The moment the first personal computers from IBM and Apple were introduced to the American public in the early 1980s, one needed neither genius nor clairvoyance to predict that society would never be the same. Within a decade, more than 50 million of these devices were in daily use in homes and offices throughout the country and the world. A generation of people who had barely gotten comfortable with pocket calculators and digital watches now found themselves confronted with a new and often baffling lexicon of bits and bytes, RAM and ROM, hard drives and floppy disks, printers, joysticks, and mice. Basic computer skills became a prerequisite for job seekers in nearly every industry, and a generation of school children began to grow up with a technology that was scarcely imagined in their parents' day. And at the end of the twentieth century, that technology became the host environment for a new subculture--one based almost entirely on the dynamics of interaction by the written word.
The personal computer (the abbreviation PC is universally used to distinguish the original IBM model and its many clones from the Apple Macintosh) was so called because it put real computing power into a device small and inexpensive enough for individual users to afford, in contrast with the mainframes and minicomputers that still ruled the high-end data processing world; hence the alternate term microcomputer. But the microcomputer did not stay "personal" for long. Business users soon found that the power of their desktop computers increased exponentially as they were connected together to pool their resources over LANs (Local-Area Networks) and then WANs (Wide-Area Networks). Hobbyists quickly discovered that they could do something similar, using the telephone line and a modem (modulator-demodulator, a term borrowed from radioteletype) attached to each computer.
Born from cybernetics, the science of automatic communication and control systems (from Greek kubernan, "to steer, control, govern"), the term cyberspace first appeared in William Gibson's science-fiction novel Neuromancer in 1982. In Gibson's computer-naïve but conceptually challenging imagination, cyberspace was a place where one communicates with others and interacts--often by means of a brain-computer interface device--with objects that are present not in reality, but virtually. A number of authors elaborated the idea in a genre known as cyberpunk. Efforts to create cyberspace environments in the "real" world involved the techniques of virtual reality (VR), whose goggle-and-glove devices allowed users to see and manipulate objects in virtual space.
By the early 1990s, journalists were using cyberspace to mean the imagined space where electronic communication takes place across computer networks. Here, distance is obliterated, as users can exchange messages in seconds anywhere via electronic mail--E-mail, e-mail, or simply email--and access limitless amounts of information by logging in to remote databases around the world.
In his 1992 vice-presidential campaign, Senator Al Gore introduced the term Information Superhighway to symbolize his vision of universal access to a huge interlinked matrix of computer systems through a highly developed communications infrastructure. (A less unwieldy equivalent, Infobahn, was soon borrowed from German.) The basis for this new megasystem was to be the already existing Internet, a loosely organized global "network of networks" with its roots in the scientific, academic, and defense communities in the late 60s. It is important to note that the Internet's direct predecessor, ARPANET (Advanced Research Project Administration Network), was an attempt to design a communications system that could survive a nuclear conflict, through a strategy of distributed control with no single center of authority. This anarchic lack of central control would become a hallmark of Internet culture.
In 1994 and 1995, interest in the Internet exploded with the maturing of the World Wide Web (WWW), a system of specially coded documents in which a reader could, by activating a highlighted word in the text or area on the screen--a hypertext link, or hyperlink--jump directly to another document, which might reside on a computer halfway around the world. So powerful and accessible was this scheme (based on HTML, Hypertext Markup Language) that both private and commercial users immediately flocked to establish their presence "on the Web"; by the end of 1995 there were over 100,000 web sites, with the number doubling every two to three months. Businesses, organizations, and private citizens alike all rushed to create distinctive home pages to advertise their wares, their services, or simply themselves. To many, the terms Web, Internet, and cyberspace became synonymous, though old hands deplored this usage.
Before the Web, however, a number of sophisticated structures were already in place for communicating via computer. Over the years a growing number of computer users had developed their own style of interacting with each other, its language strongly influenced both by the world of technology in which so many of them worked, and by the nature of the new medium, which made it easy to exchange written messages at any distance without the delay of the postal service (snail mail), or even the trouble of committing them to paper.
