Part 39

:system: n. 1. The supervisor program or OS on a computer. 2. The entire computer system, including input/output devices, the supervisor program or OS, and possibly other software. 3. Any large-scale program. 4. Any method or algorithm. 5. `System hacker': one who hacks the system (in senses 1 and 2 only; for sense 3 one mentions the particular program: e.g., `LISP hacker')

:systems jock: n. See {jock}, (sense 2).

:system mangler: n. Humorous synonym for `system manager', poss. from the fact that one major IBM OS had a {root} account called SYSMANGR. Refers specifically to a systems programmer in charge of administration, software maintenance, and updates at some site. Unlike {admin}, this term emphasizes the technical end of the skills involved.

:SysVile: /sis-vi:l'/ n. See {Missed'em-five}.

= T = =====

:T: /T/ 1. [from LISP terminology for `true'] Yes. Used in reply to a question (particularly one asked using the `-P' convention). In LISP, the constant T means `true', among other things. Some hackers use `T' and `NIL' instead of `Yes' and `No' almost reflexively. This sometimes causes misunderstandings. When a waiter or flight attendant asks whether a hacker wants coffee, he may well respond `T', meaning that he wants coffee; but of course he will be brought a cup of tea instead. As it happens, most hackers (particularly those who frequent Chinese restaurants) like tea at least as well as coffee --- so it is not that big a problem. 2. See {time T} (also {since time T equals minus infinity}). 3. [techspeak] In transaction-processing circles, an abbreviation for the noun `transaction'. 4. [Purdue] Alternate spelling of {tee}. 5. A dialect of {LISP} developed at Yale.

:tail recursion: n. If you aren't sick of it already, see {tail recursion}.

:talk mode: n. A feature supported by UNIX, ITS, and some other OSes that allows two or more logged-in users to set up a real-time on-line conversation. It combines the immediacy of talking with all the precision (and verbosity) that written language entails. It is difficult to communicate inflection, though conventions have arisen for some of these (see the section on writing style in the Prependices for details).

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 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)) 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'.

Most of the above sub-jargon is used at both Stanford and MIT. 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 <gr&d> 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

Most of these are not used at universities or in the UNIX world, 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}.

The {MUD} community uses a mixture of USENET/Internet emoticons, 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:

UOK? are you OK? THX thanks (mutant of `TNX'; clearly this comes in batches of 1138 (the Lucasian K)). CU l8er see you later (mutant of `CU l8tr') OTT over the top (excessive, uncalled for) FOAD fuck off and die (use of this is often OTT)

Some {BIFF}isms (notably the variant spelling `d00d') appear to be passing into wider use among some subgroups of MUDders.

One final note on talk mode style: neophytes, when in talk mode, 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.

See also {hakspek}, {emoticon}, {bonk/oif}.

:talker system: n. British hackerism for software that enables real-time chat or {talk mode}.

:tall card: n. A PC/AT-size expansion card (these can be larger than IBM PC or XT cards because the AT case is bigger). See also {short card}. When IBM introduced the PS/2 model 30 (its last gasp at supporting the ISA) they made the case lower and many industry-standard tall cards wouldn't fit; this was felt to be a reincarnation of the {connector conspiracy}, done with less style.

:tanked: adj. Same as {down}, used primarily by UNIX hackers. See also {hosed}. Popularized as a synonym for `drunk' by Steve Dallas in the late lamented "Bloom County" comic strip.

:TANSTAAFL: /tan'stah-fl/ [acronym, from Robert Heinlein's classic `The Moon is a Harsh Mistress'.] "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at an ugly design requirement or the prospect of using an unpleasantly {heavyweight} technique. "What? Don't tell me I have to implement a database back end to get my address book program to work!" "Well, TANSTAAFL you know." This phrase owes some of its popularity to the high concentration of science-fiction fans and political libertarians in hackerdom (see Appendix B).

:tar and feather: [from UNIX `tar(1)'] vt. To create a transportable archive from a group of files by first sticking them together with `tar(1)' (the Tape ARchiver) and then compressing the result (see {compress}). The latter action is dubbed `feathering' by analogy to what you do with an airplane propeller to decrease wind resistance, or with an oar to reduce water resistance; smaller files, after all, slip through comm links more easily.

