[1-4]86 or 680?0 and 80?86

respectively; see {glob}). 2. [after the name of an earlier

window system called `W'] An over-sized, over-featured,

over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system

developed at MIT and widely used on UNIX systems.

:XEROX PARC: The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a

decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an

astonishing volume of groundbreaking hardware and software

innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons style of software

interface was invented there. So was the laser printer, and the

local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines anticipated the

poweful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly, these

prophets were without honor in their own company; so much so that

it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place characterized

by developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.

:XOFF: /X'of/ n. Syn. {control-S}.

:XON: /X'on/ n. Syn. {control-Q}.

:xor: /X'or/, /kzor/ conj. Exclusive or. `A xor B' means

`A or B, but not both'. "I want to get cherry pie xor a

banana split." This derives from the technical use of the term as

a function on truth-values that is true if exactly one of its two

arguments is true.

:xref: /X'ref/ vt., n. Hackish standard abbreviation for

`cross-reference'.

:XXX: /X-X-X/ n. A marker that attention is needed.

Commonly used in program comments to indicate areas that are kluged

up or need to be. Some hackers liken `XXX' to the notional

heavy-porn movie rating.

:xyzzy: /X-Y-Z-Z-Y/, /X-Y-ziz'ee/, /ziz'ee/, or /ik-ziz'ee/

[from the ADVENT game] adj. The {canonical} `magic word'.

This comes from {ADVENT}, in which the idea is to explore an

underground cave with many rooms and to collect the treasures you

find there. If you type `xyzzy' at the appropriate time, you can

move instantly between two otherwise distant points. If,

therefore, you encounter some bit of {magic}, you might remark

on this quite succinctly by saying simply "Xyzzy!" "Ordinarily

you can't look at someone else's screen if he has protected it, but

if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you do it

anyway." "Xyzzy!" Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an

undocumented no-op command on several OSes; in Data General's

AOS/VS, for example, it would typically respond "Nothing

happens", just as {ADVENT} did if the magic was invoked at the

wrong spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled

the word. In more recent 32-bit versions, by the way, AOS/VS

responds "Twice as much happens". See also {plugh}.

= Y =

=====

:YA-: [Yet Another] abbrev. In hackish acronyms this almost

invariably expands to {Yet Another}, following the precedent set

by UNIX `yacc(1)' (Yet Another Compiler-Compiler). See

{YABA}.

:YABA: /ya'b*/ [Cambridge] n. Yet Another Bloody Acronym.

Whenever some program is being named, someone invariably suggests

that it be given a name that is acronymic. The response from those

with a trace of originality is to remark ironically that the

proposed name would then be `YABA-compatible'. Also used in

response to questions like "What is WYSIWYG?" See also

{TLA}.

:YAUN: /yawn/ [Acronym for `Yet Another UNIX Nerd'] n. Reported

from the San Diego Computer Society (predominantly a microcomputer

users' group) as a good-natured punning insult aimed at UNIX

zealots.

:Yellow Book: [proposed] n. The print version of this Jargon File;

`The New Hacker's Dictionary', MIT Press, 1991 (ISBN

0-262-68069-6). Includes all the material in the 2.9.6 version of

the File, plus a Foreword by Guy L. Steele Jr. and a Preface by

Eric S. Raymond. Most importantly, the book version is nicely

typeset and includes almost all of the infamous Crunchly cartoons

by the Great Quux, each attached to an appropriate entry.

:yellow wire: [IBM] n. Repair wires used when connectors

(especially ribbon connectors) got broken due to some schlemiel

pinching them, or to reconnect cut traces after the FE mistakenly

cut one. Compare {blue wire}, {purple wire}, {red wire}.

:Yet Another: adj. [From UNIX's `yacc(1)', `Yet Another

Compiler-Compiler', a LALR parser generator] 1. Of your own work: A

humorous allusion often used in titles to acknowledge that the

topic is not original, though the content is. As in `Yet Another

AI Group' or `Yet Another Simulated Annealing Algorithm'. 2. Of

others' work: Describes something of which there are already far

too many. See also {YA-}, {YABA}, {YAUN}.

:You are not expected to understand this: cav. [UNIX] The canonical

comment describing something {magic} or too complicated to

bother explaining properly. From an infamous comment in the

context-switching code of the V6 UNIX kernel.

:You know you've been hacking too long when...: The set-up line

for a genre of one-liners told by hackers about themselves. These

include the following:

* not only do you check your email more often than your paper

mail, but you remember your {network address} faster than your

postal one.

* your {SO} kisses you on the neck and the first thing you

think is "Uh, oh, {priority interrupt}."

* you go to balance your checkbook and discover that you're

doing it in octal.

* your computers have a higher street value than your car.

* in your universe, `round numbers' are powers of 2, not 10.

* more than once, you have woken up recalling a dream in

some programming language.

* you realize you have never seen half of your best friends.

[An early version of this entry said "All but one of these

have been reliably reported as hacker traits (some of them quite

often). Even hackers may have trouble spotting the ringer." The

ringer was balancing one's checkbook in octal, which I made up out

of whole cloth. Although more respondents picked that one

out as fiction than any of the others, I also received multiple

independent reports of its actually happening. --- ESR]

:Your mileage may vary: cav. [from the standard disclaimer attached

to EPA mileage ratings by American car manufacturers] 1. A ritual

warning often found in UNIX freeware distributions. Translates

roughly as "Hey, I tried to write this portably, but who

*knows* what'll happen on your system?" 2. A qualifier more

generally attached to advice. "I find that sending flowers works

well, but your mileage may vary."

:Yow!: /yow/ [from "Zippy the Pinhead" comix] interj. A favored hacker

expression of humorous surprise or emphasis. "Yow! Check out what

happens when you twiddle the foo option on this display hack!"

Compare {gurfle}.

:yoyo mode: n. The state in which the system is said to be when it

rapidly alternates several times between being up and being down.

Interestingly (and perhaps not by coincidence), many hardware

vendors give out free yoyos at Usenix exhibits.

Sun Microsystems gave out logoized yoyos at SIGPLAN '88. Tourists

staying at one of Atlanta's most respectable hotels were

subsequently treated to the sight of 200 of the country's top

computer scientists testing yo-yo algorithms in the lobby.

:Yu-Shiang Whole Fish: /yoo-shyang hohl fish/ n. obs. The

character gamma (extended SAIL ASCII 0001001), which with a loop in

its tail looks like a little fish swimming down the page. The term

is actually the name of a Chinese dish in which a fish is cooked

whole (not {parse}d) and covered with Yu-Shiang (or Yu-Hsiang)

sauce. Usage: primarily by people on the MIT LISP Machine, which

could display this character on the screen. Tends to elicit

incredulity from people who hear about it second-hand.

= Z =

=====

:zap: 1. n. Spiciness. 2. vt. To make food spicy. 3. vt. To make

someone `suffer' by making his food spicy. (Most hackers love

spicy food. Hot-and-sour soup is considered wimpy unless it makes

you wipe your nose for the rest of the meal.) See {zapped}.

4. vt. To modify, usually to correct; esp. used when the action

is performed with a debugger or binary patching tool. Also implies

surgical precision. "Zap the debug level to 6 and run it again."

In the IBM mainframe world, binary patches are applied to programs

or to the OS with a program called `superzap', whose file name is

`IMASPZAP' (possibly contrived from I M A SuPerZAP). 5. vt. To

erase or reset. 6. To {fry} a chip with static electricity.

"Uh oh --- I think that lightning strike may have zapped the disk

controller."

:zapped: adj. Spicy. This term is used to distinguish between food

that is hot (in temperature) and food that is *spicy*-hot.

