From tomj Mon Aug  2 14:51:44 1993
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From: tomj (Tom Jennings)
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Subject: jargon additions
To: gls@ai.ai.mit.edu
Date: Mon, 2 Aug 1993 14:50:07 +0000 (WET DST)
Cc: tomj (Tom Jennings)
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Some I've collected in the last year. 



Words not in The New hackers dictionary, third printing.
Tom Jennings tomj@wps.com

panic (verb)
What software does when it gets upset, usually as obnoxiously as a human
might. (This is such a unix-ism I'm surprised it got left out!)

auto X-crement (verb)
The Data General Nova series had special low-core locations that would
auto-increment and auto-decrement when you did indirects through them.
Presumably they were meant for use as index registers. Of course you'd
forget to allocate them out of the way and eventually they'd get used
to store subroutine return addresses (no hardware stack remember) and
BOING your program would die. (First heard from the mouth
of Tom Campbell, '76 or so. He's from MIT, class of 72? 73?.)

additional lore related to foo
Foo, fubar, foobar, etc. One punny permutation I remember using in the
late 70's was 
		___
		FOO

ie. Boolean bar over a var means NOT FOO, ie. foobar. Get it? Sigh.
(First heard/used in '76 or so, when I was working at Ocean Research
Inc, Falmouth Mass. The people I worked with were MITers, and grew 
up on the "1", which we went to visit one drunkenly night, and lo, it had
been sent off to a museum!)

pomposia (noun)
pomposium
Some people call them symposia/symposium, however these are frequently more
accurate. (First heard about 89, don't know origin.)

bletch (interj)
As in bletcherous. Frequently used in MAD MAGAZINE (r.i.p. William
Gaines!) I don't recall the year, but it was definitely 1970 +/- 5
yrs. (NOTE: the spelling may be different. I dont have  any old MADs
around to check. You know how memories get...)

cookie (noun)
Aka chip aka integrated circuit package. Especially the newer big ones.
First heard around 1980/1981, Boston microcomputer crowd.

ancient (adj)
Anything not currently "high tech". 80286 is ancient. VAX is ancient.
Etc. Generally something that actually *is* ancient in some way, rather 
than just *your* 33MHz 386 when I have a 66MHz 486. Origin apocryphal.

crash (verb)
In FidoNet, to deliver immediately, as opposed to predetermined,
scheduled delivery. Implies importance. "I'll crash you the document
now." Crash first appeared in the Seadog FidoNet interface about 1986 or 87.

excommunicate (verb)
In FidoNet, to remove someone from a network list of some kind, ie. 
pull their plug.  Coined by me (blush) in 1985. I even have the original
message to Thom Henderson discussing it (amazing the crap you can save
these days.)

-- 
  Tom Jennings -- tomj@wps.com -- World Power Systems -- San Francisco, Calif.