The Jargon Lexicon

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earthquake: n.  [IBM] The ultimate real-world shock test for
   computer hardware.  Hackish sources at IBM deny the rumor that the
   Bay Area quake of 1989 was initiated by the company to test
   quality-assurance procedures at its California plants.

Easter egg: n.  [from the custom of the Easter Egg hunt
   observed in the U.S. and many parts of Europe] 1. A message hidden
   in the object code of a program as a joke, intended to be found by
   persons disassembling or browsing the code.  2. A message, graphic,
   or sound effect emitted by a program (or, on a PC, the BIOS ROM) in
   response to some undocumented set of commands or keystrokes,
   intended as a joke or to display program credits.  One well-known
   early Easter egg found in a couple of OSes caused them to respond
   to the command `make love' with `not war?'.  Many
   personal computers have much more elaborate eggs hidden in ROM,
   including lists of the developers' names, political exhortations,
   snatches of music, and (in one case) graphics images of the entire
   development team.

Easter egging: n.  [IBM] The act of replacing unrelated
   components more or less at random in hopes that a malfunction will
   go away.  Hackers consider this the normal operating mode of
   {field circus} techs and do not love them for it.  See also the
   jokes under {field circus}.  Compare {shotgun debugging}.

eat flaming death: imp.  A construction popularized among
   hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive from
   a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic
   that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something
   of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign
   Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own"
   included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this
   may have been an influence).  Used in humorously overblown
   expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, {{EBCDIC}} users!"

EBCDIC: /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see`dik/, or /eb'k*-dik/ n. 
   [abbreviation, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] An
   alleged character set used on IBM {dinosaur}s.  It exists in at
   least six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such
   delights as non-contiguous letter sequences and the absence of
   several ASCII punctuation characters fairly important for modern
   computer languages (exactly which characters are absent varies
   according to which version of EBCDIC you're looking at).  IBM
   adapted EBCDIC from {{punched card}} code in the early 1960s and
   promulgated it as a customer-control tactic (see {connector
   conspiracy}), spurning the already established ASCII standard.
   Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own
   description of the EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them
   is still internally classified top-secret, burn-before-reading.
   Hackers blanch at the very *name* of EBCDIC and consider it a
   manifestation of purest {evil}.  See also {fear and
   loathing}.

echo: [FidoNet] n.  A {topic group} on {FidoNet}'s
   echomail system.  Compare {newsgroup}.

eighty-column mind: n.  [IBM] The sort said to be possessed by
   persons for whom the transition from {punched card} to tape was
   traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet).  It is said
   that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder
   of IBM, will be buried `face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being
   the bottom of the card).  This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402
   and 1622 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel
   called "The Last Bug", the climactic lines of which are as
   follows:

        He died at the console
        Of hunger and thirst.
        Next day he was buried,
        Face down, 9-edge first.

   The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's
   customer base and its thinking.  See {IBM}, {fear and
   loathing}, {card walloper}.

El Camino Bignum: /el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/ n.  The road
   mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco
   peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City
   and many portions of which are still intact.  Navigation on the San
   Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real,
   which defines {logical} north and south even though it isn't
   really north-south many places.  El Camino Real runs right past
   Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.

   The Spanish word `real' (which has two syllables: /ray-ol'/)
   means `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'.  In the FORTRAN
   language, a `real' quantity is a number typically precise to seven
   significant digits, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger
   floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant
   digits (other languages have similar `real' types).

   When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a
   long road El Camino Real was.  Making a pun on `real', he started
   calling it `El Camino Double Precision' -- but when the hacker
   was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it
   `El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck.  (See {bignum}.)
   In recent years, the synonym `El Camino Virtual' has been
   reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.

   [GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was
   in fact him -- ESR]

elder days: n.  The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly,
   pre-1980); the era of the {PDP-10}, {TECO}, {{ITS}}, and the
   ARPANET.  This term has been rather consciously adopted from
   J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings".
   Compare {Iron Age}; see also {elvish} and {Great Worm,
   the}.

elegant: adj.  [from mathematical usage] Combining
   simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design.  Higher
   praise than `clever', `winning', or even {cuspy}.