For example, the Chinese appetizer Bon Bon Chicken is a kind of

chicken salad that is cold but zapped; by contrast, {vanilla}

wonton soup is hot but not zapped. See also {{oriental food}},

{laser chicken}. See {zap}, senses 1 and 2.

:zen: vt. To figure out something by meditation or by a sudden flash

of enlightenment. Originally applied to bugs, but occasionally

applied to problems of life in general. "How'd you figure out the

buffer allocation problem?" "Oh, I zenned it." Contrast {grok},

which connotes a time-extended version of zenning a system.

Compare {hack mode}. See also {guru}.

:zero: vt. 1. To set to 0. Usually said of small pieces of data,

such as bits or words (esp. in the construction `zero out'). 2. To

erase; to discard all data from. Said of disks and directories,

where `zeroing' need not involve actually writing zeroes throughout

the area being zeroed. One may speak of something being

`logically zeroed' rather than being `physically zeroed'. See

{scribble}.

:zero-content: adj. Syn. {content-free}.

:zeroth: /zee'rohth/ adj. First. Among software designers, comes

from C's and LISP's 0-based indexing of arrays. Hardware people

also tend to start counting at 0 instead of 1; this is natural

since, e.g., the 256 states of 8 bits correspond to the binary

numbers 0, 1, ..., 255 and the digital devices known as `counters'

count in this way.

Hackers and computer scientists often like to call the first

chapter of a publication `chapter 0', especially if it is of an

introductory nature (one of the classic instances was in the First

Edition of {K&R}). In recent years this trait has also been

observed among many pure mathematicians (who have an independent

tradition of numbering from 0). Zero-based numbering tends to

reduce {fencepost error}s, though it cannot eliminate them

entirely.

:zigamorph: /zig'*-morf/ n. Hex FF (11111111) when used as a

delimiter or {fence} character. Usage: primarily at IBM

shops.

:zip: [primarily MS-DOS] vt. To create a compressed archive from a

group of files using PKWare's PKZIP or a compatible archiver. Its

use is spreading now that portable implementations of the algorithm

have been written. Commonly used as follows: "I'll zip it up and

send it to you." See {arc}, {tar and feather}.

:zipperhead: [IBM] n. A person with a closed mind.

:zombie: [UNIX] n. A process that has died but has not yet

relinquished its process table slot (because the parent process

hasn't executed a `wait(2)' for it yet). These can be seen in

`ps(1)' listings occasionally. Compare {orphan}.

:zorch: /zorch/ 1. [TMRC] v. To attack with an inverse heat sink.

2. [TMRC] v. To travel, with v approaching c [that

is, with velocity approaching lightspeed --- ESR]. 3. [MIT] v. To

propel something very quickly. "The new comm software is very

fast; it really zorches files through the network." 4. [MIT] n.

Influence. Brownie points. Good karma. The intangible and fuzzy

currency in which favors are measured. "I'd rather not ask him

for that just yet; I think I've used up my quota of zorch with him

for the week." 5. [MIT] n. Energy, drive, or ability. "I think

I'll {punt} that change for now; I've been up for 30 hours

and I've run out of zorch."

:Zork: /zork/ n. The second of the great early experiments in computer

fantasy gaming; see {ADVENT}. Originally written on MIT-DM

during the late 1970s, later distributed with BSD UNIX (as a patched,

sourceless RT-11 Fortran binary; see {retrocomputing}) and

commercialized as `The Zork Trilogy' by Infocom.

:zorkmid: /zork'mid/ n. The canonical unit of currency in

hacker-written games. This originated in {zork} but has spread

to {nethack} and is referred to in several other games.

= [^A-Za-z] (see {regexp}) =

============================

:'Snooze: /snooz/ [FidoNet] n. Fidonews, the weekly official on-line

newsletter of FidoNet. As the editorial policy of Fidonews is

"anything that arrives, we print", there are often large articles

completely unrelated to FidoNet, which in turn tend to elicit

{flamage} in subsequent issues.

:(TM): // [USENET] ASCII rendition of the trademark-superscript symbol

appended to phrases that the author feels should be recorded for

posterity, perhaps in future editions of this lexicon. Sometimes

used ironically as a form of protest against the recent spate of

software and algorithm patents and `look and feel' lawsuits. See

also {UN*X}.

:-oid: [from `android'] suff. 1. This suffix is used as in

mainstream English to indicate a poor imitation, a counterfeit, or

some otherwise slightly bogus resemblance. Hackers will happily

use it with all sorts of non-Greco/Latin stem words that wouldn't

keep company with it in mainstream English. For example, "He's a

nerdoid" means that he superficially resembles a nerd but can't

make the grade; a `modemoid' might be a 300-baud box (Real Modems

run at 9600); a `computeroid' might be any {bitty box}. The

word `keyboid' could be used to describe a {chiclet keyboard},

but would have to be written; spoken, it would confuse the listener

as to the speaker's city of origin. 2. There is a more specific

sense of `oid' as an indicator for `resembling an android'

which in the past has been confined to science-fiction fans and

hackers. It too has recently (in 1991) started to go mainstream

(most notably in the term `trendoid' for victims of terminal

hipness). This is probably traceable to the popularization of the

term {droid} in "Star Wars" and its sequels.

Coinages in both forms have been common in science fiction for at

least fifty years, and hackers (who are often SF fans) have

probably been making `-oid' jargon for almost that long

[though GLS and I can personally confirm only that they were

already common in the mid-1970s --- ESR].

:-ware: [from `software'] suff. Commonly used to form jargon terms

for classes of software. For examples, see {careware},

{crippleware}, {crudware}, {freeware}, {fritterware},

{guiltware}, {liveware}, {meatware}, {payware},

{psychedelicware}, {shareware}, {shelfware}, {vaporware},

{wetware}.

:/dev/null: /dev-nuhl/ [from the UNIX null device, used as a data

sink] n. A notional `black hole' in any information space being

discussed, used, or referred to. A controversial posting, for

example, might end "Kudos to rasputin@kremlin.org, flames to

/dev/null". See {bit bucket}.

:0: Numeric zero, as opposed to `O' (the 15th letter of the English

alphabet). In their unmodified forms they look a lot alike, and

various kluges invented to make them visually distinct have

compounded the confusion. If your zero is center-dotted and

letter-O is not, or if letter-O looks almost rectangular but zero

more like an American football stood on end, you're probably

looking at a modern character display (though the dotted zero seems

to have originated as an option on IBM 3270 controllers). If your

zero is slashed but letter-O is not, you're probably looking at an

old-style ASCII graphic set descended from the default typewheel on

the venerable ASR-33 Teletype (Scandinavians, for whom slashed-O is

a letter, curse this arrangement). If letter-O has a slash across

it and the zero does not, your display is tuned for a very old

convention used at IBM and a few other early mainframe makers

(Scandinavians curse *this* arrangement even more, because it

means two of their letters collide). Some Burroughs/Unisys

equipment displays a zero with a *reversed* slash. And yet

another convention common on early line printers left zero

unornamented but added a tail or hook to the letter-O so that it

resembled an inverted Q or cursive capital letter-O. Are we

sufficiently confused yet?

:1TBS: // n. The "One True Brace Style"; see {indent style}.

:120 reset: /wuhn-twen'tee ree'set/ [from 120 volts, U.S. wall

voltage] n. To cycle power on a machine in order to reset or unjam

it. Compare {Big Red Switch}, {power cycle}.

:2: infix. In translation software written by hackers, infix 2 often

represents the syllable *to* with the connotation

`translate to': as in dvi2ps (DVI to PostScript), int2string

(integer to string), and texi2roff (Texinfo to [nt]roff).

