Chapter 59

The first widely distributed version of Unix, released unsupported by Bell Labs in 1978. The term is used adjectivally to describe Unix features and programs that date from that release, and are thus guaranteed to be present and portable in all Unix versions (this was the standard gauge of portability before the POSIX and IEEE 1003 standards). Note that this usage does not derive from the release being the "seventh version of Unix"; research Unix at Bell Labs has traditionally been numbered according to the edition of the associated documentation. Indeed, only the widely-distributed Sixth and Seventh Editions are widely known as V[67]; the OS that might today be known as `V10' is instead known in full as "Tenth Edition Research Unix" or just "Tenth Edition" for short. For this reason, "V7" is often read by cognoscenti as "Seventh Edition". See BSD, USG Unix, Unix. Some old-timers impatient with commercialization and kernel bloat still maintain that V7 was the Last True Unix.

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vgrep /vee'grep/ v.,n.

Visual grep. The operation of finding patterns in a file optically rather than digitally (also called an `optical grep'). See grep; compare vdiff.

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vi /V-I/, not /vi:/ and never /siks/ n.

[from `Visual Interface'] A screen editor crufted together by Bill Joy for an early BSD release. Became the _de facto_ standard Unix editor and a nearly undisputed hacker favorite outside of MIT until the rise of EMACS after about 1984. Tends to frustrate new users no end, as it will neither take commands while expecting input text nor vice versa, and the default setup on older versions provides no indication of which mode the editor is in (years ago, a correspondent reported that he has often heard the editor's name pronounced /vi:l/; there is now a vi clone named `vile'). Nevertheless vi (and variants such as vim and elvis) is still widely used (about half the respondents in a 1991 Usenet poll preferred it), and even EMACS fans often resort to it as a mail editor and for small editing jobs (mainly because it starts up faster than the bulkier versions of EMACS). See holy wars.

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video toaster n.

Historically, an Amiga fitted with a particular line of special video effects hardware from NewTek - long a popular platform at special-effects and video production houses. More generally, any computer system designed specifically for video production and manipulation. Compare web toaster and see toaster.

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videotex n. obs.

An electronic service offering people the privilege of paying to read the weather on their television screens instead of having somebody read it to them for free while they brush their teeth. The idea bombed everywhere it wasn't government-subsidized, because by the time videotex was practical the installed base of personal computers could hook up to timesharing services and do the things for which videotex might have been worthwhile better and cheaper. Videotex planners badly overestimated both the appeal of getting information from a computer and the cost of local intelligence at the user's end. Like the gorilla arm effect, this has been a cautionary tale to hackers ever since. See also vannevar.

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virgin adj.

Unused; pristine; in a known initial state. "Let's bring up a virgin system and see if it crashes again." (Esp. useful after contracting a virus through SEX.) Also, by extension, buffers and the like within a program that have not yet been used.

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virtual adj.

[via the technical term `virtual memory', prob. from the term `virtual image' in optics] 1. Common alternative to logical; often used to refer to the artificial objects (like addressable virtual memory larger than physical memory) simulated by a computer system as a convenient way to manage access to shared resources. 2. Simulated; performing the functions of something that isn't really there. An imaginative child's doll may be a virtual playmate. Oppose real.

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virtual beer n.

Praise or thanks. Used universally in the Linux community. Originally this term signified cash, after a famous incident in which some some Britishers who wanted to buy Linus a beer and sent him money to Finland to do so.

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virtual Friday n.

(also `logical Friday') The last day before an extended weekend, if that day is not a `real' Friday. For example, the U.S. holiday Thanksgiving is always on a Thursday. The next day is often also a holiday or taken as an extra day off, in which case Wednesday of that week is a virtual Friday (and Thursday is a virtual Saturday, as is Friday). There are also `virtual Mondays' that are actually Tuesdays, after the three-day weekends associated with many national holidays in the U.S.

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virtual reality n.

