There is also a usage "ACK?" (from sense 1) meaning "Are you
there?", often used in email when earlier mail has produced no
reply, or during a lull in talk mode to see if the person has
gone away (the standard humorous response is of course NAK
(sense 2), i.e., "I'm not here").
This game defined the terse, dryly humorous style now expected in
text adventure games, and popularized several tag lines that have
become fixtures of hacker-speak: "A huge green fierce snake bars
the way!" "I see no X here" (for some noun X). "You are in a
maze of twisty little passages, all alike." "You are in a little
maze of twisty passages, all different." The `magic words'
xyzzy and plugh also derive from this game.
Crowther, by the way, participated in the exploration of the
Mammoth & Flint Ridge cave system; it actually *has* a
`Colossal Cave' and a `Bedquilt' as in the game, and the `Y2' that
also turns up is cavers' jargon for a map reference to a secondary
entrance.
Examples of AI-complete problems are `The Vision Problem'
(building a system that can see as well as a human) and `The
Natural Language Problem' (building a system that can understand
and speak a natural language as well as a human). These may appear
to be modular, but all attempts so far (1993) to solve them have
foundered on the amount of context information and `intelligence'
they seem to require. See also gedanken.
Historical note: Though this term is nowadays associated with
C programming, it was already in use in a very similar sense in the
Algol-60 and FORTRAN communities in the 1960s.
Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a PDP-10
instruction that took any memory location in the computer and added
1 to it; AOS meant `Add One and do not Skip'. Why, you may ask,
does the `S' stand for `do not Skip' rather than for `Skip'? Ah,
here was a beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such
instructions: AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction
if the result was Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if
the result was Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped
if the result was Not 0; AOSA added 1 and then skipped Always;
and so on. Just plain AOS didn't say when to skip, so it never
skipped.
For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even
more bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the
next instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant
`do not JUMP'; the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers
never did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the JRST
(Jump and ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster
and so was invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of
assembler programming.
ARMM's bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which
mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other
headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which
each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject
line got longer and longer and longer.
Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological
messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying
line charges for their USENET feeds. One poster described the ARMM
debacle as "instant USENET history" (also establishing the term
despew), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary
example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and
incompetence can wreak on a network. Compare [Great Worm, The];
sorcerer's apprentice mode. See also software laser,
network meltdown.
This list derives from revision 2.3 of the USENET ASCII
pronunciation guide. Single characters are listed in ASCII order;
character pairs are sorted in by first member. For each character,
common names are given in rough order of popularity, followed by
names that are reported but rarely seen; official ANSI/CCITT names
are surrounded by brokets: <>. Square brackets mark the
particularly silly names introduced by INTERCAL. The
abbreviations "l/r" and "o/c" stand for left/right and
"open/close" respectively. Ordinary parentheticals provide some
usage information.
!
"
#
$
%
&
'
( )
Common: l/r paren; l/r parenthesis; left/right; open/close;
*
+
,
-
.
/
:
;
< >
=
?
@
V
[ ]
\
^
_
`
[ ]
|
~
The pronunciation of `#' as `pound' is common in the U.S.
The `uparrow' name for circumflex and `leftarrow' name for
The `swung dash' or `approximation' sign is not quite the same
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The `#',
The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the
Common: bang; pling; excl; shriek;
Rare: factorial; exclam; smash; cuss; boing; yell; wow; hey;
wham; eureka; [spark-spot]; soldier.
Common: double quote; quote. Rare: literal mark;
double-glitch;
[rabbit-ears]; double prime.
Common: number sign; pound; pound sign; hash; sharp; crunch;
hex; [mesh]. Rare: grid; crosshatch; octothorpe; flash;
splat.
Common: dollar;
cash; string (from BASIC); escape (when used as the echo of
ASCII ESC); ding; cache; [big money].
Common: percent;
[double-oh-seven].
Common:
reference (from C++); andpersand; bitand; background (from
`sh(1)'); pretzel; amp. [INTERCAL called this `ampersand';
what could be sillier?]