:@-party: /at'par`tee/ [from the @-sign in an Internet address]

n. (alt. `@-sign party' /at'si:n par`tee/) A semi-closed

party thrown for hackers at a science-fiction convention (esp.

the annual Worldcon); one must have a {network address} to

get in, or at least be in company with someone who does. One of

the most reliable opportunities for hackers to meet face to face

with people who might otherwise be represented by mere phosphor

dots on their screens. Compare {boink}.

:@Begin: // See {\begin}.

:\begin: // [from the LaTeX command] With \end, used

humorously in writing to indicate a context or to remark on the

surrounded text. For example:

\begin{flame}

Predicate logic is the only good programming

language. Anyone who would use anything else

is an idiot. Also, all computers should be

tredecimal instead of binary.

\end{flame}

The Scribe users at CMU and elsewhere used to use @Begin/@End in

an identical way (LaTeX was built to resemble Scribe). On USENET,

this construct would more frequently be rendered as `<FLAME ON>'

and `<FLAME OFF>'.

:(Lexicon Entries End Here):

:Appendix A: Hacker Folklore

****************************

This appendix contains several legends and fables that illuminate the

meaning of various entries in the lexicon.

:The Meaning of `Hack':

=======================

"The word {hack} doesn't really have 69 different meanings", according

to MIT hacker Phil Agre. "In fact, {hack} has only one meaning, an

extremely subtle and profound one which defies articulation. Which

connotation is implied by a given use of the word depends in similarly

profound ways on the context. Similar remarks apply to a couple of

other hacker words, most notably {random}."

Hacking might be characterized as `an appropriate application of

ingenuity'. Whether the result is a quick-and-dirty patchwork job or a

carefully crafted work of art, you have to admire the cleverness that

went into it.

An important secondary meaning of {hack} is `a creative practical joke'.

This kind of hack is easier to explain to non-hackers than the

programming kind. Of course, some hacks have both natures; see the

lexicon entries for {pseudo} and {kgbvax}. But here are some examples

of pure practical jokes that illustrate the hacking spirit:

In 1961, students from Caltech (California Institute of Technology,

in Pasadena) hacked the Rose Bowl football game. One student posed

as a reporter and `interviewed' the director of the University of

Washington card stunts (such stunts involve people in the stands

who hold up colored cards to make pictures). The reporter learned

exactly how the stunts were operated, and also that the director

would be out to dinner later.

While the director was eating, the students (who called themselves

the `Fiendish Fourteen') picked a lock and stole a blank direction

sheet for the card stunts. They then had a printer run off 2300

copies of the blank. The next day they picked the lock again and

stole the master plans for the stunts --- large sheets of graph

paper colored in with the stunt pictures. Using these as a guide,

they made new instructions for three of the stunts on the

duplicated blanks. Finally, they broke in once more, replacing the

stolen master plans and substituting the stack of diddled

instruction sheets for the original set.

The result was that three of the pictures were totally different.

Instead of `WASHINGTON', the word ``CALTECH' was flashed. Another

stunt showed the word `HUSKIES', the Washington nickname, but

spelled it backwards. And what was supposed to have been a picture

of a husky instead showed a beaver. (Both Caltech and MIT use the

beaver --- nature's engineer --- as a mascot.)

After the game, the Washington faculty athletic representative

said: "Some thought it ingenious; others were indignant." The

Washington student body president remarked: "No hard feelings, but

at the time it was unbelievable. We were amazed."

This is now considered a classic hack, particularly because revising the

direction sheets constituted a form of programming.

Here is another classic hack:

On November 20, 1982, MIT hacked the Harvard-Yale football game.

Just after Harvard's second touchdown against Yale, in the first

quarter, a small black ball popped up out of the ground at the

40-yard line, and grew bigger, and bigger, and bigger. The letters

`MIT' appeared all over the ball. As the players and officials

stood around gawking, the ball grew to six feet in diameter and

then burst with a bang and a cloud of white smoke.

The `Boston Globe' later reported: "If you want to know the truth,

MIT won The Game."

The prank had taken weeks of careful planning by members of MIT's

Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity. The device consisted of a weather

balloon, a hydraulic ram powered by Freon gas to lift it out of the

ground, and a vacuum-cleaner motor to inflate it. They made eight

separate expeditions to Harvard Stadium between 1 and 5 A.M.,

locating an unused 110-volt circuit in the stadium and running

buried wires from the stadium circuit to the 40-yard line, where

they buried the balloon device. When the time came to activate the

device, two fraternity members had merely to flip a circuit breaker

and push a plug into an outlet.

This stunt had all the earmarks of a perfect hack: surprise,

publicity, the ingenious use of technology, safety, and

harmlessness. The use of manual control allowed the prank to be

timed so as not to disrupt the game (it was set off between plays,

so the outcome of the game would not be unduly affected). The

perpetrators had even thoughtfully attached a note to the balloon

explaining that the device was not dangerous and contained no

explosives.

Harvard president Derek Bok commented: "They have an awful lot of

clever people down there at MIT, and they did it again." President

Paul E. Gray of MIT said: "There is absolutely no truth to the

rumor that I had anything to do with it, but I wish there were."

The hacks above are verifiable history; they can be proved to have

happened. Many other classic-hack stories from MIT and elsewhere,

though retold as history, have the characteristics of what Jan Brunvand

has called `urban folklore' (see {FOAF}). Perhaps the best known of

these is the legend of the infamous trolley-car hack, an alleged

incident in which engineering students are said to have welded a trolley

car to its tracks with thermite. Numerous versions of this have been

recorded from the 1940s to the present, most set at MIT but at least one

very detailed version set at CMU.

Brian Leibowitz has researched MIT hacks both real and mythical

extensively; the interested reader is referred to his delightful

pictorial compendium `The Journal of the Institute for Hacks,

Tomfoolery, and Pranks' (MIT Museum, 1990; ISBN 0-917027-03-5).

Finally, here is a story about one of the classic computer hacks.

Back in the mid-1970s, several of the system support staff at

Motorola discovered a relatively simple way to crack system

security on the Xerox CP-V timesharing system. Through a simple

programming strategy, it was possible for a user program to trick

the system into running a portion of the program in `master mode'

(supervisor state), in which memory protection does not apply. The

program could then poke a large value into its `privilege level'

byte (normally write-protected) and could then proceed to bypass

all levels of security within the file-management system, patch the

system monitor, and do numerous other interesting things. In

short, the barn door was wide open.

Motorola quite properly reported this problem to Xerox via an

official `level 1 SIDR' (a bug report with an intended urgency of

`needs to be fixed yesterday'). Because the text of each SIDR was

entered into a database that could be viewed by quite a number of

people, Motorola followed the approved procedure: they simply

reported the problem as `Security SIDR', and attached all of the

necessary documentation, ways-to-reproduce, etc.

The CP-V people at Xerox sat on their thumbs; they either didn't

realize the severity of the problem, or didn't assign the necessary

operating-system-staff resources to develop and distribute an

official patch.

Months passed. The Motorola guys pestered their Xerox

field-support rep, to no avail. Finally they decided to take

direct action, to demonstrate to Xerox management just how easily

the system could be cracked and just how thoroughly the security

safeguards could be subverted.

They dug around in the operating-system listings and devised a

thoroughly devilish set of patches. These patches were then

incorporated into a pair of programs called `Robin Hood' and `Friar

Tuck'. Robin Hood and Friar Tuck were designed to run as `ghost

jobs' (daemons, in UNIX terminology); they would use the existing

loophole to subvert system security, install the necessary patches,

and then keep an eye on one another's statuses in order to keep the

system operator (in effect, the superuser) from aborting them.

One fine day, the system operator on the main CP-V software

development system in El Segundo was surprised by a number of

unusual phenomena. These included the following:

* Tape drives would rewind and dismount their tapes in the

middle of a job.