   The French aviator, adventurer, and author Antoine de
   Saint-Exup'ery, probably best known for his classic children's
   book "The Little Prince", was also an aircraft designer.  He
   gave us perhaps the best definition of engineering elegance when he
   said "A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there
   is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take
   away."

elephantine: adj.  Used of programs or systems that are both
   conspicuous {hog}s (owing perhaps to poor design founded on
   {brute force and ignorance}) and exceedingly {hairy} in
   source form.  An elephantine program may be functional and even
   friendly, but (as in the old joke about being in bed with an
   elephant) it's tough to have around all the same (and, like a
   pachyderm, difficult to maintain).  In extreme cases, hackers have
   been known to make trumpeting sounds or perform expressive
   proboscatory mime at the mention of the offending program.  usage:
   semi-humorous.  Compare `has the elephant nature' and the
   somewhat more pejorative {monstrosity}.  See also
   {second-system effect} and {baroque}.

elevator controller: n.  An archetypal dumb embedded-systems
   application, like {toaster} (which superseded it).  During one
   period (1983--84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C
   standardization committee) this was the canonical example of a
   really stupid, memory-limited computation environment.  "You can't
   require `printf(3)' to be part of the default runtime library
   -- what if you're targeting an elevator controller?"  Elevator
   controllers became important rhetorical weapons on both sides of
   several {holy wars}.

elite: adj.  Clueful.  Plugged-in.  One of the cognoscenti.
   Also used as a general positive adjective.  This term is not
   actually hacker slang in the strict sense; it is used primarily by
   crackers and {warez d00dz}.  Cracker usage is probaby related to
   a 19200cps modem called the `Courier Elite' that was widely popular
   on pirate boards before the V.32bis standard.  A true hacker would
   be more likely to use `wizardly'. Oppose {lamer}.

ELIZA effect: /*-li:'z* *-fekt'/ n.  [AI community] The
   tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior
   experience.  For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol
   `+' that makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's just
   that people associate it with addition.  Using `+' or `plus'
   to mean addition in a computer language is taking advantage of the
   ELIZA effect.

   This term comes from the famous ELIZA program by Joseph Weizenbaum,
   which simulated a Rogerian psychotherapist by rephrasing many of the
   patient's statements as questions and posing them to the patient.
   It worked by simple pattern recognition and substitution of key
   words into canned phrases.  It was so convincing, however, that
   there are many anecdotes about people becoming very emotionally
   caught up in dealing with ELIZA.  All this was due to people's
   tendency to attach to words meanings which the computer never put
   there.  The ELIZA effect is a {Good Thing} when writing a
   programming language, but it can blind you to serious shortcomings
   when analyzing an Artificial Intelligence system.  Compare
   {ad-hockery}; see also {AI-complete}.

elvish: n.  1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms
   resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the "Book
   of Kells".  Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in "The
   Lord of The Rings" as an orthography for his fictional `elvish'
   languages, this system (which is both visually and phonetically
   {elegant}) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be intrigued
   by artificial languages in general).  It is traditional for
   graphics printers, plotters, window systems, and the like to
   support a Feanorian typeface as one of their demo items.  See also
   {elder days}.  2. By extension, any odd or unreadable typeface
   produced by a graphics device.  3. The typeface mundanely called
   `B"ocklin', an art-decoish display font.

EMACS: /ee'maks/ n.  [from Editing MACroS] The ne plus
   ultra of hacker editors, a programmable text editor with an entire
   LISP system inside it.  It was originally written by Richard
   Stallman in {TECO} under {{ITS}} at the MIT AI lab; AI Memo 554
   described it as "an advanced, self-documenting, customizable,
   extensible real-time display editor".  It has since been
   reimplemented any number of times, by various hackers, and versions
   exist that run under most major operating systems.  Perhaps the
   most widely used version, also written by Stallman and now called
   "{GNU} EMACS" or {GNUMACS}, runs principally under UNIX.
   It includes facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and
   receive mail; many hackers spend up to 80% of their {tube time}
   inside it.  Other variants include {GOSMACS}, CCA EMACS,
   UniPress EMACS, Montgomery EMACS, jove, epsilon, and MicroEMACS.

   Some EMACS versions running under window managers iconify as an
   overflowing kitchen sink, perhaps to suggest the one feature the
   editor does not (yet) include.  Indeed, some hackers find EMACS too
   {heavyweight} and {baroque} for their taste, and expand the
   name as `Escape Meta Alt Control Shift' to spoof its heavy reliance
   on keystrokes decorated with {bucky bits}.  Other spoof
   expansions include `Eight Megabytes And Constantly Swapping',
   `Eventually `malloc()'s All Computer Storage', and `EMACS
   Makes A Computer Slow' (see {{recursive acronym}}).  See
   also {vi}.

email: /ee'mayl/  (also written `e-mail')
   1. n. Electronic mail automatically passed through computer
   networks and/or via modems over common-carrier lines.  Contrast
   {snail-mail}, {paper-net}, {voice-net}.  See {network
   address}.  2. vt. To send electronic mail.

