Talk mode has a special set of jargon words, used to save typing,
which are not used orally. Some of these are identical to (and
probably derived from) Morse-code jargon used by ham-radio amateurs
since the 1920s.
BCNU
Most of the above sub-jargon is used at both Stanford and MIT.
Most of these are not used at universities or in the UNIX world,
The MUD community uses a mixture of USENET/Internet emoticons,
CU l8er
Some BIFFisms (notably the variant spelling `d00d')
One final note on talk mode style: neophytes, when in talk mode,
be seeing you
BTW
by the way
BYE?
are you ready to unlink? (this is the standard way to end a
talk-mode conversation; the other person types `BYE' to
confirm, or else continues the conversation)
CUL
see you later
ENQ?
are you busy? (expects `ACK' or `NAK' in return)
FOO?
are you there? (often used on unexpected links, meaning also
"Sorry if I butted in ..." (linker) or "What's up?" (linkee))
FWIW
for what it's worth
FYI
for your information
FYA
for your amusement
GA
go ahead (used when two people have tried to type
simultaneously; this cedes the right to type to the other)
GRMBL
grumble (expresses disquiet or disagreement)
HELLOP
hello? (an instance of the `-P' convention)
JAM
just a minute (equivalent to `SEC....')
MIN
same as `JAM'
NIL
no (see NIL)
O
over to you
OO
over and out
/
another form of "over to you" (from x/y as "x over y")
\
lambda (used in discussing LISPy things)
OBTW
oh, by the way
R U THERE?
are you there?
SEC
wait a second (sometimes written `SEC...')
T
yes (see the main entry for T)
TNX
thanks
TNX 1.0E6
thanks a million (humorous)
TNXE6
another form of "thanks a million"
WRT
with regard to, or with respect to.
WTF
the universal interrogative particle; WTF knows what it means?
WTH
what the hell?
When the typing party has finished, he/she types two newlines
to signal that he/she is done; this leaves a blank line
between `speeches' in the conversation, making it easier to
reread the preceding text.
When three or more terminals are linked, it is conventional
for each typist to prepend his/her login name or handle and
a colon (or a hyphen) to each line to indicate who is typing
(some conferencing facilities do this automatically). The
login name is often shortened to a unique prefix (possibly a
single letter) during a very long conversation.
/\/\/\
A giggle or chuckle. On a MUD, this usually means `earthquake
fault'.
Several of these expressions are also common in email, esp.
FYI, FYA, BTW, BCNU, WTF, and CUL. A few other abbreviations have
been reported from commercial networks, such as GEnie and
CompuServe, where on-line `live' chat including more than two
people is common and usually involves a more `social' context,
notably the following:
grin
grinning, running, and ducking
BBL
be back later
BRB
be right back
HHOJ
ha ha only joking
HHOK
ha ha only kidding
HHOS
ha ha only serious
IMHO
in my humble opinion (see IMHO)
LOL
laughing out loud
NHOH
Never Heard of Him/Her (often used in initgame)
ROTF
rolling on the floor
ROTFL
rolling on the floor laughing
AFK
away from keyboard
b4
before
CU l8tr
see you later
MORF
male or female?
TTFN
ta-ta for now
TTYL
talk to you later
OIC
oh, I see
rehi
hello again
though ROTF and TTFN have gained some currency there and IMHO is
common; conversely, most of the people who know these are
unfamiliar with FOO?, BCNU, HELLOP, NIL, and T.
a few of the more natural of the old-style talk-mode abbrevs, and
some of the `social' list above; specifically, MUD respondents
report use of BBL, BRB, LOL, b4, BTW, WTF, TTFN, and WTH. The use
of `rehi' is also common; in fact, mudders are fond of re-
compounds and will frequently `rehug' or `rebonk' (see
bonk/oif) people. The word `re' by itself is taken as
`regreet'. In general, though, MUDders express a preference for
typing things out in full rather than using abbreviations; this may
be due to the relative youth of the MUD cultures, which tend to
include many touch typists and to assume high-speed links. The
following uses specific to MUDs are reported:
see you later (mutant of `CU l8tr')
FOAD
fuck off and die (use of this is generally OTT)
OTT
over the top (excessive, uncalled for)
ppl
abbrev for "people"
THX
thanks (mutant of `TNX'; clearly this comes in batches of 1138
(the Lucasian K)).
UOK?
are you OK?
appear to be passing into wider use among some subgroups of
MUDders.
often seem to think they must produce letter-perfect prose because
they are typing rather than speaking. This is not the best
approach. It can be very frustrating to wait while your partner
pauses to think of a word, or repeatedly makes the same spelling
error and backs up to fix it. It is usually best just to leave
typographical errors behind and plunge forward, unless severe
confusion may result; in that case it is often fastest just to type
"xxx" and start over from before the mistake.
Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North
America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice
of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and
prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were
feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous `ANSI
standard cup of tea' and wind up with a political situation
distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious
technical contexts. Milk and lemon don't mix very well.
As an example of TECO's obscurity, here is a TECO program that
takes a list of names such as:
Loser, J. Random
Quux, The Great
Dick, Moby
sorts them alphabetically according to surname, and then puts the
surname last, removing the comma, to produce the following:
Moby Dick
J. Random Loser
The Great Quux
The program is
[1 J^P$L$$
J <.-Z; .,(S,$ -D .)FX1 @F^B $K :L I $ G1 L>$$
(where ^B means `Control-B' (ASCII 0000010) and $ is actually
an alt or escape (ASCII 0011011) character).