1. Computer simulations that use 3-D graphics and devices such as the Dataglove to allow the user to interact with the simulation. See cyberspace. 2. A form of network interaction incorporating aspects of role-playing games, interactive theater, improvisational comedy, and `true confessions' magazines. In a virtual reality forum (such as Usenet's _alt.callahans_ newsgroup or the MUD experiments on Internet), interaction between the participants is written like a shared novel complete with scenery, `foreground characters' that may be personae utterly unlike the people who write them, and common `background characters' manipulable by all parties. The one iron law is that you may not write irreversible changes to a character without the consent of the person who `owns' it. Otherwise anything goes. See bamf, cyberspace, teledildonics.

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virtual shredder n.

The jargonic equivalent of the bit bucket at shops using IBM's VM/CMS operating system. VM/CMS officially supports a whole bestiary of virtual card readers, virtual printers, and other phantom devices; these are used to supply some of the same capabilities Unix gets from pipes and I/O redirection.

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virus n.

[from the obvious analogy with biological viruses, via SF] A cracker program that searches out other programs and `infects' them by embedding a copy of itself in them, so that they become Trojan horses. When these programs are executed, the embedded virus is executed too, thus propagating the `infection'. This normally happens invisibly to the user. Unlike a worm, a virus cannot infect other computers without assistance. It is propagated by vectors such as humans trading programs with their friends (see SEX). The virus may do nothing but propagate itself and then allow the program to run normally. Usually, however, after propagating silently for a while, it starts doing things like writing cute messages on the terminal or playing strange tricks with the display (some viruses include nice display hacks). Many nasty viruses, written by particularly perversely minded crackers, do irreversible damage, like nuking all the user's files.

In the 1990s, viruses became a serious problem, especially among Windows users; the lack of security on these machines enables viruses to spread easily, even infecting the operating system (Unix machines, by contrast, are immune to such attacks). The production of special anti-virus software has become an industry, and a number of exaggerated media reports have caused outbreaks of near hysteria among users; many lusers tend to blame everything that doesn't work as they had expected on virus attacks. Accordingly, this sense of `virus' has passed not only into techspeak but into also popular usage (where it is often incorrectly used to denote a worm or even a Trojan horse). See phage; compare back door; see also Unix conspiracy.

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visionary n.

1. One who hacks vision, in the sense of an Artificial Intelligence researcher working on the problem of getting computers to `see' things using TV cameras. (There isn't any problem in sending information from a TV camera to a computer. The problem is, how can the computer be programmed to make use of the camera information? See SMOP, AI-complete.) 2. [IBM] One who reads the outside literature. At IBM, apparently, such a penchant is viewed with awe and wonder.

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VMS /V-M-S/ n.

DEC's proprietary operating system for its VAX minicomputer; one of the seven or so environments that loom largest in hacker folklore. Many Unix fans generously concede that VMS would probably be the hacker's favorite commercial OS if Unix didn't exist; though true, this makes VMS fans furious. One major hacker gripe with VMS concerns its slowness -- thus the following limerick:

There once was a system called VMS Of cycles by no means abstemious. It's chock-full of hacks And runs on a VAX And makes my poor stomach all squeamious. --- The Great Quux

See also VAX, TOPS-10, TOPS-20, Unix, runic.

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voice vt.

To phone someone, as opposed to emailing them or connecting in talk mode. "I'm busy now; I'll voice you later."

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voice-net n.

Hackish way of referring to the telephone system, analogizing it to a digital network. Usenet sig blocks not uncommonly include the sender's phone next to a "Voice:" or "Voice-Net:" header; common variants of this are "Voicenet" and "V-Net". Compare paper-net, snail-mail.

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voodoo programming n.

[from George Bush's "voodoo economics"] 1. The use by guess or cookbook of an obscure or hairy system, feature, or algorithm that one does not truly understand. The implication is that the technique may not work, and if it doesn't, one will never know why. Almost synonymous with black magic, except that black magic typically isn't documented and nobody understands it. Compare magic, deep magic, heavy wizardry, rain dance, cargo cult programming, wave a dead chicken. 2. Things programmers do that they know shouldn't work but they try anyway, and which sometimes actually work, such as recompiling everything.

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VR // [MUD] n.

On-line abbrev for virtual reality, as opposed to RL.

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Vulcan nerve pinch n.