* Disk drives would seek back and forth so rapidly that they

would attempt to walk across the floor (see {walking drives}).

* The card-punch output device would occasionally start up of

itself and punch a {lace card}. These would usually jam in

the punch.

* The console would print snide and insulting messages from

Robin Hood to Friar Tuck, or vice versa.

* The Xerox card reader had two output stackers; it could be

instructed to stack into A, stack into B, or stack into A

(unless a card was unreadable, in which case the bad card was

placed into stacker B). One of the patches installed by the

ghosts added some code to the card-reader driver... after

reading a card, it would flip over to the opposite stacker.

As a result, card decks would divide themselves in half when

they were read, leaving the operator to recollate them

manually.

Naturally, the operator called in the operating-system developers.

They found the bandit ghost jobs running, and X'ed them... and were

once again surprised. When Robin Hood was X'ed, the following

sequence of events took place:

!X id1

id1: Friar Tuck... I am under attack! Pray save me!

id1: Off (aborted)

id2: Fear not, friend Robin! I shall rout the Sheriff

of Nottingham's men!

id1: Thank you, my good fellow!

Each ghost-job would detect the fact that the other had been

killed, and would start a new copy of the recently slain program

within a few milliseconds. The only way to kill both ghosts was to

kill them simultaneously (very difficult) or to deliberately crash

the system.

Finally, the system programmers did the latter --- only to find

that the bandits appeared once again when the system rebooted! It

turned out that these two programs had patched the boot-time OS

image (the kernel file, in UNIX terms) and had added themselves to

the list of programs that were to be started at boot time.

The Robin Hood and Friar Tuck ghosts were finally eradicated when

the system staff rebooted the system from a clean boot-tape and

reinstalled the monitor. Not long thereafter, Xerox released a

patch for this problem.

It is alleged that Xerox filed a complaint with Motorola's management

about the merry-prankster actions of the two employees in question.

It is not recorded that any serious disciplinary action was taken

against either of them.

:TV Typewriters: A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity

============================================

Here is a true story about a glass tty: One day an MIT hacker was in a

motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in the hospital

quite a while, and got restless because he couldn't {hack}. Two of his

friends therefore took a terminal and a modem for it to the hospital, so

that he could use the computer by telephone from his hospital bed.

Now this happened some years before the spread of home computers, and

computer terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person.

When the two friends got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and asked

what they were carrying. They explained that they wanted to take a

computer terminal to their friend who was a patient.

The guard got out his list of things that patients were permitted to

have in their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape player,

... no computer terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the list, so

the guard wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know. (This guard

was clearly a {droid}.)

Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were

frustrated, of course, because they knew that the terminal was as

harmless as a TV or anything else on the list... which gave them an

idea.

The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard stopped

them and asked what they were carrying. They said: "This is a TV

typewriter!" The guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and

demonstrated it. "See? You just type on the keyboard and what you type

shows up on the TV screen." Now the guard didn't stop to think about

how utterly useless a typewriter would be that didn't produce any paper

copies of what you typed; but this was clearly a TV typewriter, no doubt

about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all right, a typewriter is

all right ... okay, take it on in!"

[Historical note: Many years ago, `Popular Electronics' published

solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the essential

uselessness of the device, it was an enormously popular project.

Steve Ciarcia, the man behind `Byte' magazine's "Circuit Cellar"

feature, resurrected this ghost in one of his books of the early

1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly) to the

feeling of power the builder could achieve by being able to decide

himself what would be shown on the TV. --- ESR]

:A Story About `Magic': (by GLS)

================================

Some years ago, I was snooping around in the cabinets that housed the

MIT AI Lab's PDP-10, and noticed a little switch glued to the frame of

one cabinet. It was obviously a homebrew job, added by one of the lab's

hardware hackers (no one knows who).

You don't touch an unknown switch on a computer without knowing what it

does, because you might crash the computer. The switch was labeled in a

most unhelpful way. It had two positions, and scrawled in pencil on the

metal switch body were the words `magic' and `more magic'. The switch

was in the `more magic' position.

I called another hacker over to look at it. He had never seen the

switch before either. Closer examination revealed that the switch had

only one wire running to it! The other end of the wire did disappear

into the maze of wires inside the computer, but it's a basic fact of

electricity that a switch can't do anything unless there are two wires

connected to it. This switch had a wire connected on one side and no

wire on its other side.

It was clear that this switch was someone's idea of a silly joke.

Convinced by our reasoning that the switch was inoperative, we flipped

it. The computer instantly crashed.

Imagine our utter astonishment. We wrote it off as coincidence, but

nevertheless restored the switch to the `more magic' position before

reviving the computer.

A year later, I told this story to yet another hacker, David Moon as I

recall. He clearly doubted my sanity, or suspected me of a supernatural

belief in the power of this switch, or perhaps thought I was fooling him

with a bogus saga. To prove it to him, I showed him the very switch,

still glued to the cabinet frame with only one wire connected to it,

still in the `more magic' position. We scrutinized the switch and its

lone connection, and found that the other end of the wire, though

connected to the computer wiring, was connected to a ground pin. That

clearly made the switch doubly useless: not only was it electrically

nonoperative, but it was connected to a place that couldn't affect

anything anyway. So we flipped the switch.

The computer promptly crashed.

This time we ran for Richard Greenblatt, a long-time MIT hacker, who was

close at hand. He had never noticed the switch before, either. He

inspected it, concluded it was useless, got some diagonal cutters and

{dike}d it out. We then revived the computer and it has run fine ever

since.

We still don't know how the switch crashed the machine. There is a

theory that some circuit near the ground pin was marginal, and

flipping the switch changed the electrical capacitance enough to upset

the circuit as millionth-of-a-second pulses went through it. But

we'll never know for sure; all we can really say is that the switch

was {magic}.

I still have that switch in my basement. Maybe I'm silly, but I

usually keep it set on `more magic'.

:A Selection of AI Koans:

=========================

These are some of the funniest examples of a genre of jokes told at the

MIT AI Lab about various noted hackers. The original koans were

composed by Danny Hillis. In reading these, it is at least useful to

know that Minsky, Sussman, and Drescher are AI researchers of note, that

Tom Knight was one of the Lisp machine's principal designers, and that

David Moon wrote much of Lisp machine Lisp.

* * *

A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power

off and on.

Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You cannot

fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is

going wrong."

Knight turned the machine off and on.

The machine worked.

* * *

One day a student came to Moon and said: "I understand how to make a

better garbage collector. We must keep a reference count of the

pointers to each cons."

Moon patiently told the student the following story:

"One day a student came to Moon and said: `I understand how to make

a better garbage collector...

[Ed. note: Pure reference-count garbage collectors have problems with

circular structures that point to themselves.]

* * *

In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat

hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe"

Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman

said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

* * *

A disciple of another sect once came to Drescher as he was eating his

morning meal.

"I would like to give you this personality test", said the outsider,

"because I want you to be happy."

Drescher took the paper that was offered him and put it into the

toaster, saying: "I wish the toaster to be happy, too."

:OS and JEDGAR:

===============

This story says a lot about the the ITS ethos.

On the ITS system there was a program that allowed you to see what was

being printed on someone else's terminal. It spied on the other guy's

output by examining the insides of the monitor system. The output spy

program was called OS. Throughout the rest of the computer science (and

at IBM too) OS means `operating system', but among old-time ITS hackers

it almost always meant `output spy'.

OS could work because ITS purposely had very little in the way of

`protection' that prevented one user from trespassing on another's

areas. Fair is fair, however. There was another program that would

automatically notify you if anyone started to spy on your output. It

worked in exactly the same way, by looking at the insides of the

operating system to see if anyone else was looking at the insides that

had to do with your output. This `counterspy' program was called JEDGAR

(a six-letterism pronounced as two syllables: /jed'gr/), in honor of the

former head of the FBI.