:taste: [primarily MIT] n. 1. The quality in a program that tends to be inversely proportional to the number of features, hacks, and kluges programmed into it. Also `tasty', `tasteful', `tastefulness'. "This feature comes in N tasty flavors." Although `tasteful' and `flavorful' are essentially synonyms, `taste' and {flavor} are not. Taste refers to sound judgment on the part of the creator; a program or feature can *exhibit* taste but cannot *have* taste. On the other hand, a feature can have {flavor}. Also, {flavor} has the additional meaning of `kind' or `variety' not shared by `taste'. {Flavor} is a more popular word than `taste', though both are used. See also {elegant}. 2. Alt. sp. of {tayste}.

:tayste: /tayst/ n. Two bits; also as {taste}. Syn. {crumb}, {quarter}. Compare {{byte}}, {dynner}, {playte}, {nybble}, {quad}.

:TCB: /T-C-B/ [IBM] n. 1. Trouble Came Back. An intermittent or difficult-to-reproduce problem that has failed to respond to neglect. Compare {heisenbug}. Not to be confused with: 2. Trusted Computing Base, an `official' jargon term from the {Orange Book}.

:tea, ISO standard cup of: [South Africa] n. A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on.

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.

:TechRef: /tek'ref/ [MS-DOS] n. The original `IBM PC Technical Reference Manual', including the BIOS listing and complete schematics for the PC. The only PC documentation in the issue package that's considered serious by real hackers.

:TECO: /tee'koh/ obs. 1. vt. Originally, to edit using the TECO editor in one of its infinite variations (see below). 2. vt.,obs. To edit even when TECO is *not* the editor being used! This usage is rare and now primarily historical. 2. [originally an acronym for `[paper] Tape Editor and COrrector'; later, `Text Editor and COrrector'] n. A text editor developed at MIT and modified by just about everybody. With all the dialects included, TECO might have been the most prolific editor in use before {EMACS}, to which it was directly ancestral. Noted for its powerful programming-language-like features and its unspeakably hairy syntax. It is literally the case that every string of characters is a valid TECO program (though probably not a useful one); one common hacker game used to be mentally working out what the TECO commands corresponding to human names did. 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}.

:tee: n.,vt. [Purdue] A carbon copy of an electronic transmission. "Oh, you're sending him the {bits} to that? Slap on a tee for me." From the UNIX command `tee(1)', itself named after a pipe fitting (see {plumbing}). Can also mean `save one for me', as in "Tee a slice for me!" Also spelled `T'.

:Telerat: /tel'*-rat/ n. Unflattering hackerism for `Teleray', a line of extremely losing terminals. Compare {AIDX}, {terminak}, {Macintrash} {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {HP-SUX}.

:TELNET: /tel'net/ vt. To communicate with another Internet host using the {TELNET} protocol (usually using a program of the same name). TOPS-10 people used the word IMPCOM, since that was the program name for them. Sometimes abbreviated to TN /T-N/. "I usually TN over to SAIL just to read the AP News."

:ten-finger interface: n. The interface between two networks that cannot be directly connected for security reasons; refers to the practice of placing two terminals side by side and having an operator read from one and type into the other.

:tense: adj. Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got that way because it was highly {bum}med, but sometimes it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student hacker at CMU: "This routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes." A tense programmer is one who produces tense code.

:tenured graduate student: n. One who has been in graduate school for 10 years (the usual maximum is 5 or 6): a `ten-yeared' student (get it?). Actually, this term may be used of any grad student beginning in his seventh year. Students don't really get tenure, of course, the way professors do, but a tenth-year graduate student has probably been around the university longer than any untenured professor.

:tera-: /te'r*/ [SI] pref. See {{quantifiers}}.

:teraflop club: /te'r*-flop kluhb/ [FLOP = Floating Point Operation] n. A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder.

:terminak: /ter'mi-nak`/ [Caltech, ca. 1979] n. Any malfunctioning computer terminal. A common failure mode of Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the `L' key to produce the `K' code instead; complaints about this tended to look like "Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease fix." See {AIDX}, {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {Telerat}, {HP-SUX}.