[from the old "Star Trek" TV series via Commodore Amiga hackers] The keyboard combination that forces a soft-boot or jump to ROM monitor (on machines that support such a feature). On PC clones this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns, L1-A; on Macintoshes, it is - or - - ! Also called three-finger salute. Compare quadruple bucky.

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vulture capitalist n.

Pejorative hackerism for `venture capitalist', deriving from the common practice of pushing contracts that deprive inventors of control over their own innovations and most of the money they ought to have made from them.

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= W =

W2K bug:

wabbit:

WAITS:

waldo:

walk:

walk off the end of:

walking drives:

wall:

wall follower:

wall time:

wall wart:

wallpaper:

wango:

wank:

wannabee:

war dialer:

-ware:

warez:

warez d00dz:

warez kiddies:

warlording:

warm boot:

wart:

washing machine:

washing software:

water MIPS:

wave a dead chicken:

weasel:

web pointer:

web toaster:

webify:

webmaster:

web ring:

wedged:

wedgie:

wedgitude:

weeble:

weeds:

weenie:

Weenix:

well-behaved:

well-connected:

wetware:

whack:

whack-a-mole:

whacker:

whales:

whalesong:

What's a spline?:

wheel:

wheel bit:

wheel of reincarnation:

wheel wars:

White Book:

whitelist:

whizzy:

wibble:

WIBNI:

widget:

wiggles:

WIMP environment:

win:

win big:

win win:

Winchester:

windoid:

window shopping:

Windoze:

winged comments:

winkey:

winnage:

winner:

winnitude:

Wintel:

wired:

wirehead:

wirewater:

wish list:

within delta of:

within epsilon of:

wizard:

Wizard Book:

wizard hat:

wizard mode:

wizardly:

wok-on-the-wall:

womb box:

WOMBAT:

womble:

wonky:

woofer:

workaround:

working as designed:

worm:

wormhole:

wound around the axle:

wrap around:

write-only code:

write-only language:

write-only memory:

Wrong Thing:

wugga wugga:

wumpus:

WYSIAYG:

WYSIWYG:

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W2K bug

[from `Y2K bug' for the Year 2000 problem] The upcoming deployment of Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which hackers generally expect will be among the worst train wrecks in the history of software engineering. Such is the power of Microsoft marketing, however, that it is also expected this will not become obvious until it has incurred hundreds of millions of dollars in downtime and lost opportunity costs.

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wabbit /wab'it/ n.

[almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy wabbit!"] 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 a hack called RABBITS reported from 1969 on a Burroughs 5500 at the University of Washington Computer Center. The program would make two copies of itself every time it was run, eventually crashing the system. 2. By extension, any hack that includes infinite self-replication but is not a virus or worm. See fork bomb and rabbit job, see also cookie monster.

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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 as `West-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 do `real-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. Also invented there were bucky bits -- thus, the ALT key on every IBM PC is a WAITS legacy. One WAITS feature very notable in pre-Web days 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.

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waldo /wol'doh/ n.

[From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. 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.

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walk n.,vt.

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

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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.

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walking drives n.

An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machines. 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.

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wall interj.

[WPI] 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: "Wall??" 2. A request for further explication. Compare octal forty. 3. [Unix, from `write all'] 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.

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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 a `finger' 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; compare droid.

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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 ticks required to execute it (on a timesharing system these always differ, as no one program gets all the ticks, and on multiprocessor systems with good thread support one may get more processor time than real time).

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wall wart n.

A small power-supply brick with integral male plug, designed to plug directly into a wall outlet; called a `wart' because when installed on a power strip it tends to block up at least one more socket than it uses.. These are frequently associated with modems and other small electronic devices which would become unacceptably bulky or hot if they had power supplies on board (there are other reasons as well having to do with the cost of UL certification).

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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 the `Windows' 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.)

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wango /wang'goh/ n.

Random bit-level grovelling 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."

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wank /wangk/ n.,v.,adj.

[Columbia University: prob. by mutation from Commonwealth slang v. `wank', to masturbate] 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. Compare `neep-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. Adjectival `wanky' is less offensive and simply means `stupid' or `broken' (this is mainstream in Great Britain).

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wannabee /won'*-bee/ n.

(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] 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.