   Oddly enough, the word `emailed' is actually listed in the OED;
   it means "embossed (with a raised pattern) or perh. arranged in a
   net or open work".  A use from 1480 is given. The word is derived
   from Old French `emmaill"ure', network.  A French correspondent
   tells us that in modern French, `email' is a hard enamel obtained
   by heating special paints in a furnace; an `emailleur' (no final e)
   is a craftsman who makes email (he generally paints some objects
   like jewels and cook them in a furnace).

emoticon: /ee-moh'ti-kon/ n.  An ASCII glyph used to
   indicate an emotional state in email or news.  Although originally
   intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some other explicit humor
   indication) are virtually required under certain circumstances in
   high-volume text-only communication forums such as Usenet; the lack
   of verbal and visual cues can otherwise cause what were intended to
   be humorous, sarcastic, ironic, or otherwise non-100%-serious
   comments to be badly misinterpreted (not always even by
   {newbie}s), resulting in arguments and {flame war}s.

   Hundreds of emoticons have been proposed, but only a few are in
   common use.  These include:

     :-)
          `smiley face' (for humor, laughter, friendliness,
          occasionally sarcasm)

     :-(
          `frowney face' (for sadness, anger, or upset)

     ;-)
          `half-smiley' ({ha ha only serious}); also known as
          `semi-smiley' or `winkey face'.

     :-/
          `wry face'

   (These may become more comprehensible if you tilt your head
   sideways, to the left.)

   The first two listed are by far the most frequently encountered.
   Hyphenless forms of them are common on CompuServe, GEnie, and BIX;
   see also {bixie}.  On {Usenet}, `smiley' is often used as a
   generic term synonymous with {emoticon}, as well as specifically
   for the happy-face emoticon.

   It appears that the emoticon was invented by one Scott Fahlman on
   the CMU {bboard} systems around 1980.  He later wrote: "I wish I
   had saved the original post, or at least recorded the date for
   posterity, but I had no idea that I was starting something that
   would soon pollute all the world's communication channels."  [GLS
   confirms that he remembers this original posting].

   Note for the {newbie}: Overuse of the smiley is a mark of
   loserhood!  More than one per paragraph is a fairly sure sign that
   you've gone over the line.

empire: n.  Any of a family of military simulations derived
   from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago.  Five or six
   multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication exist,
   and one single-player version implemented for both UNIX and VMS;
   the latter is even available as MS-DOS freeware.  All are
   notoriously addictive.

engine: n.  1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some
   function but can't be used without some kind of {front end}.
   Today we have, especially, `print engine': the guts of a laser
   printer.  2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that
   does a lot of noisy crunching, such as a `database engine'.

   The hackish senses of `engine' are actually close to its original,
   pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or
   instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity').  This sense had
   not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of
   power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which
   explains why he named the stored-program computer that
   he designed in 1844 the `Analytical Engine'.

English:  1. n.,obs. The source code for a program, which may
   be in any language, as opposed to the linkable or executable binary
   produced from it by a compiler.  The idea behind the term is that
   to a real hacker, a program written in his favorite programming
   language is at least as readable as English.  usage: mostly by
   old-time hackers, though recognizable in context.  2. The official
   name of the database language used by the Pick Operating System,
   actually a sort of crufty, brain-damaged SQL with delusions of
   grandeur.  The name permits {marketroid}s to say "Yes, and you
   can program our computers in English!" to ignorant {suit}s
   without quite running afoul of the truth-in-advertising laws.

enhancement: n.  Common {marketroid}-speak for a bug
   {fix}.  This abuse of language is a popular and time-tested way
   to turn incompetence into increased revenue.  A hacker being ironic
   would instead call the fix a {feature} -- or perhaps save some
   effort by declaring the bug itself to be a feature.

ENQ: /enkw/ or /enk/  [from the ASCII mnemonic ENQuire
   for 0000101] An on-line convention for querying someone's
   availability.  After opening a {talk mode} connection to someone
   apparently in heavy hack mode, one might type `SYN SYN ENQ?'
   (the SYNs representing notional synchronization bytes), and expect
   a return of {ACK} or {NAK} depending on whether or not the
   person felt interruptible.  Compare {ping}, {finger}, and the
   usage of `FOO?' listed under {talk mode}.