Computer hobbyists learned early on that there were great advantages in linking computers together via modem. Some of them made their machines available as full-time Bulletin Board Systems, which others could call any time to leave messages, upload or download files and software, and chat online from keyboard to keyboard; the operators of these BBSes (also called b-boards or simply boards) were known as sysops. Some BBSes grew to be quite large, serving hundreds of users, and many were linked into more-or-less formal networks of their own, over which users could send email without the cost of long-distance phone calls. Many BBSes propagated discussion groups, SIGs (Special Interest Groups) or forums in which users who shared a common interest could share their ideas daily. Never before had it been so easy for an individual to reach such a large audience so quickly. Commercial interests with more resources expanded on the BBS concept, creating online services such as CompuServe, Prodigy, GEnie, and America Online.
While hobbyists developed the BBS system, members of the academic and research community began to pursue their interests over the amorphous and steadily expanding Internet. The service was almost universally free to users, as costs were generally absorbed by institutional budgets and research grants. But here, too, commercial ventures sensed opportunity. Around 1990, a few services began to offer Internet access to the public for a monthly subscription fee. By mid-decade, competition in the ISP (Internet Service Provider) business was ferocious, as the major online services, the long-distance telephone companies, and numerous small mom and pop ISPs attempted to carve out niches in the rapidly expanding market.
From the beginning, the universal foundation of Internet communication was email, a system that combined the speed of the telephone with the convenience of paper mail. As the medium grew, new tools for sharing and searching for information across the 'Net brought new words to users' vocabulary, and new meanings for old ones. A sophisticated program called gopher allowed a user to jump from one server to another to find sites (gopher holes) of interest. Files began to be stored in large collections, where users could retrieve them by ftp (file transfer protocol). To facilitate searching for files in these archives, the Archie program was developed. A related program for locating information on gopher sites was christened Veronica, ostensibly an acronym (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Netwide Index to Computer Archives), but clearly inspired by the name of another teenage character in the popular Archie comic strip. The pattern continued with Jughead, officially from "Jonzy's Universal Gopher Hierarchy."
Probably the largest recognizable Internet-related activity, before the World Wide Web, was Usenet, which originated in the 1980s as an ARPANET-like, decentralized mechanism for distributing news about the UNIX computer operating system and other topics of interest to computer scientists. Much like the discussion forums on a BBS, each Usenet newsgroup was dedicated to a single topic, and provided for an exchange of views by participants from institutions worldwide, who often had never met each other face-to-face. The numbers of both users and newsgroups grew steadily, until by 1996 there were something like 20,000 separate groups, on topics as diverse as artificial intelligence and collecting Teddy bears.
From the start, Usenetters developed their own jargon, shared to some extent by the BBS community. Sending a message to a newsgroup was called posting, reflecting the system's bulletin board-like origins. A message to the group was an article, or alternatively a posting or post; posting the same article to multiple groups simultaneously was cross-posting. To reply to an article meant to send a message to the author by private email; responding to it publicly in the newsgroup was called posting a followup. A series of articles on the same subject was a thread. One who read the articles in the group but never announced his presence or posted articles of his own was a lurker, a descriptive term which carried little connotation of disapproval. When a newsgroup grew large enough so that experienced hands grew tired of new users asking for the same basic information time and again, someone would create and post a document providing answers to the most Frequently Asked Questions, after which newbies were regularly enjoined to "read the FAQ."
Other facets of the Internet were less well known to the general public but pursued passionately by their devotees. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) let users carry on keyboard-to-keyboard conversations with others around the world; at any given time thousands of separate channels might be active with anything from scientific discussions to no-holds-barred bull sessions. Other users spent their time in MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons), where participants could create identities and characters for themselves, compete in imaginary combat and adventure games, and cooperate in expanding the dimensions of the ongoing computer-generated world. For many, mudding became an obsession; true mudheads sometimes spent so much time at it that they lost jobs, alienated friends, and failed degrees in the quest to attain wizard status.
In the mid 1990s, the World Wide Web came to the fore as the preeminent method for navigating the Net. An elaboration of the gopher concept, the Web provided a unified method of locating most of the Net's resources by using a single point-and-click program, the web browser. As browsers rapidly grew in sophistication, users could surf the Web in search of ever more elaborately designed web sites offering not only text, but all the features of hypermedia: integrated graphics, sound, and full-motion video clips. Businesses rushed in to what they perceived as a new marketing frontier, creating online shopping malls to purvey their goods and services to cybershoppers, who could order online. Web design, creating and maintaining web pages and their ever-shifting content, became a sought-after skill, entrusted to those with the newly created job title Webmaster.
