10 points for correctly being able to process a "Kamikaze"
packet (AKA nastygram, christmas tree packet, lamp test
segment, et al.). That is, correctly handle a segment with the
maximum combination of features at once (e.g., a SYN URG PUSH
FIN segment with options and data).
See also Chernobyl packet.
The popularity of the phrase `attack of the killer micros' is
doubtless reinforced by the movie title "Attack Of The Killer
Tomatoes" (one of the canonical examples of
so-bad-it's-wonderful among hackers). This has even more flavor
now that killer micros have gone on the offensive not just
individually (in workstations) but in hordes (within massively
parallel computers).
Nowadays this term is often encountered in the variant spelling
`kludge'. Reports from old farts are consistent that
`kluge' was the original spelling, reported around computers as
far back as the mid-1950s and, at that time, used exclusively of
*hardware* kluges. In 1947, the "New York Folklore
Quarterly" reported a classic shaggy-dog story `Murgatroyd the
Kluge Maker' then current in the Armed Forces, in which a `kluge'
was a complex and puzzling artifact with a trivial function. Other
sources report that `kluge' was common Navy slang in the WWII era
for any piece of electronics that worked well on shore but
consistently failed at sea.
However, there is reason to believe this slang use may be a decade
older. Several respondents have connected it to the brand name of
a device called a "Kluge paper feeder" dating back at least to
1935, an adjunct to mechanical printing presses. The Kluge feeder
was designed before small, cheap electric motors and control
electronics; it relied on a fiendishly complex assortment of cams,
belts, and linkages to both power and synchronize all its
operations from one motive driveshaft. It was accordingly
tempermental, subject to frequent breakdowns, and devilishly
difficult to repair --- but oh, so clever! One traditional
folk etymology of `kluge' makes it the name of a design engineer;
in fact, `Kluge' is a surname in German, and the designer of the
Kluge feeder may well have been the man behind this myth.
TMRC and the MIT hacker culture of the early '60s seems to
have developed in a milieu that remembered and still used some WWII
military slang (see also foobar). It seems likely that
`kluge' came to MIT via alumni of the many military electronics
projects that had been located in Cambridge (many in MIT's
venerable Building 20, in which TMRC is also located) during
the war.
The variant `kludge' was apparently popularized by the
Datamation article mentioned above; it was titled "How
to Design a Kludge" (February 1962, pp. 30, 31). Some people
who encountered the word first in print or on-line jumped to the
reasonable but incorrect conclusion that the word should be
pronounced /kluhj/ (rhyming with `sludge'). The result of this
tangled history is a mess; in 1993, many (perhaps even most)
hackers pronounce the word correctly as /klooj/ but spell it
incorrectly as `kludge' (compare the pronunciation drift of
mung). Some observers consider this appropriate in view of
its meaning.
In fact, it was only six years later that the first genuine site in
Moscow, demos.su, joined USENET. Some readers needed
convincing that the postings from it weren't just another prank.
Vadim Antonov, senior programmer at Demos and the major poster from
there up to mid-1991, was quite aware of all this, referred to it
frequently in his own postings, and at one point twitted some
credulous readers by blandly asserting that he *was* a
hoax!
Eventually he even arranged to have the domain's gateway site
*named* kremvax, thus neatly turning fiction into truth
and demonstrating that the hackish sense of humor transcends
cultural barriers. [Mr. Antonov also contributed the
Russian-language material for this lexicon. --- ESR]
In an even more ironic historical footnote, kremvax became an
electronic center of the anti-communist resistance during the
bungled hard-line coup of August 1991. During those three days the
Soviet UUCP network centered on kremvax became the only
trustworthy news source for many places within the USSR. Though
the sysops were concentrating on internal communications,
cross-border postings included immediate transliterations of Boris
Yeltsin's decrees condemning the coup and eyewitness reports of the
demonstrations in Moscow's streets. In those hours, years of
speculation that totalitarianism would prove unable to maintain its
grip on politically-loaded information in the age of computer
networking were proved devastatingly accurate --- and the original
kremvax joke became a reality as Yeltsin and the new Russian
revolutionaries of `glasnost' and `perestroika' made
kremvax one of the timeliest means of their outreach to the
West.