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

unexpectedly. "His talk was relatively sane until somebody asked him a trick question; then he bogued out and did nothing but {flame} afterwards." See also {bogosity}, {bogus}.

:bogus: adj. 1. Non-functional. "Your patches are bogus."

Useless. "OPCON is a bogus program." 3. False. "Your arguments are bogus." 4. Incorrect. "That algorithm is bogus."

Unbelievable. "You claim to have solved the halting problem for Turing Machines? That's totally bogus." 6. Silly. "Stop writing those bogus sagas."

Astrology is bogus. So is a bolt that is obviously about to break.

So is someone who makes blatantly false claims to have solved a scientific problem. (This word seems to have some, but not all, of the connotations of {random} --- mostly the negative ones.) It is claimed that bogus' was originally used in the hackish sense at Princeton in the late 1960s. It was spread to CMU and Yale by Michael Shamos, a migratory Princeton alumnus. A glossary of bogus words was compiled at Yale when the word was first popularized (see {autobogotiphobia} under {bogotify}). The word spread into hackerdom from CMU and MIT. By the early 1980s it was also current in something like the hackish sense in West Coast teen slang, and it had gone mainstream by 1985. A correspondent from Cambridge reports, by contrast, that these uses ofbogus' grate on British nerves; in Britain the word means, rather specifically, `counterfeit', as in "a bogus 10-pound note".

:Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/ [from quantum physics] n. A repeatable {bug}; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions. Antonym of {heisenbug}; see also {mandelbug}, {schroedinbug}.

:boink: /boynk/ [USENET: ascribed there to the TV series "Cheers" and "Moonlighting"] 1. To have sex with; compare {bounce}, sense 3. (This is mainstream slang.) In Commonwealth hackish the variant bonk' is more common. 2. After the original Peter KornBoinkon' {USENET} parties, used for almost any net social gathering, e.g., Miniboink, a small boink held by Nancy Gillett in 1988; Minniboink, a Boinkcon in Minnesota in 1989; Humpdayboinks, Wednesday get-togethers held in the San Francisco Bay Area. Compare {@-party}. 3. Var of `bonk'; see {bonk/oif}.

:bomb: 1. v. General synonym for {crash} (sense 1) except that it is not used as a noun; esp. used of software or OS failures.

"Don't run Empire with less than 32K stack, it'll bomb."

n.,v. Atari ST and Macintosh equivalents of a UNIX `panic' or Amiga {guru} (sense 2), where icons of little black-powder bombs or mushroom clouds are displayed, indicating that the system has died. On the Mac, this may be accompanied by a decimal (or occasionally hexadecimal) number indicating what went wrong, similar to the Amiga {guru meditation} number. {{MS-DOS}}

machines tend to get {locked up} in this situation.

:bondage-and-discipline language: A language (such as Pascal, Ada, APL, or Prolog) that, though ostensibly general-purpose, is designed so as to enforce an author's theory of right programming' even though said theory is demonstrably inadequate for systems hacking or even vanilla general-purpose programming. Often abbreviatedB&D'; thus, one may speak of things "having the B&D nature". See {{Pascal}}; oppose {languages of choice}.

:bonk/oif: /bonk/, /oyf/ interj. In the {MUD} community, it has become traditional to express pique or censure by bonking' the offending person. There is a convention that one should acknowledge a bonk by sayingoif!' and a myth to the effect that failing to do so upsets the cosmic bonk/oif balance, causing much trouble in the universe. Some MUDs have implemented special commands for bonking and oifing. See also {talk mode}, {posing}.

:book titles:: There is a tradition in hackerdom of informally tagging important textbooks and standards documents with the dominant color of their covers or with some other conspicuous feature of the cover. Many of these are described in this lexicon under their own entries. See {Aluminum Book}, {Blue Book}, {Cinderella Book}, {Devil Book}, {Dragon Book}, {Green Book}, {Orange Book}, {Pink-Shirt Book}, {Purple Book}, {Red Book}, {Silver Book}, {White Book}, {Wizard Book}, {Yellow Book}, and {bible}; see also {rainbow series}.

:boot: [techspeak; from `by one's bootstraps'] v.,n. To load and initialize the operating system on a machine. This usage is no longer jargon (having passed into techspeak) but has given rise to some derivatives that are still jargon.

