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

they feature little overall plot, bad game topology, little competitive interaction, etc. --- not to mention the alleged horrors of the TinyMUD code itself. This dispute is one of the MUD

world's hardiest perennial {holy wars}. 2. TinyMud-oriented chat on the USENET group rec.games.mud and elsewhere, especially {newbie} questions and flamage.

:tip of the ice-cube: [IBM] n. The visible part of something small and insignificant. Used as an ironic comment in situations where `tip of the iceberg' might be appropriate if the subject were at all important.

:tired iron: [IBM] n. Hardware that is perfectly functional but far enough behind the state of the art to have been superseded by new products, presumably with sufficient improvement in bang-per-buck that the old stuff is starting to look a bit like a {dinosaur}.

:tits on a keyboard: n. Small bumps on certain keycaps to keep touch-typists registered (usually on the 5' of a numeric keypad, and on theF' and J' of a QWERTY keyboard; but the Mac, perverse as usual, has them on theD' and `K'

keys).

:TLA: /T-L-A/ [Three-Letter Acronym] n. 1. Self-describing abbreviation for a species with which computing terminology is infested. 2. Any confusing acronym. Examples include MCA, FTP, SNA, CPU, MMU, SCCS, DMU, FPU, NNTP, TLA. People who like this looser usage argue that not all TLAs have three letters, just as not all four-letter words have four letters. One also hears of ETLA' (Extended Three-Letter Acronym, pronounced /ee tee el ay/) being used to describe four-letter acronyms. The termSFLA' (Stupid Four-Letter Acronym) has also been reported. See also {YABA}.

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.)

:TMRC: /tmerk'/ n. The Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT, one of the wellsprings of hacker culture. The 1959 `Dictionary of the TMRC Language' compiled by Peter Samson included several terms which became basics of the hackish vocabulary (see esp. {foo}

and {frob}).

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 switch}es 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 (no model railroad can begin to approximate the scale distances between towns and stations, so model railroad timetables assume a fast clock so that it seems to take about the right amount of time for a train to complete its journey). 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 calledfoo 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.

:TMRCie: /tmerk'ee/, /tuh-merk'ee/ [MIT] n. A denizen of {TMRC}.

:to a first approximation: 1. [techspeak] When one is doing certain numerical computations, an approximate solution may be computed by any of several heuristic methods, then refined to a final value.

By using the starting point of a first approximation of the answer, one can write an algorithm that converges more quickly to the correct result. 2. In jargon, a preface to any comment that indicates that the comment is only approximately true. The remark "To a first approximation, I feel good" might indicate that deeper questioning would reveal that not all is perfect (e.g., a nagging cough still remains after an illness).

:to a zeroth approximation: [from `to a first approximation'] A really sloppy approximation; a wild guess. Compare {social science number}.

:toast: 1. n. Any completely inoperable system or component, esp.

one that has just crashed and burned: "Uh, oh ... I think the serial board is toast." 2. vt. To cause a system to crash accidentally, especially in a manner that requires manual rebooting. "Rick just toasted the {firewall machine} again."

:toaster: n. 1. The archetypal really stupid application for an embedded microprocessor controller; often used in comments that imply that a scheme is inappropriate technology (but see {elevator controller}). "{DWIM} for an assembler? That'd be as silly as running UNIX on your toaster!" 2. A very, very dumb computer. "You could run this program on any dumb toaster." See {bitty box}, {Get a real computer!}, {toy}, {beige toaster}.

A Macintosh, esp. the Classic Mac. Some hold that this is implied by sense 2. 4. A peripheral device. "I bought my box without toasters, but since then I've added two boards and a second disk drive."

:toeprint: n. A {footprint} of especially small size.

:toggle: vt. To change a {bit} from whatever state it is in to the other state; to change from 1 to 0 or from 0 to 1. This comes from toggle switches', such as standard light switches, though the wordtoggle' actually refers to the mechanism that keeps the switch in the position to which it is flipped rather than to the fact that the switch has two positions. There are four things you can do to a bit: set it (force it to be 1), clear (or zero) it, leave it alone, or toggle it. (Mathematically, one would say that there are four distinct boolean-valued functions of one boolean argument, but saying that is much less fun than talking about toggling bits.)

:tool: 1. n. A program used primarily to create, manipulate, modify, or analyze other programs, such as a compiler or an editor or a cross-referencing program. Oppose {app}, {operating system}.

[UNIX] An application program with a simple, `transparent'

(typically text-stream) interface designed specifically to be used in programmed combination with other tools (see {filter}).

[MIT: general to students there] vi. To work; to study (connotes tedium). The TMRC Dictionary defined this as "to set one's brain to the grindstone". See {hack}. 4. [MIT] n. A student who studies too much and hacks too little. (MIT's student humor magazine rejoices in the name Tool and Die'.) :toolsmith: n. The software equivalent of a tool-and-die specialist; one who specializes in making the {tool}s with which other programmers create applications. Many hackers consider this more fun than applications per se; to understand why, see {uninteresting}. Jon Bentley, in the "Bumper-Sticker Computer Science" chapter of his bookMore Programming Pearls', quotes Dick Sites from DEC as saying "I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs".

:topic drift: n. Term used on GEnie, USENET and other electronic fora to describe the tendency of a {thread} to drift away from the original subject of discussion (and thus, from the Subject header of the originating message), or the results of that tendency. Often used in gentle reminders that the discussion has strayed off any useful track. "I think we started with a question about Niven's last book, but we've ended up discussing the sexual habits of the common marmoset. Now that's topic drift!"

:topic group: n. Syn. {forum}.

:TOPS-10:: /tops-ten/ n. DEC's proprietary OS for the fabled {PDP-10}

machines, long a favorite of hackers but now effectively extinct.

A fountain of hacker folklore; see {appendix A}. See also {{ITS}}, {{TOPS-20}}, {{TWENEX}}, {VMS}, {operating system}. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from `bottoms-ten') as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything.

:TOPS-20:: /tops-twen'tee/ n. See {{TWENEX}}.

:toto: /toh'toh/ n. This is reported to be the default scratch file name among French-speaking programmers --- in other words, a francophone {foo}. It is reported that the phonetic mutations "titi", "tata", and "tutu" canonically follow `toto', analogously to {bar}, {baz} and {quux} in English.

:tourist: [ITS] n. A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for {comm mode}, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below {luser}. Hackers often spell this {turist}, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with {luser} (this also expresses the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms). Compare {twink}, {read-only user}.

:tourist information: n. Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The `bytes free'

information at the bottom of an MS-DOS dir' display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a UNIXps(1)' display.

:touristic: adj. Having the quality of a {tourist}. Often used as a pejorative, as in losing touristic scum'. Often spelledturistic' or turistik', so that phrase might be more properly renderedlusing