In fact, this very program was used to produce the second, sorted
list from the first list. The first hack at it had a bug: GLS
(the author) had accidentally omitted the `@' in front
of `F^B', which as anyone can see is clearly the Wrong Thing. It
worked fine the second time. There is no space to describe all the
features of TECO, but it may be of interest that `^P' means
`sort' and `J<.-Z; ... L>' is an idiomatic series of commands
for `do once for every line'.
In mid-1991, TECO is pretty much one with the dust of history,
having been replaced in the affections of hackerdom by EMACS.
Descendants of an early (and somewhat lobotomized) version adopted
by DEC can still be found lurking on VMS and a couple of crufty
PDP-11 operating systems, however, and ports of the more advanced
MIT versions remain the focus of some antiquarian interest. See
also retrocomputing, write-only language.
Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining
quality of the typesetting in volumes I--III of his monumental
"Art of Computer Programming" (see Knuth, also
bible). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to
solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his
own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his
sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years. The
language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of "The
Art of Computer Programming" has yet to appear as of mid-1993. The
impact and influence of TeX's design has been such that nobody
minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started as
a bit of toolsmithing on the way to something else; Knuth's
diversion was simply on a grander scale than most.
TeX has also been a noteworthy example of free, shared, but
high-quality software. Knuth used to offer monetary awards to people
who found and reported bugs in it; as the years wore on and the few
remaining bugs were fixed (and new ones even harder to find), the
bribe went up. Though well-written, TeX is so large (and so full of
cutting edge technique) that it is said to have unearthed at least
one bug in every Pascal system it has been compiled with.
Historical note: There are a couple of onomatopoeic myths
circulating about the origin of this term. The most common is that
it is the sound made by data hitting the stack; another holds that
the sound is that of the data hitting an accumulator. Yet another
suggests that it is the sound of the expression being unfrozen at
argument-evaluation time. In fact, according to the inventors, it
was coined after they realized (in the wee hours after hours of
discussion) that the type of an argument in Algol-60 could be
figured out in advance with a little compile-time thought,
simplifying the evaluation machinery. In other words, it had
`already been thought of'; thus it was christened a `thunk',
which is "the past tense of `think' at two in the morning".
A subset of tiger teams are professional crackers, testing the
security of military computer installations by attempting remote
attacks via networks or supposedly `secure' comm channels. Some of
their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the
greatest hacks of all times. The term has been adopted in
commercial computer-security circles in this more specific sense.
Interestingly, the only such incident for which we have been
pointed to documentary evidence took place in the Soviet Union in
1986! A disgruntled programmer at the Volga Automobile Plant
(where the Fiat clones called Ladas were manufactured) planted a
time bomb which, a week after he'd left on vacation, stopped the
entire main assembly line for a day. The case attracted lots of
attention in the Soviet Union because it was the first cracking
case to make it to court there. The perpetrator got 3 years in
jail.
The self-effacing phrase "TDM TLA" (Too Damn Many...) is
often used to bemoan the plethora of TLAs in use. In 1989, a
random of the journalistic persuasion asked hacker Paul Boutin
"What do you think will be the biggest problem in computing in
the 90s?" Paul's straight-faced response: "There are only
17,000 three-letter acronyms." (To be exact, there are 26^3
= 17,576.)
By 1962, TMRC's legendary layout was already a marvel of complexity
(and has grown in the thirty years since; all the features
described here are still present). The control system alone
featured about 1200 relays. There were scram switches located
at numerous places around the room that could be thwacked if
something undesirable was about to occur, such as a train going
full-bore at an obstruction. Another feature of the system was a
digital clock on the dispatch board, which was itself something of
a wonder in those bygone days before cheap LEDS and seven-segment
displays. When someone hit a scram switch the clock stopped and
the display was replaced with the word `FOO'; at TMRC the scram
switches are therefore called `foo switches'.
Steven Levy, in his book "Hackers" (see the Bibliography in
Appendix C), gives a stimulating account of those early
years. TMRC's Power and Signals group included most of the early
PDP-1 hackers and the people who later bacame the core of the MIT
AI Lab staff. Thirty years later that connection is still very
much alive, and this lexicon accordingly includes a number of
entries from a recent revision of the TMRC dictionary.
This term is associated with assembler programming (`interrupt'
or `exception' is more common among HLL programmers) and
appears to be fading into history among programmers as the role of
assembler continues to shrink. However, it is still important to
computer architects and systems hackers (see system,
sense 1), who use it to distinguish deterministically repeatable
exceptions from timing-dependent ones (such as I/O interrupts).
In 1979, Brian Kernighan modified `troff' so that it could
drive phototypesetters other than the Graphic Systems CAT. His
paper describing that work ("A Typesetter-independent troff,"
AT&T CSTR #97) explains troff's durability. After discussing the
program's "obvious deficiencies --- a rebarbative input syntax,
mysterious and undocumented properties in some areas, and a
voracious appetite for computer resources" and noting the ugliness
and extreme hairiness of the code and internals, Kernighan
concludes:
None of these remarks should be taken as denigrating
Ossanna's accomplishment with TROFF. It has proven a
remarkably robust tool, taking unbelievable abuse from a
variety of preprocessors and being forced into uses that
were never conceived of in the original design, all with
considerable grace under fire.
The success of "TeX" and desktop publishing systems have
reduced `troff''s relative importance, but this tribute
perfectly captures the strengths that secured `troff' a place
in hacker folklore; indeed, it could be taken more generally as an
indication of those qualities of good programs that, in the long
run, hackers most admire.
The twirling baton was a popular component of animated signature
files on the pioneering PLATO educational timesharing system. The
`archie' Internet service is perhaps the best-known baton
program today; it uses the twirling baton as an idler indicating
that the program is working on a query.