But there's more. JEDGAR would ask the user for `license to kill'. If

the user said yes, then JEDGAR would actually {gun} the job of the

{luser} who was spying. Unfortunately, people found that this made life

too violent, especially when tourists learned about it. One of the

systems hackers solved the problem by replacing JEDGAR with another

program that only pretended to do its job. It took a long time to do

this, because every copy of JEDGAR had to be patched. To this day no

one knows how many people never figured out that JEDGAR had been

defanged.

:The Story of Mel, a Real Programmer:

=====================================

This was posted to USENET by its author, Ed Nather (utastro!nather), on

May 21, 1983.

A recent article devoted to the *macho* side of programming

made the bald and unvarnished statement:

Real Programmers write in FORTRAN.

Maybe they do now,

in this decadent era of

Lite beer, hand calculators, and "user-friendly" software

but back in the Good Old Days,

when the term "software" sounded funny

and Real Computers were made out of drums and vacuum tubes,

Real Programmers wrote in machine code.

Not FORTRAN. Not RATFOR. Not, even, assembly language.

Machine Code.

Raw, unadorned, inscrutable hexadecimal numbers.

Directly.

Lest a whole new generation of programmers

grow up in ignorance of this glorious past,

I feel duty-bound to describe,

as best I can through the generation gap,

how a Real Programmer wrote code.

I'll call him Mel,

because that was his name.

I first met Mel when I went to work for Royal McBee Computer Corp.,

a now-defunct subsidiary of the typewriter company.

The firm manufactured the LGP-30,

a small, cheap (by the standards of the day)

drum-memory computer,

and had just started to manufacture

the RPC-4000, a much-improved,

bigger, better, faster --- drum-memory computer.

Cores cost too much,

and weren't here to stay, anyway.

(That's why you haven't heard of the company, or the computer.)

I had been hired to write a FORTRAN compiler

for this new marvel and Mel was my guide to its wonders.

Mel didn't approve of compilers.

"If a program can't rewrite its own code",

he asked, "what good is it?"

Mel had written,

in hexadecimal,

the most popular computer program the company owned.

It ran on the LGP-30

and played blackjack with potential customers

at computer shows.

Its effect was always dramatic.

The LGP-30 booth was packed at every show,

and the IBM salesmen stood around

talking to each other.

Whether or not this actually sold computers

was a question we never discussed.

Mel's job was to re-write

the blackjack program for the RPC-4000.

(Port? What does that mean?)

The new computer had a one-plus-one

addressing scheme,

in which each machine instruction,

in addition to the operation code

and the address of the needed operand,

had a second address that indicated where, on the revolving drum,

the next instruction was located.

In modern parlance,

every single instruction was followed by a GO TO!

Put *that* in Pascal's pipe and smoke it.

Mel loved the RPC-4000

because he could optimize his code:

that is, locate instructions on the drum

so that just as one finished its job,

the next would be just arriving at the "read head"

and available for immediate execution.

There was a program to do that job,

an "optimizing assembler",

but Mel refused to use it.

"You never know where it's going to put things",

he explained, "so you'd have to use separate constants".

It was a long time before I understood that remark.

Since Mel knew the numerical value

of every operation code,

and assigned his own drum addresses,

every instruction he wrote could also be considered

a numerical constant.

He could pick up an earlier "add" instruction, say,

and multiply by it,

if it had the right numeric value.

His code was not easy for someone else to modify.

I compared Mel's hand-optimized programs

with the same code massaged by the optimizing assembler program,

and Mel's always ran faster.

That was because the "top-down" method of program design

hadn't been invented yet,

and Mel wouldn't have used it anyway.

He wrote the innermost parts of his program loops first,

so they would get first choice

of the optimum address locations on the drum.

The optimizing assembler wasn't smart enough to do it that way.

Mel never wrote time-delay loops, either,

even when the balky Flexowriter

required a delay between output characters to work right.

He just located instructions on the drum

so each successive one was just *past* the read head

when it was needed;

the drum had to execute another complete revolution

to find the next instruction.

He coined an unforgettable term for this procedure.

Although "optimum" is an absolute term,

like "unique", it became common verbal practice

to make it relative:

"not quite optimum" or "less optimum"

or "not very optimum".

Mel called the maximum time-delay locations

the "most pessimum".

After he finished the blackjack program

and got it to run

("Even the initializer is optimized",

he said proudly),

he got a Change Request from the sales department.

The program used an elegant (optimized)

random number generator

to shuffle the "cards" and deal from the "deck",

and some of the salesmen felt it was too fair,

since sometimes the customers lost.

They wanted Mel to modify the program

so, at the setting of a sense switch on the console,

they could change the odds and let the customer win.

Mel balked.

He felt this was patently dishonest,

which it was,

and that it impinged on his personal integrity as a programmer,

which it did,

so he refused to do it.

The Head Salesman talked to Mel,

as did the Big Boss and, at the boss's urging,

a few Fellow Programmers.

Mel finally gave in and wrote the code,

but he got the test backwards,

and, when the sense switch was turned on,

the program would cheat, winning every time.

Mel was delighted with this,

claiming his subconscious was uncontrollably ethical,

and adamantly refused to fix it.

After Mel had left the company for greener pa$ture$,

the Big Boss asked me to look at the code

and see if I could find the test and reverse it.

Somewhat reluctantly, I agreed to look.

Tracking Mel's code was a real adventure.

I have often felt that programming is an art form,

whose real value can only be appreciated

by another versed in the same arcane art;

there are lovely gems and brilliant coups

hidden from human view and admiration, sometimes forever,

by the very nature of the process.

You can learn a lot about an individual

just by reading through his code,

even in hexadecimal.

Mel was, I think, an unsung genius.

Perhaps my greatest shock came

when I found an innocent loop that had no test in it.

No test. *None*.

Common sense said it had to be a closed loop,

where the program would circle, forever, endlessly.

Program control passed right through it, however,

and safely out the other side.

It took me two weeks to figure it out.

The RPC-4000 computer had a really modern facility

called an index register.

It allowed the programmer to write a program loop

that used an indexed instruction inside;

each time through,

the number in the index register

was added to the address of that instruction,

so it would refer

to the next datum in a series.

He had only to increment the index register

each time through.

Mel never used it.

Instead, he would pull the instruction into a machine register,

add one to its address,

and store it back.

He would then execute the modified instruction

right from the register.

The loop was written so this additional execution time

was taken into account ---

just as this instruction finished,

the next one was right under the drum's read head,

ready to go.

But the loop had no test in it.

The vital clue came when I noticed

the index register bit,

the bit that lay between the address

and the operation code in the instruction word,

was turned on ---

yet Mel never used the index register,

leaving it zero all the time.

When the light went on it nearly blinded me.

He had located the data he was working on

near the top of memory ---

the largest locations the instructions could address ---

so, after the last datum was handled,

incrementing the instruction address

would make it overflow.

The carry would add one to the

operation code, changing it to the next one in the instruction set:

a jump instruction.

Sure enough, the next program instruction was

in address location zero,

and the program went happily on its way.

I haven't kept in touch with Mel,

so I don't know if he ever gave in to the flood of

change that has washed over programming techniques

since those long-gone days.

I like to think he didn't.

In any event,

I was impressed enough that I quit looking for the

offending test,

telling the Big Boss I couldn't find it.

He didn't seem surprised.

When I left the company,

the blackjack program would still cheat

if you turned on the right sense switch,

and I think that's how it should be.