Much of cyberspace jargon reflects the background and experience of its creators--an assortment of computer scientists, researchers, and students who built the structure as they went along. The most general designation for any denizen of cyberspace is user, a term originally used by programmers to refer to non-programmers, people who operate systems and programs without knowing how they work. (At MIT around 1975, a debate over whether such people should be described as users or losers was resolved with the compromise form luser.)
In the relationship between computers and society, few terms have been the center of as much debate as hacker. In computer circles, it means essentially an expert programmer, one who enjoys learning as much as possible about the details of programmable systems, solving problems and overcoming limitations with creativity and ingenuity. Naturally, in the course of events a certain number turned their efforts to the challenge of circumventing security safeguards on systems in the real world, such as telephone companies, banks, and university registrars' offices. Concern in the media first brought hacker to the public consciousness in this negative sense, though within the hacker community the accepted term for these activities was cracking. But beneath this distinction lay a fundamental difference in how hackers and the general public viewed privacy, security, and access to information. It was a common conviction among those who developed the Internet and the UNIX operating system on which it was based that information resources should be free and accessible to all. Many hackers extended this belief to include the view that system-cracking was ethically acceptable as long as the cracker committed no theft, vandalism, or breach of confidentiality. Although it clashed profoundly with the concerns of security-minded administrators in the real world, this view was a defining characteristic of life on the Net, until the influx of commercial interests began to overwhelm it in the mid 1990s.
A less complimentary term was geek (short for computer geek). It is difficult to improve on the New Hacker's Dictionary's description: "One who fulfills all the dreariest negative stereotypes about hackers: an asocial, malodorous, pasty-faced monomaniac with all the personality of a cheese grater." Even on those occasions when geeks found themselves at social gatherings with non-computer types, they might find it difficult to avoid geeking out, or byte-bonding with fellow propeller-heads. Depending on context and speaker, the term could be one of scorn or approbation, as could weenie (from wiener), one who has spent a great deal of time and effort at mastering a particular operating system, programming language, or the like. Likewise wannabe (from the phenomenon of look-alike fans of the singer Madonna), one who aspires to the hacker lifestyle but lacks either the experience or the sensibility to truly understand the mystique.
At the other end of the spectrum from hackers and experienced Internauts (or, less complimentarily, net potatoes, after the television-watching counterpart couch potato) were newbies, those who had yet to learn the ropes. Those whose errors were particularly egregious, repeated, or cretinous might be tagged lamers.
As the number of users climbed and the complexity of the Net grew, the work of the system administrator (sysadmin, or simply admin), the person (or people) in charge of computer and network operations at each site, grew more difficult. Unlike the early users who accepted the new technology's experimental nature--and were often willing and able to solve problems themselves--paying subscribers to commercial services demanded reliable service and quick repairs when things went wrong. A large part of the sysadmin's work came to consist of firefighting, intensive efforts to correct system malfunctions. Another important entity at many sites was the postmaster, to whom it was customary to direct complaints about users who abused the mail system.
From the beginning, the online community developed a body of accepted practices that arose from the special characteristics of online communication, especially in email and Usenet. On the Internet, adhering to the standards of netiquette was the sign of a well-behaved netizen. For example, posting a message in all capital letters was frowned on, as the online equivalent of SHOUTING. Most users also deplored practices which wasted bandwidth, such as excessive cross-posting and over-large signatures, or .sigs (pronounced "dot sig," from the UNIX name of the file which contained them), sections of artwork using only the symbols in the ASCII character set. The informal codification of netiquette also included many of the same rules of common courtesy found in everyday speaking and writing, such as not being deliberately rude or insulting and avoiding obscene language (though this standard was often much more relaxed than in wider society).
The most common consequence of violating the standards of netiquette was to be subjected to flames, an acrimonious or hostile response from another user. If returned in kind, the exchange could rapidly escalate into a public flame war, which if joined by enough third parties could lead to the breakdown of an entire discussion forum. Antisocial types were sometimes known to post flame bait, messages whose offensive content was deliberately intended to elicit the predictable response. A related, if less malicious, technique was trolling: posting an article that would deceive and embarass the clueless but which more experienced netters would recognize as a troll.