:terminal brain death: n. The extreme form of {terminal illness} (sense 1). What someone who has obviously been hacking continuously for far too long is said to be suffering from.

:terminal illness: n. 1. Syn. {raster burn}. 2. The `burn-in' condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a screen saver.

:terminal junkie: [UK] n. A {wannabee} or early {larval stage} hacker who spends most of his or her time wandering the directory tree and writing {noddy} programs just to get a fix of computer time. Variants include `terminal jockey', `console junkie', and {console jockey}. The term `console jockey' seems to imply more expertise than the other three (possibly because of the exalted status of the {{console}} relative to an ordinary terminal). See also {twink}, {read-only user}.

:terpri: /ter'pree/ [from LISP 1.5 (and later, MacLISP)] vi. To output a {newline}. Now rare as jargon, though still used as techspeak in Common LISP. It is a contraction of `TERminate PRInt line', named for the fact that, on some early OSes and hardware, no characters would be printed until a complete line was formed, so this operation terminated the line and emitted the output.

:test: n. 1. Real users bashing on a prototype long enough to get thoroughly acquainted with it, with careful monitoring and followup of the results. 2. Some bored random user trying a couple of the simpler features with a developer looking over his or her shoulder, ready to pounce on mistakes. Judging by the quality of most software, the second definition is far more prevalent. See also {demo}.

:TeX: /tekh/ n. An extremely powerful {macro}-based text formatter written by Donald E. {Knuth}, very popular in the computer-science community (it is good enough to have displaced UNIX `troff(1)', the other favored formatter, even at many UNIX installations). TeX fans insist on the correct (guttural) pronunciation, and the correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E depressed below the baseline; the mixed-case `TeX' is considered an acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices). Fans like to proliferate names from the word `TeX' --- such as TeXnician (TeX user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique.

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-1991. 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 tool-building 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 it has been compiled with.

:text: n. 1. [techspeak] Executable code, esp. a `pure code' portion shared between multiple instances of a program running in a multitasking OS (compare {English}). 2. Textual material in the mainstream sense; data in ordinary {{ASCII}} or {{EBCDIC}} representation (see {flat-ASCII}). "Those are text files; you can review them using the editor." These two contradictory senses confuse hackers, too.

:thanks in advance: [USENET] Conventional net.politeness ending a posted request for information or assistance. Sometimes written `advTHANKSance' or `aTdHvAaNnKcSe' or abbreviated `TIA'. See {net.-}, {netiquette}.

:That's not a bug, that's a feature!: The {canonical} first parry in a debate about a purported bug. The complainant, if unconvinced, is likely to retort that the bug is then at best a {misfeature}. See also {feature}.

:the X that can be Y is not the true X: Yet another instance of hackerdom's peculiar attraction to mystical references --- a common humorous way of making exclusive statements about a class of things. The template is from the `Tao te Ching': "The Tao which can be spoken of is not the true Tao." The implication is often that the X is a mystery accessible only to the enlightened. See the {trampoline} entry for an example, and compare {has the X nature}.

:theology: n. 1. Ironically or humorously used to refer to {religious issues}. 2. Technical fine points of an abstruse nature, esp. those where the resolution is of theoretical interest but is relatively {marginal} with respect to actual use of a design or system. Used esp. around software issues with a heavy AI or language-design component, such as the smart-data vs. smart-programs dispute in AI.

:theory: n. The consensus, idea, plan, story, or set of rules that is currently being used to inform a behavior. This is a generalization and abuse of the technical meaning. "What's the theory on fixing this TECO loss?" "What's the theory on dinner tonight?" ("Chinatown, I guess.") "What's the current theory on letting lusers on during the day?" "The theory behind this change is to fix the following well-known screw...."

:thinko: /thing'koh/ [by analogy with `typo'] n. A momentary, correctable glitch in mental processing, especially one involving recall of information learned by rote; a bubble in the stream of consciousness. Syn. {braino}; see also {brain fart}. Compare {mouso}.

:This can't happen: Less clipped variant of {can't happen}.