I didn't feel comfortable

hacking up the code of a Real Programmer.

This is one of hackerdom's great heroic epics, free verse or no. In a

few spare images it captures more about the esthetics and psychology of

hacking than all the scholarly volumes on the subject put together. For

an opposing point of view, see the entry for {real programmer}.

[1992 postscript --- the author writes: "The original submission to

the net was not in free verse, nor any approximation to it --- it was

straight prose style, in non-justified paragraphs. In bouncing around

the net it apparently got modified into the `free verse' form now

popular. In other words, it got hacked on the net. That seems

appropriate, somehow."]

:Appendix B: A Portrait of J. Random Hacker

*******************************************

This profile reflects detailed comments on an earlier `trial balloon'

version from about a hundred USENET respondents. Where comparatives are

used, the implicit `other' is a randomly selected segment of the

non-hacker population of the same size as hackerdom.

An important point: Except in some relatively minor respects such as

slang vocabulary, hackers don't get to be the way they are by imitating

each other. Rather, it seems to be the case that the combination of

personality traits that makes a hacker so conditions one's outlook on

life that one tends to end up being like other hackers whether one wants

to or not (much as bizarrely detailed similarities in behavior and

preferences are found in genetic twins raised separately).

:General Appearance:

====================

Intelligent. Scruffy. Intense. Abstracted. Surprisingly for a

sedentary profession, more hackers run to skinny than fat; both

extremes are more common than elsewhere. Tans are rare.

:Dress:

=======

Casual, vaguely post-hippie; T-shirts, jeans, running shoes,

Birkenstocks (or bare feet). Long hair, beards, and moustaches are

common. High incidence of tie-dye and intellectual or humorous `slogan'

T-shirts (only rarely computer related; that would be too obvious).

A substantial minority prefers `outdoorsy' clothing --- hiking boots

("in case a mountain should suddenly spring up in the machine room", as

one famous parody put it), khakis, lumberjack or chamois shirts, and the

like.

Very few actually fit the `National Lampoon' Nerd stereotype, though it

lingers on at MIT and may have been more common before 1975. These

days, backpacks are more common than briefcases, and the hacker `look'

is more whole-earth than whole-polyester.

Hackers dress for comfort, function, and minimal maintenance hassles

rather than for appearance (some, perhaps unfortunately, take this to

extremes and neglect personal hygiene). They have a very low tolerance

of suits and other `business' attire; in fact, it is not uncommon for

hackers to quit a job rather than conform to a dress code.

Female hackers almost never wear visible makeup, and many use none at

all.

:Reading Habits:

================

Omnivorous, but usually includes lots of science and science fiction.

The typical hacker household might subscribe to `Analog', `Scientific

American', `Co-Evolution Quarterly', and `Smithsonian'. Hackers often

have a reading range that astonishes liberal arts people but tend not to

talk about it as much. Many hackers spend as much of their spare time

reading as the average American burns up watching TV, and often keep

shelves and shelves of well-thumbed books in their homes.

:Other Interests:

=================

Some hobbies are widely shared and recognized as going with the culture:

science fiction, music, medievalism (in the active form practiced by the

Society for Creative Anachronism and similar organizations), chess, go,

backgammon, wargames, and intellectual games of all kinds.

(Role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons used to be extremely

popular among hackers but they lost a bit of their luster as they moved

into the mainstream and became heavily commercialized.) Logic puzzles.

Ham radio. Other interests that seem to correlate less strongly but

positively with hackerdom include linguistics and theater teching.

:Physical Activity and Sports:

==============================

Many (perhaps even most) hackers don't follow or do sports at all and

are determinedly anti-physical. Among those who do, interest in

spectator sports is low to non-existent; sports are something one

*does*, not something one watches on TV.

Further, hackers avoid most team sports like the plague (volleyball is a

notable exception, perhaps because it's non-contact and relatively

friendly). Hacker sports are almost always primarily self-competitive

ones involving concentration, stamina, and micromotor skills: martial

arts, bicycling, auto racing, kite flying, hiking, rock climbing,

aviation, target-shooting, sailing, caving, juggling, skiing, skating

(ice and roller). Hackers' delight in techno-toys also tends to draw

them towards hobbies with nifty complicated equipment that they can

tinker with.

:Education:

===========

Nearly all hackers past their teens are either college-degreed or

self-educated to an equivalent level. The self-taught hacker is often

considered (at least by other hackers) to be better-motivated, and may

be more respected, than his school-shaped counterpart. Academic areas

from which people often gravitate into hackerdom include (besides the

obvious computer science and electrical engineering) physics,

mathematics, linguistics, and philosophy.

:Things Hackers Detest and Avoid:

=================================

IBM mainframes. Smurfs, Ewoks, and other forms of offensive cuteness.

Bureaucracies. Stupid people. Easy listening music. Television

(except for cartoons, movies, the old "Star Trek", and the new

"Simpsons"). Business suits. Dishonesty. Incompetence.

Boredom. COBOL. BASIC. Character-based menu interfaces.

:Food:

======

Ethnic. Spicy. Oriental, esp. Chinese and most esp. Szechuan, Hunan,

and Mandarin (hackers consider Cantonese vaguely d'eclass'e). Hackers

prefer the exotic; for example, the Japanese-food fans among them will

eat with gusto such delicacies as fugu (poisonous pufferfish) and whale.

Thai food has experienced flurries of popularity. Where available,

high-quality Jewish delicatessen food is much esteemed. A visible

minority of Southwestern and Pacific Coast hackers prefers Mexican.

For those all-night hacks, pizza and microwaved burritos are big.

Interestingly, though the mainstream culture has tended to think of

hackers as incorrigible junk-food junkies, many have at least mildly

health-foodist attitudes and are fairly discriminating about what they

eat. This may be generational; anecdotal evidence suggests that the

stereotype was more on the mark 10--15 years ago.

:Politics:

==========

Vaguely left of center, except for the strong libertarian contingent

which rejects conventional left-right politics entirely. The only safe

generalization is that hackers tend to be rather anti-authoritarian;

thus, both conventional conservatism and `hard' leftism are rare.

Hackers are far more likely than most non-hackers to either (a) be

aggressively apolitical or (b) entertain peculiar or idiosyncratic

political ideas and actually try to live by them day-to-day.

:Gender and Ethnicity:

======================

Hackerdom is still predominantly male. However, the percentage of women

is clearly higher than the low-single-digit range typical for technical

professions, and female hackers are generally respected and dealt with

as equals.

In the U.S., hackerdom is predominantly Caucasian with strong minorities

of Jews (East Coast) and Orientals (West Coast). The Jewish contingent

has exerted a particularly pervasive cultural influence (see {Food},

above, and note that several common jargon terms are obviously mutated

Yiddish).

The ethnic distribution of hackers is understood by them to be a

function of which ethnic groups tend to seek and value education.

Racial and ethnic prejudice is notably uncommon and tends to be met with

freezing contempt.

When asked, hackers often ascribe their culture's gender- and

color-blindness to a positive effect of text-only network channels,

and this is doubtless a powerful influence. Also, the ties many

hackers have to AI research and SF literature may have helped them to

develop an idea of personhood that is inclusive rather than exclusive

--- after all, if one's imagination readily grants full human rights to AI

programs, robots, dolphins, and extraterrestrial aliens, mere color and

gender can't seem very important any more.

:Religion:

==========

Agnostic. Atheist. Non-observant Jewish. Neo-pagan. Very commonly,

three or more of these are combined in the same person. Conventional

faith-holding Christianity is rare though not unknown.

Even hackers who identify with a religious affiliation tend to be

relaxed about it, hostile to organized religion in general and all forms

of religious bigotry in particular. Many enjoy `parody' religions such

as Discordianism and the Church of the SubGenius.