Perhaps the most widespread cause of net flamage, however, was spamming: flooding the Net with inappropriate, off-topic messages, often posted simultaneously to a huge number of unrelated newsgroups or electronic mailing lists. The name apparently came from the popular comedy sketch by Monty Python's Flying Circus, in which the word was repeated over and over. A relative rarity in the early days, the spam problem increased massively as the Net was opened to non-techies and subscribers to the major commercial online services. A common response to spam campaigns was mailbombing, a tactic of returning hundreds of copies of the offending message to the point of origin, in the hope that the resulting overload of the sender's system would lead to the cancellation of his account.
Two distinctive features of online communication arose from the limitations of a written medium in expressing conversational speech: acronyms and emoticons. Suiting the impromptu, rapid style of writing electronic notes, online correspondents developed a multitude of abbreviations for common expressions, for example:
AFAIK: As far as I know
AFK: Away from keyboard (used on IRC)
BRB: Be right back (used on IRC)
BTW: By the way
FWIW: For what it's worth
IANAL: I am not a lawyer (disclaimer used when giving legal advice)
IMHO: In my humble opinion
IMNSHO: In my not-so-humble opinion
IYKWIM: If you know what I mean
LOL: Laughing out loud
OTOH: On the other hand
PMFJI: Pardon me for jumping in
ROTFL(L): Rolling on the floor laughing (loudly)
TTFN: Ta ta for now
YMMV: Your mileage may vary (a phrase from automobile ads); i.e., you may not get the same results I did
Impatience on the part of experienced experts, or gurus, with questions they considered asinine or unnecessary led to another extremely common abbreviation, the universally understood RTFM: Read the Fucking Manual. The only permissible rebuttal to this instruction is "I did RTFM; the answer wasn't in there."
Emoticons, from emotion + icon, are possibly the most original feature of online communication, neatly and creatively solving the problem of being unable to see facial expressions or hear tones of voice in typed correspondence. The basic form of the emoticon is a smiling face (hence the alternative generic term smiley), created from characters on the keyboard, and viewed by tilting one's head sideways:
:-)
This sign was a convenient humor marker, added whenever a writer wanted to ensure that what he had written was intended to be ironic or all in good fun. Combining keyboard characters in various ways led to a great variety of smileys, from simple to elaborate:
;-) Winking smiley
:-/ Skeptical smiley
:-( Sad face
(-: Left-handed smiley
:-o Shocked smiley
:-x My lips are sealed
:-)} Man with beard
:-{) Man with mustache
( :-) Bald-headed man
{ :-) Man wearing a toupee
:-))) Double chin
8-) Wearing glasses
B-) Wearing horn-rimmed glasses
:-)X Wearing a bow tie
:-? Smoking a pipe
:-# Braces on teeth
8:-) User is a little girl
:-)-8 User is a big girl
C=:-) User is a chef
+-:-) User is the Pope
=|:-)= Uncle Sam
As the cyberspace phenomenon moved into the mainstream of public awareness in the mid 1990s, concerns began to surface over its effect on society at large. Access to this new frontier was easy; anyone with a computer and modem could cruise the fast lane of the Information Superhighway, with little protection from nefarious activity, real or imagined. The fact that unsupervised young people could be exposed to sexually explicit or graphically violent materials prompted many groups to call for tighter restrictions on what could be placed on the Net, while advocates of free speech strongly resisted any such controls and condemned the efforts of self-appointed net police. On February 8, 1996--dubbed "Black Thursday" by its opponents--President Clinton signed into law the Communications Decency Act. Despite a vigorous counterattack by the American Civil Liberties Union and substantial (if unofficial) repudiation by the Supreme Court, the measure caused consternation among the Internet community, and in protest many sites went black, removing all visible content from their pages. As computer entertainment and television moved closer together at the end of the 20th century, similar worries over the potential content of interactive TV and video on demand led to the development of the V-chip, a device to allow home users to set controls on what their home sets could display.