EOF: /E-O-F/ n.  [abbreviation, `End Of File']
   1. [techspeak] The {out-of-band} value returned by C's
   sequential character-input functions (and their equivalents in
   other environments) when end of file has been reached.  This value
   is -1 under C libraries postdating V6 UNIX, but was
   originally 0.  2. [UNIX] The keyboard character (usually control-D,
   the ASCII EOT (End Of Transmission) character) that is mapped by
   the terminal driver into an end-of-file condition.  3. Used by
   extension in non-computer contexts when a human is doing something
   that can be modeled as a sequential read and can't go further.
   "Yeah, I looked for a list of 360 mnemonics to post as a joke, but
   I hit EOF pretty fast; all the library had was a {JCL} manual."
   See also {EOL}.

EOL: /E-O-L/ n.  [End Of Line] Syn. for {newline},
   derived perhaps from the original CDC6600 Pascal.  Now rare, but
   widely recognized and occasionally used for brevity.  Used in the
   example entry under {BNF}.  See also {EOF}.

EOU: /E-O-U/ n.  The mnemonic of a mythical ASCII control
   character (End Of User) that would make an ASR-33 Teletype explode
   on receipt.  This construction parodies the numerous obscure
   delimiter and control characters left in ASCII from the days when
   it was associated more with wire-service teletypes than computers
   (e.g., FS, GS, RS, US, EM, SUB, ETX, and esp. EOT).  It is worth
   remembering that ASR-33s were big, noisy mechanical beasts with a
   lot of clattering parts; the notion that one might explode was
   nowhere near as ridiculous as it might seem to someone sitting in
   front of a {tube} or flatscreen today.

epoch: n.  [UNIX: prob. from astronomical timekeeping] The
   time and date corresponding to 0 in an operating system's clock and
   timestamp values.  Under most UNIX versions the epoch is 00:00:00
   GMT, January 1, 1970; under VMS, it's 00:00:00 of November 17, 1858
   (base date of the U.S. Naval Observatory's ephemerides); on a
   Macintosh, it's the midnight beginning January 1 1904.  System time
   is measured in seconds or {tick}s past the epoch.  Weird
   problems may ensue when the clock wraps around (see {wrap
   around}), which is not necessarily a rare event; on systems
   counting 10 ticks per second, a signed 32-bit count of ticks is
   good only for 6.8 years.  The 1-tick-per-second clock of UNIX is
   good only until January 18, 2038, assuming at least some software
   continues to consider it signed and that word lengths don't
   increase by then.  See also {wall time}.

epsilon:  [see {delta}] 1. n. A small quantity of
   anything.  "The cost is epsilon."  2. adj. Very small,
   negligible; less than {marginal}.  "We can get this feature for
   epsilon cost."  3. `within epsilon of': close enough to be
   indistinguishable for all practical purposes, even closer than
   being `within delta of'.  "That's not what I asked for, but it's
   within epsilon of what I wanted."  Alternatively, it may mean not
   close enough, but very little is required to get it there: "My
   program is within epsilon of working."

epsilon squared: n.  A quantity even smaller than
   {epsilon}, as small in comparison to epsilon as epsilon is to
   something normal; completely negligible.  If you buy a
   supercomputer for a million dollars, the cost of the
   thousand-dollar terminal to go with it is {epsilon}, and the
   cost of the ten-dollar cable to connect them is epsilon squared.
   Compare {lost in the underflow}, {lost in the noise}.

era, the:  Syn. {epoch}.  Webster's Unabridged makes these
   words almost synonymous, but `era' more often connotes a span of
   time rather than a point in time, whereas the reverse is true for
   {epoch}.  The {epoch} usage is recommended.

Eric Conspiracy: n.  A shadowy group of mustachioed hackers
   named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous
   talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986; this was doubtless influenced by
   the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre.  There do
   indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed Erics in hackerdom
   than the frequency of these three traits can account for unless
   they are correlated in some arcane way.  Well-known examples
   include Eric Allman (he of the `Allman style' described under
   {indent style}) and Erik Fair (co-author of NNTP); your editor
   has heard from about fifteen others by email, and the organization
   line `Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories' now emanates regularly
   from more than one site.