Also, many hackers are influenced to varying degrees by Zen Buddhism or

(less commonly) Taoism, and blend them easily with their `native'

religions.

There is a definite strain of mystical, almost Gnostic sensibility that

shows up even among those hackers not actively involved with

neo-paganism, Discordianism, or Zen. Hacker folklore that pays homage

to `wizards' and speaks of incantations and demons has too much

psychological truthfulness about it to be entirely a joke.

:Ceremonial Chemicals:

======================

Most hackers don't smoke tobacco, and use alcohol in moderation if at

all (though there is a visible contingent of exotic-beer fanciers, and a

few hackers are serious oenophiles). Limited use of non-addictive

psychedelic drugs, such as cannabis, LSD, psilocybin, and nitrous oxide,

etc., used to be relatively common and is still regarded with more

tolerance than in the mainstream culture. Use of `downers' and opiates,

on the other hand, appears to be particularly rare; hackers seem in

general to dislike drugs that `dumb them down'. On the third hand, many

hackers regularly wire up on caffeine and/or sugar for all-night hacking

runs.

:Communication Style:

=====================

See the discussions of speech and writing styles near the beginning of

this File. Though hackers often have poor person-to-person

communication skills, they are as a rule extremely sensitive to nuances

of language and very precise in their use of it. They are often better

at writing than at speaking.

:Geographical Distribution:

===========================

In the United States, hackerdom revolves on a Bay Area-to-Boston axis;

about half of the hard core seems to live within a hundred miles of

Cambridge (Massachusetts) or Berkeley (California), although there are

significant contingents in Los Angeles, in the Pacific Northwest, and

around Washington DC. Hackers tend to cluster around large cities,

especially `university towns' such as the Raleigh-Durham area in North

Carolina or Princeton, New Jersey (this may simply reflect the fact that

many are students or ex-students living near their alma maters).

:Sexual Habits:

===============

Hackerdom tolerates a much wider range of sexual and lifestyle variation

than the mainstream culture. It includes a relatively large gay and bi

contingent. Hackers are somewhat more likely to live in polygynous or

polyandrous relationships, practice open marriage, or live in communes

or group houses. In this, as in general appearance, hackerdom

semi-consciously maintains `counterculture' values.

:Personality Characteristics:

=============================

The most obvious common `personality' characteristics of hackers are

high intelligence, consuming curiosity, and facility with intellectual

abstractions. Also, most hackers are `neophiles', stimulated by and

appreciative of novelty (especially intellectual novelty). Most are

also relatively individualistic and anti-conformist.

Although high general intelligence is common among hackers, it is not

the sine qua non one might expect. Another trait is probably even more

important: the ability to mentally absorb, retain, and reference large

amounts of `meaningless' detail, trusting to later experience to give it

context and meaning. A person of merely average analytical intelligence

who has this trait can become an effective hacker, but a creative genius

who lacks it will swiftly find himself outdistanced by people who

routinely upload the contents of thick reference manuals into their

brains. [During the production of the book version of this document,

for example, I learned most of the rather complex typesetting language

TeX over about four working days, mainly by inhaling Knuth's 477-page

manual. My editor's flabbergasted reaction to this genuinely surprised

me, because years of associating with hackers have conditioned me to

consider such performances routine and to be expected. --- ESR]

Contrary to stereotype, hackers are *not* usually intellectually narrow;

they tend to be interested in any subject that can provide mental

stimulation, and can often discourse knowledgeably and even

interestingly on any number of obscure subjects --- if you can get them

to talk at all, as opposed to, say, going back to their hacking.

It is noticeable (and contrary to many outsiders' expectations) that the

better a hacker is at hacking, the more likely he or she is to have

outside interests at which he or she is more than merely competent.

Hackers are `control freaks' in a way that has nothing to do with the

usual coercive or authoritarian connotations of the term. In the same

way that children delight in making model trains go forward and back by

moving a switch, hackers love making complicated things like computers

do nifty stuff for them. But it has to be *their* nifty stuff. They

don't like tedium, nondeterminism, or most of the fussy, boring,

ill-defined little tasks that go with maintaining a normal existence.

Accordingly, they tend to be careful and orderly in their intellectual

lives and chaotic elsewhere. Their code will be beautiful, even if

their desks are buried in 3 feet of crap.

Hackers are generally only very weakly motivated by conventional rewards

such as social approval or money. They tend to be attracted by

challenges and excited by interesting toys, and to judge the interest of

work or other activities in terms of the challenges offered and the toys

they get to play with.

In terms of Myers-Briggs and equivalent psychometric systems, hackerdom

appears to concentrate the relatively rare INTJ and INTP types; that is,

introverted, intuitive, and thinker types (as opposed to the

extroverted-sensate personalities that predominate in the mainstream

culture). ENT[JP] types are also concentrated among hackers but are in

a minority.

:Weaknesses of the Hacker Personality:

======================================

Hackers have relatively little ability to identify emotionally with

other people. This may be because hackers generally aren't much like

`other people'. Unsurprisingly, hackers also tend towards

self-absorption, intellectual arrogance, and impatience with people and

tasks perceived to be wasting their time.

As cynical as hackers sometimes wax about the amount of idiocy in the

world, they tend by reflex to assume that everyone is as rational,

`cool', and imaginative as they consider themselves. This bias often

contributes to weakness in communication skills. Hackers tend to be

especially poor at confrontation and negotiation.

Because of their passionate embrace of (what they consider to be) the

{Right Thing}, hackers can be unfortunately intolerant and bigoted on

technical issues, in marked contrast to their general spirit of

camaraderie and tolerance of alternative viewpoints otherwise. Old-time

{{ITS}} partisans look down on the ever-growing hordes of {{UNIX}}

hackers; UNIX aficionados despise {VMS} and {{MS-DOS}}; and hackers who

are used to conventional command-line user interfaces loathe

mouse-and-menu based systems such as the Macintosh. Hackers who don't

indulge in {USENET} consider it a huge waste of time and {bandwidth};

fans of old adventure games such as {ADVENT} and {Zork} consider {MUD}s

to be glorified chat systems devoid of atmosphere or interesting

puzzles; hackers who are willing to devote endless hours to USENET or

MUDs consider {IRC} to be a *real* waste of time; IRCies think MUDs

might be okay if there weren't all those silly puzzles in the way. And,

of course, there are the perennial {holy wars} -- {EMACS} vs. {vi},

{big-endian} vs. {little-endian}, RISC vs. CISC, etc., etc., etc. As

in society at large, the intensity and duration of these debates is

usually inversely proportional to the number of objective, factual

arguments available to buttress any position.

As a result of all the above traits, many hackers have difficulty

maintaining stable relationships. At worst, they can produce the

classic {computer geek}: withdrawn, relationally incompetent, sexually

frustrated, and desperately unhappy when not submerged in his or her

craft. Fortunately, this extreme is far less common than mainstream

folklore paints it --- but almost all hackers will recognize something

of themselves in the unflattering paragraphs above.

Hackers are often monumentally disorganized and sloppy about dealing

with the physical world. Bills don't get paid on time, clutter piles up

to incredible heights in homes and offices, and minor maintenance tasks

get deferred indefinitely.

The sort of person who uses phrases like `incompletely socialized'

usually thinks hackers are. Hackers regard such people with contempt

when they notice them at all.

:Miscellaneous:

===============

Hackers are more likely to have cats than dogs (in fact, it is widely

grokked that cats have the hacker nature). Many drive incredibly

decrepit heaps and forget to wash them; richer ones drive spiffy

Porsches and RX-7s and then forget to have them washed. Almost all

hackers have terribly bad handwriting, and often fall into the habit of

block-printing everything like junior draftsmen.