The derivative `reboot' implies that the machine hasn't been down for long, or that the boot is a {bounce} intended to clear some state of {wedgitude}. This is sometimes used of human thought processes, as in the following exchange: "You've lost me." "OK, reboot. Here's the theory...."

This term is also found in the variants cold boot' (from power-off condition) andwarm boot' (with the CPU and all devices already powered up, as after a hardware reset or software crash).

Another variant: `soft boot', reinitialization of only part of a system, under control of other software still running: "If you're running the {mess-dos} emulator, control-alt-insert will cause a soft-boot of the emulator, while leaving the rest of the system running."

Opposed to this there is `hard boot', which connotes hostility towards or frustration with the machine being booted: "I'll have to hard-boot this losing Sun." "I recommend booting it hard." One often hard-boots by performing a {power cycle}.

Historical note: this term derives from bootstrap loader', a short program that was read in from cards or paper tape, or toggled in from the front panel switches. This program was always very short (great efforts were expended on making it short in order to minimize the labor and chance of error involved in toggling it in), but was just smart enough to read in a slightly more complex program (usually from a card or paper tape reader), to which it handed control; this program in turn was smart enough to read the application or operating system from a magnetic tape drive or disk drive. Thus, in successive steps, the computerpulled itself up by its bootstraps' to a useful operating state. Nowadays the bootstrap is usually found in ROM or EPROM, and reads the first stage in from a fixed location on the disk, called the `boot block'. When this program gains control, it is powerful enough to load the actual OS and hand control over to it.

:bottom feeder: n. syn. for {slopsucker} derived from the fisherman's and naturalist's term for finny creatures who subsist on the primordial ooze.

:bottom-up implementation: n. Hackish opposite of the techspeak term `top-down design'. It is now received wisdom in most programming cultures that it is best to design from higher levels of abstraction down to lower, specifying sequences of action in increasing detail until you get to actual code. Hackers often find (especially in exploratory designs that cannot be closely specified in advance) that it works best to build things in the opposite order, by writing and testing a clean set of primitive operations and then knitting them together.

:bounce: v. 1. [perhaps from the image of a thrown ball bouncing off a wall] An electronic mail message that is undeliverable and returns an error notification to the sender is said to `bounce'.

See also {bounce message}. 2. [Stanford] To play volleyball.

At the now-demolished {D. C. Power Lab} building used by the Stanford AI Lab in the 1970s, there was a volleyball court on the front lawn. From 5 P.M. to 7 P.M. was the scheduled maintenance time for the computer, so every afternoon at 5 the computer would become unavailable, and over the intercom a voice would cry, "Now hear this: bounce, bounce!" followed by Brian McCune loudly bouncing a volleyball on the floor outside the offices of known volleyballers. 3. To engage in sexual intercourse; prob. from the expression `bouncing the mattress', but influenced by Roo's psychosexually loaded "Try bouncing me, Tigger!" from the "Winnie-the-Pooh" books. Compare {boink}. 4. To casually reboot a system in order to clear up a transient problem. Reported primarily among {VMS} users.

[IBM] To {power cycle} a peripheral in order to reset it.

:bounce message: [UNIX] n. Notification message returned to sender by a site unable to relay {email} to the intended {{Internet address}}

recipient or the next link in a {bang path} (see {bounce}).

Reasons might include a nonexistent or misspelled username or a {down} relay site. Bounce messages can themselves fail, with occasionally ugly results; see {sorcerer's apprentice mode}.

The terms bounce mail' andbarfmail' are also common.

:boustrophedon: [from a Greek word for turning like an ox while plowing] n. An ancient method of writing using alternate left-to-right and right-to-left lines. This term is actually philologists' techspeak and typesetter's jargon. Erudite hackers use it for an optimization performed by some computer typesetting software (notably UNIX troff(1)'). The adverbial formboustrophedonically' is also found (hackers purely love constructions like this).

:box: n. 1. A computer; esp. in the construction `foo box'

where foo is some functional qualifier, like graphics', or the name of an OS (thus,UNIX box', `MS-DOS box', etc.) "We preprocess the data on UNIX boxes before handing it up to the mainframe." 2. [within IBM] Without qualification but within an SNA-using site, this refers specifically to an IBM front-end processor or FEP /F-E-P/. An FEP is a small computer necessary to enable an IBM {mainframe} to communicate beyond the limits of the {dinosaur pen}. Typically used in expressions like the cry