Eris: /e'ris/ n.  The Greek goddess of Chaos, Discord,
   Confusion, and Things You Know Not Of; her name was latinized to
   Discordia and she was worshiped by that name in Rome.  Not a very
   friendly deity in the Classical original, she was reinvented as a
   more benign personification of creative anarchy starting in 1959 by
   the adherents of {Discordianism} and has since been a
   semi-serious subject of veneration in several `fringe' cultures,
   including hackerdom.  See {Discordianism}, {Church of the
   SubGenius}.

erotics: /ee-ro'tiks/ n.  [Helsinki University of
   Technology, Finland] n. English-language university slang for
   electronics.  Often used by hackers in Helsinki, maybe because good
   electronics excites them and makes them warm.

error 33: [XEROX PARC] n.  1. Predicating one research effort
   upon the success of another.  2. Allowing your own research effort
   to be placed on the critical path of some other project (be it a
   research effort or not).

evil: adj.  As used by hackers, implies that some system,
   program, person, or institution is sufficiently maldesigned as to
   be not worth the bother of dealing with.  Unlike the adjectives in
   the {cretinous}/{losing}/{brain-damaged} series, `evil'
   does not imply incompetence or bad design, but rather a set of
   goals or design criteria fatally incompatible with the speaker's.
   This usage is more an esthetic and engineering judgment than a
   moral one in the mainstream sense.  "We thought about adding a
   {Blue Glue} interface but decided it was too evil to deal
   with."  "{TECO} is neat, but it can be pretty evil if you're
   prone to typos."  Often pronounced with the first syllable
   lengthened, as /eeee'vil/.  Compare {evil and rude}.

evil and rude: adj.  Both {evil} and {rude}, but with
   the additional connotation that the rudeness was due to malice
   rather than incompetence.  Thus, for example: Microsoft's Windows
   NT is evil because it's a competent implementation of a bad
   design; it's rude because it's gratuitously incompatible with
   UNIX in places where compatibility would have been as easy and
   effective to do; but it's evil and rude because the
   incompatibilities are apparently there not to fix design bugs in
   UNIX but rather to lock hapless customers and developers into the
   Microsoft way.  Hackish evil and rude is close to the
   mainstream sense of `evil'.

exa-: /ek's*/ pref.  [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.

examining the entrails: n.  The process of {grovel}ling
   through a {core dump} or hex image in an attempt to discover the
   bug that brought a program or system down.  The reference is to
   divination from the entrails of a sacrified animal.  Compare
   {runes}, {incantation}, {black art}, {desk check}.

EXCH: /eks'ch*/ or /eksch/ vt.  To exchange two things,
   each for the other; to swap places.  If you point to two people
   sitting down and say "Exch!", you are asking them to trade
   places.  EXCH, meaning EXCHange, was originally the name of a
   PDP-10 instruction that exchanged the contents of a register and a
   memory location.  Many newer hackers are probably thinking instead
   of the {{PostScript}} exchange operator (which is usually written
   in lowercase).

excl: /eks'kl/ n.  Abbreviation for `exclamation point'.
   See {bang}, {shriek}, {{ASCII}}.

EXE: /eks'ee/ or /eek'see/ or /E-X-E/ n.  An executable
   binary file.  Some operating systems (notably MS-DOS, VMS, and
   TWENEX) use the extension .EXE to mark such files.  This usage is
   also occasionally found among UNIX programmers even though UNIX
   executables don't have any required suffix.

exec: /eg-zek'/ or /eks'ek/ vt., n.  1. [UNIX: from
   `execute'] Synonym for {chain}, derives from the
   `exec(2)' call.  2. [from `executive'] obs. The command
   interpreter for an {OS} (see {shell}); term esp. used
   around mainframes, and prob. derived from UNIVAC's archaic EXEC 2
   and EXEC 8 operating systems.  3. At IBM and VM/CMS shops, the
   equivalent of a shell command file (among VM/CMS users).

   The mainstream `exec' as an abbreviation for (human) executive is
   *not* used.  To a hacker, an `exec' is a always a program,
   never a person.

exercise, left as an:  [from technical books] Used to
   complete a proof when one doesn't mind a {handwave}, or to avoid
   one entirely.  The complete phrase is: "The proof [or `the rest']
   is left as an exercise for the reader."  This comment *has*
   occasionally been attached to unsolved research problems by authors
   possessed of either an evil sense of humor or a vast faith in the
   capabilities of their audiences.

external memory: n.  A memo pad or written notes.  "Hold on
   while I write that to external memory".  The analogy is with store
   or DRAM versus nonvolatile disk storage on computers.

eyeball search: n.,v.  To look for something in a mass of
   code or data with one's own native optical sensors, as opposed to
   using some sort of pattern matching software like {grep} or any
   other automated search tool.  Also called a {vgrep}; compare
   {vdiff}, {desk check}.