:Appendix C: Bibliography

*************************

Here are some other books you can read to help you understand the hacker

mindset.

:G"odel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid:

Douglas Hofstadter

Basic Books, 1979

ISBN 0-394-74502-7

This book reads like an intellectual Grand Tour of hacker

preoccupations. Music, mathematical logic, programming, speculations on

the nature of intelligence, biology, and Zen are woven into a brilliant

tapestry themed on the concept of encoded self-reference. The perfect

left-brain companion to `Illuminatus'.

:Illuminatus!:

I. `The Eye in the Pyramid'

II. `The Golden Apple'

III. `Leviathan'.

Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Dell, 1988

ISBN 0-440-53981-1

This work of alleged fiction is an incredible berserko-surrealist

rollercoaster of world-girdling conspiracies, intelligent dolphins, the

fall of Atlantis, who really killed JFK, sex, drugs, rock'n'roll, and

the Cosmic Giggle Factor. First published in three volumes, but there

is now a one-volume trade paperback, carried by most chain bookstores

under SF. The perfect right-brain companion to Hofstadter's `G"odel,

Escher, Bach'. See {Eris}, {Discordianism}, {random numbers}, {Church

Of The SubGenius}.

:The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Douglas Adams

Pocket Books, 1981

ISBN 0-671-46149-4

This `Monty Python in Space' spoof of SF genre traditions has been

popular among hackers ever since the original British radio show. Read

it if only to learn about Vogons (see {bogon}) and the significance of

the number 42 (see {random numbers}) --- and why the winningest chess

program of 1990 was called `Deep Thought'.

:The Tao of Programming:

James Geoffrey

Infobooks, 1987

ISBN 0-931137-07-1

This gentle, funny spoof of the `Tao Te Ching' contains much that is

illuminating about the hacker way of thought. "When you have learned to

snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to

leave."

:Hackers:

Steven Levy

Anchor/Doubleday 1984

ISBN 0-385-19195-2

Levy's book is at its best in describing the early MIT hackers at the

Model Railroad Club and the early days of the microcomputer revolution.

He never understood UNIX or the networks, though, and his enshrinement

of Richard Stallman as "the last true hacker" turns out (thankfully) to

have been quite misleading. Numerous minor factual errors also mar the

text; for example, Levy's claim that the original Jargon File derived

from the TMRC Dictionary (the File originated at Stanford and was

brought to MIT in 1976; the co-authors of the first edition had never

seen the dictionary in question). There are also numerous misspellings

in the book that inflame the passions of old-timers; as Dan Murphy, the

author of TECO, once said: "You would have thought he'd take the trouble

to spell the name of a winning editor right." Nevertheless, this

remains a useful and stimulating book that captures the feel of several

important hackish subcultures.

:The Devil's DP Dictionary:

Stan Kelly-Bootle

McGraw-Hill, 1981

ISBN 0-07-034022-6

This pastiche of Ambrose Bierce's famous work is similar in format to

the Jargon File (and quotes several entries from jargon-1) but somewhat

different in tone and intent. It is more satirical and less

anthropological, and is largely a product of the author's literate and

quirky imagination. For example, it defines `computer science' as "a

study akin to numerology and astrology, but lacking the precision of the

former and the success of the latter" and "the boring art of coping with

a large number of trivialities."

:The Devouring Fungus: Tales from the Computer Age:

Karla Jennings

Norton, 1990

ISBN 0-393-30732-8

The author of this pioneering compendium knits together a great deal of

computer- and hacker-related folklore with good writing and a few

well-chosen cartoons. She has a keen eye for the human aspects of the

lore and is very good at illuminating the psychology and evolution of

hackerdom. Unfortunately, a number of small errors and awkwardnesses

suggest that she didn't have the final manuscript checked over by a

native speaker; the glossary in the back is particularly embarrassing,

and at least one classic tale (the Magic Switch story, retold here under

{A Story About `Magic'} in {appendix A}) is given in incomplete and

badly mangled form. Nevertheless, this book is a win overall and can be

enjoyed by hacker and non-hacker alike.

:The Soul of a New Machine:

Tracy Kidder

Little, Brown, 1981

(paperback: Avon, 1982

ISBN 0-380-59931-7)

This book (a 1982 Pulitzer Prize winner) documents the adventure of the

design of a new Data General computer, the Eclipse. It is an amazingly

well-done portrait of the hacker mindset --- although largely the

hardware hacker --- done by a complete outsider. It is a bit thin in

spots, but with enough technical information to be entertaining to the

serious hacker while providing non-technical people a view of what

day-to-day life can be like --- the fun, the excitement, the disasters.

During one period, when the microcode and logic were glitching at the

nanosecond level, one of the overworked engineers departed the company,

leaving behind a note on his terminal as his letter of resignation: "I

am going to a commune in Vermont and will deal with no unit of time

shorter than a season."

:Life with UNIX: a Guide for Everyone:

Don Libes and Sandy Ressler

Prentice-Hall, 1989

ISBN 0-13-536657-7

The authors of this book set out to tell you all the things about UNIX

that tutorials and technical books won't. The result is gossipy, funny,

opinionated, downright weird in spots, and invaluable. Along the way

they expose you to enough of UNIX's history, folklore and humor to

qualify as a first-class source for these things. Because so much of

today's hackerdom is involved with UNIX, this in turn illuminates many

of its in-jokes and preoccupations.

:True Names ... and Other Dangers:

Vernor Vinge

Baen Books, 1987

ISBN 0-671-65363-6

Hacker demigod Richard Stallman believes the title story of this book

"expresses the spirit of hacking best". This may well be true; it's

certainly difficult to recall a better job. The other stories in this

collection are also fine work by an author who is perhaps one of today's

very best practitioners of hard SF.

:Cyberpunk: Outlaws and Hackers on the Computer Frontier:

Katie Hafner & John Markoff

Simon & Schuster 1991

ISBN 0-671-68322-5

This book gathers narratives about the careers of three notorious

crackers into a clear-eyed but sympathetic portrait of hackerdom's dark

side. The principals are Kevin Mitnick, "Pengo" and "Hagbard" of the

Chaos Computer Club, and Robert T. Morris (see {RTM}, sense 2) .

Markoff and Hafner focus as much on their psychologies and motivations

as on the details of their exploits, but don't slight the latter. The

result is a balanced and fascinating account, particularly useful when

read immediately before or after Cliff Stoll's {The Cuckoo's Egg}. It

is especially instructive to compare RTM, a true hacker who blundered,

with the sociopathic phone-freak Mitnick and the alienated, drug-addled

crackers who made the Chaos Club notorious. The gulf between {wizard}

and {wannabee} has seldom been made more obvious.

:Technobabble:

John Barry

MIT Press 1991

ISBN 0-262-02333-4

Barry's book takes a critical and humorous look at the `technobabble' of

acronyms, neologisms, hyperbole, and metaphor spawned by the computer

industry. Though he discusses some of the same mechanisms of jargon

formation that occur in hackish, most of what he chronicles is actually

suit-speak --- the obfuscatory language of press releases, marketroids,

and Silicon Valley CEOs rather than the playful jargon of hackers (most

of whom wouldn't be caught dead uttering the kind of pompous,

passive-voiced word salad he deplores).

:The Cuckoo's Egg:

Clifford Stoll

Doubleday 1989

ISBN 0-385-24946-2

Clifford Stoll's absorbing tale of how he tracked Markus Hess and the

Chaos Club cracking ring nicely illustrates the difference between

`hacker' and `cracker'. Stoll's portrait of himself, his lady Martha,

and his friends at Berkeley and on the Internet paints a marvelously

vivid picture of how hackers and the people around them like to live and

what they think.

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