The Hacker's Dictionary, - [best reads of all time .txt] 📗

line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] n. 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978; this may have descended (if only by inspiration) from hack called RABBITS

reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 55000 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system.

By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication but is not a {virus} or {worm}. See {fork bomb}, see also {cookie monster}.

:WAITS:: /wayts/ n. The mutant cousin of {{TOPS-10}} used on a handful of systems at {{SAIL}} up to 1990. There was never an official' expansion of WAITS (the name itself having been arrived at by a rather sideways process), but it was frequently glossed asWest-coast Alternative to ITS'. Though WAITS was less visible than ITS, there was frequent exchange of people and ideas between the two communities, and innovations pioneered at WAITS exerted enormous indirect influence. The early screen modes of {EMACS}, for example, were directly inspired by WAITS's E' editor --- one of a family of editors that were the first to doreal-time editing', in which the editing commands were invisible and where one typed text at the point of insertion/overwriting. The modern style of multi-region windowing is said to have originated there, and WAITS alumni at XEROX PARC and elsewhere played major roles in the developments that led to the XEROX Star, the Macintosh, and the Sun workstations. {Bucky bits} were also invented there ---

thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One notable WAITS feature seldom duplicated elsewhere was a news-wire interface that allowed WAITS hackers to read, store, and filter AP and UPI dispatches from their terminals; the system also featured a still-unusual level of support for what is now called `multimedia'

computing, allowing analog audio and video signals to be switched to programming terminals.

:waldo: /wol'doh/ [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"]

A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead of {foobar} as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See {foo}, {bar}, {foobar}, {quux}.

:walk: n.,vt. Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in {core}. See also {codewalker}, {silly walk}, {clobber}.

:walk off the end of: vt. To run past the end of an array, list, or medium after stepping through it --- a good way to land in trouble.

Often the result of an {off-by-one error}. Compare {clobber}, {roach}, {smash the stack}.

:walking drives: n. An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky {washing machine}s. Those old {dinosaur} parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to `walk' across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it! Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.

:wall: [WPI] interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare {octal forty}. 3. [UNIX] v. To send a message to everyone currently logged in, esp. with the wall(8) utility.

It is said that sense 1 came from the idiom `like talking to a blank wall'. It was originally used in situations where, after you had carefully answered a question, the questioner stared at you blankly, clearly having understood nothing that was explained. You would then throw out a "Hello, wall?" to elicit some sort of response from the questioner. Later, confused questioners began voicing "Wall?" themselves.

:wall follower: n. A person or algorithm that compensates for lack of sophistication or native stupidity by efficiently following some simple procedure shown to have been effective in the past. Used of an algorithm, this is not necessarily pejorative; it recalls Harvey Wallbanger', the winning robot in an early AI contest (named, of course, after the cocktail). Harvey successfully solved mazes by keeping afinger' on one wall and running till it came out the other end. This was inelegant, but it was mathematically guaranteed to work on simply-connected mazes --- and, in fact, Harvey outperformed more sophisticated robots that tried to `learn' each maze by building an internal representation of it.

Used of humans, the term is pejorative and implies an uncreative, bureaucratic, by-the-book mentality. See also {code grinder}, {droid}.

:wall time: n. (also wall clock time') 1.Real world' time (what the clock on the wall shows), as opposed to the system clock's idea of time. 2. The real running time of a program, as opposed to the number of {clocks} required to execute it (on a timesharing system these will differ, as no one program gets all the {clocks}, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor clocks than real-time clocks).

:wallpaper: n. 1. A file containing a listing (e.g., assembly listing) or a transcript, esp. a file containing a transcript of all or part of a login session. (The idea was that the paper for such listings was essentially good only for wallpaper, as evidenced at Stanford, where it was used to cover windows.) Now rare, esp. since other systems have developed other terms for it (e.g., PHOTO on TWENEX). However, the UNIX world doesn't have an equivalent term, so perhaps {wallpaper} will take hold there.

The term probably originated on ITS, where the commands to begin and end transcript files were :WALBEG' and:WALEND', with default file WALL PAPER' (the space was a path delimiter). 2. The background pattern used on graphical workstations (this is techspeak under theWindows' graphical user interface to MS-DOS). 3. wallpaper file' n. The file that contains the wallpaper information before it is actually printed on paper. (Even if you don't intend ever to produce a real paper copy of the file, it is still called a wallpaper file.) :wango: /wang'goh/ n. Random bit-level {grovel}ling going on in a system during some unspecified operation. Often used in combination with {mumble}. For example: "You start with the.o'

file, run it through this postprocessor that does mumble-wango ---

and it comes out a snazzy object-oriented executable."

:wank: /wangk/ [Columbia University: prob. by mutation from Commonwealth slang v. wank', to masturbate] n.,v. Used much as {hack} is elsewhere, as a noun denoting a clever technique or person or the result of such cleverness. May describe (negatively) the act of hacking for hacking's sake ("Quit wanking, let's go get supper!") or (more positively) a {wizard}. Adj.wanky'

describes something particularly clever (a person, program, or algorithm). Conversations can also get wanky when there are too many wanks involved. This excess wankiness is signalled by an overload of the wankometer' (compare {bogometer}). When the wankometer overloads, the conversation's subject must be changed, or all non-wanks will leave. Compareneep-neeping' (under {neep-neep}). Usage: U.S. only. In Britain and the Commonwealth this word is extremely rude and is best avoided unless one intends to give offense.

:wannabee: /won'*-bee/ (also, more plausibly, spelled `wannabe') [from a term recently used to describe Madonna fans who dress, talk, and act like their idol; prob. originally from biker slang] n. A would-be {hacker}. The connotations of this term differ sharply depending on the age and exposure of the subject. Used of a person who is in or might be entering {larval stage}, it is semi-approving; such wannabees can be annoying but most hackers remember that they, too, were once such creatures. When used of any professional programmer, CS academic, writer, or {suit}, it is derogatory, implying that said person is trying to cuddle up to the hacker mystique but doesn't, fundamentally, have a prayer of understanding what it is all about.

Overuse of terms from this lexicon is often an indication of the {wannabee} nature. Compare {newbie}.

Historical note: The wannabee phenomenon has a slightly different flavor now (1991) than it did ten or fifteen years ago. When the people who are now hackerdom's tribal elders were in {larval stage}, the process of becoming a hacker was largely unconscious and unaffected by models known in popular culture --- communities formed spontaneously around people who, as individuals, felt irresistibly drawn to do hackerly things, and what wannabees experienced was a fairly pure, skill-focused desire to become similarly wizardly. Those days of innocence are gone forever; society's adaptation to the advent of the microcomputer after 1980

included the elevation of the hacker as a new kind of