Common: single quote; quote;
glitch; tick; irk; pop; [spark];
paren/thesis; o/c paren; o/c parenthesis; l/r parenthesis; l/r
banana. Rare: so/already; lparen/rparen;
[wax/wane]; parenthisey/unparenthisey; l/r ear.
Common: star; [splat];
dingle; mult; spider; aster; times; twinkle; glob (see
glob); Nathan Hale.
Common:
Common:
Common: dash;
bithorpe.
Common: dot; point;
point; full stop; [spot].
Common: slash; stroke;
diagonal; solidus; over; slak; virgule; [slat].
Common:
Common:
pit-thwong.
Common:
bracket; l/r broket. Rare: from/[into, towards]; read
from/write to; suck/blow; comes-from/gozinta; in/out;
crunch/zap (all from UNIX); [angle/right angle].
Common:
[half-mesh].
Common: query;
[what]; wildchar; huh; hook; buttonhook; hunchback.
Common: at sign; at; strudel. Rare: each; vortex; whorl;
[whirlpool]; cyclone; snail; ape; cat; rose; cabbage;
Rare: [book].
Common: l/r square bracket; l/r bracket;
turn back].
Common: backslash; escape (from C/UNIX); reverse slash; slosh;
backslant; backwhack. Rare: bash;
virgule; [backslat].
Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret;
chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of');
fang; pointer (in Pascal).
Common:
score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm].
Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote;
unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push;
Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly
bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace;
squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].
Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare:
UNIX); [spike].
Common:
wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].
but a bad idea; "Commonwealth Hackish" has its own, rather more
apposite use of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards
the pound graphic
happens to replace `#'; thus Britishers sometimes
call `#' on a U.S.-ASCII keyboard `pound', compounding the
American error). The U.S. usage derives from an old-fashioned
commercial practice of using a `#' suffix to tag pound weights
on bills of lading. The character is usually pronounced `hash'
outside the U.S.
underline are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963
version), which had these graphics in those character positions
rather than the modern punctuation characters.
as tilde in typeset material
but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare [angle
brackets}).
`$', `>', and `&' characters, for example, are all
pronounced "hex" in different communities because various
assemblers use them as a prefix tag for hexadecimal constants (in
particular, `#' in many assembler-programming cultures,
`$' in the 6502 world, `>' at Texas Instruments, and
`&' on the BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See
also splat.
world's other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits
look more and more like a serious misfeature as the use of
international networks continues to increase (see [software
rot}). Hardware and software from the U.S. still tends to embody
the assumption that ASCII is the universal character set and that
characters have 7 bits; this is a a major irritant to people who
want to use a character set suited to their own languages.
Perversely, though, efforts to solve this problem by proliferating
`national' character sets produce an evolutionary pressure to use
a *smaller* subset common to all those in use.
o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O
L )||( | | | C U
A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-\/\/-+--o - T
C N )||( | | | | P
E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--)|--+-o U
)||( | | | GND T
o----)||(--+--|<----+----------+
A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit
feeding a capacitor input filter circuit
Figure 1.
And here are some very silly examples:
|\/\/\/| ____/| ___ |\_/| ___
| | \ o.O| ACK! / \_ |` '| _/ \
| | =(_)= THPHTH! / \/ \/ \
| (o)(o) U / \
C _) (__) \/\/\/\ _____ /\/\/\/
| ,___| (oo) \/ \/
| / \/-------\ U (__)
/____\ || | \ /---V `v'- oo )
/ \ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |_/\
//-o-\\
____---=======---____
====___\ /.. ..\ /___==== Klingons rule OK!
// ---\__O__/--- \\
\_\ /_/
Figure 2.
There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the
standard character names in the fashion of a rebus.
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
" A Bee in the Carrot Patch "
Figure 3.
Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire
flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are
reproduced in Figure 2; here are three more:
(__) (__) (__)
(\/) ($$) (**)
/-------\/ /-------\/ /-------\/
/ | 666 || / |=====|| / | ||
* ||----|| * ||----|| * ||----||
~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love
Figure 4.
Computer usage, in either of the above senses, has none of the
connotations that `atomic' has in mainstream English (i.e. of
particles of matter, nuclear explosions etc.).