Another area of debate was cybercrime, the theft of information by computer. Because of the Internet's inherent structure, it was relatively easy for cybercrooks to intercept personal email and retrieve valuable data. Users accustomed to paper mail looked for tighter security, and businesses seeking to expand their markets sought ways of persuading potential customers that it was indeed safe to send their credit card numbers and other personal data over the World Wide Web. For many, the answer to problems of data security was to develop effective schemes for encrypting communications, so that only those who held the appropriate keys could decipher them. Many in the government, however, saw in encryption a threat of unrestrained and unmonitorable worldwide communications to the benefit of criminal and terrorist organizations, and so supported the development of the Clipper Chip, a device that would permit authorized agencies to intercept and monitor any encrypted communications at need. Vehement opposition to the plan was led by a loosely organized group of encryption adherents known as cypherpunks.
More positive innovations also left their mark on the language. Speedier and more realistic interactions in cyberspace made it possible to pursue activities that were once largely face-to-face: cyberdoctors could practice increasingly effective telemedicine; students could choose from a huge variety of telecourses and degree programs via distance learning. Far-reaching changes affected the American workplace, as workers and employers found advantages in telecommuting, creating a virtual office at home.
Partly because electronic communication is largely unrecorded and ephemeral, and partly because lexical innovation can spread through such a large community in virtually no time, the vocabulary of cyberspace is characterized by rapid change. Like any selection of representative terminology, then, the following list is a snapshot, arbitrarily limited in both time and perspective.
404, lost or clueless. From the World Wide Web error message "404, URL not found," meaning that the requested document cannot be located.
asbestos, material for protecting oneself from flames. Often in the form of asbestos longjohns, typically donned in advance by one who knowingly makes an inflammatory remark. An alternative tactic is to append <gd&r>, "grinning, ducking & running" to the offending comment.
ASCII (pronounced as-kee), acronym for American Standard Code for Information Interchange. The basic set of characters shared by most personal computers. It is limited to only the 128 letters, numbers, and punctuation symbols most commonly used in English, so that non-English letters and signs like á, ô, ü, ç, ð, ß, and ¿ sometimes look odd when transmitted over ASCII-only channels. Because the computer must make a distinction between upper- and lower-case letters, ASCIIbetical order is different from normal alphabetical, or alphanumeric, order.
Astroturf campaign, a phony grass-roots political campaign, facilitated by the ease of mass mailings over the Internet.
avatar, in MUDs and virtual reality environments, a symbol that represents a user's character.
Bad Thing, an idea or action that cannot possibly make matters better. From the 1930 parody of English history 1066 And All That. Conversely, a notion that is bound to be helpful is a Good Thing.
bamf, in MUDs, a representation of the sound made when one is magically teleported or transformed. (From X-Men comics.)
bandwidth, a telecommunications term meaning roughly "the amount of information a transmission medium can handle per unit time." In cyberspace, it is chiefly a commodity which others are accused of "wasting" through off-topic remarks, unnecessary quoting, excessive cross-posting, over-large signatures, and general lameness. Such accusations often engender extensive flame wars which typically squander far more bandwidth than the original offense did.
barfogenesis, the queasy feeling, akin to motion sickness or seasickness, experienced by some users of virtual reality headsets.
baud, the unit of transmission speed over a serial communications line. In general usage it is equivalent to "bits per second," although its technical meaning is more complex. (Named for the French engineer Jean Maurice Emile Baudot.)
baud barf, the garbage one sees on the screen when the connection with another computer uses incorrect settings or is disrupted.
beta, the final testing stage of a software product before it is released to the public at large. Hence, anything that is still under testing and possibly buggy; "their relationship is still in beta."
bigot, a person zealously devoted to a particular type of computer, operating system, program, programming language, or the like. In contrast with the weenie, the bigot is reluctant to give up his attachment even when the system becomes obsolete.
bio-break, a necessary pause in one's hacking or net surfing to use the toilet.
bit bucket, the mythical receptacle for all data and messages lost in transmission, or summarily deleted either by accident or intent. "Flames about this article to the bit bucket" means "I will ignore any gratuitous insults about what I have just written."
bit flip, a complete reversal in personality. A bit (binary digit) is a quantity representing one of only two possible states, on or off, 1 or 0.
bitraking, a type of investigative journalism practiced by reporters cruising the Net for breaking stories. (After muckraking.)
bogus, useless, wrong, stupid, silly, or lame. In hacker slang since the late 60s, it spawned a number of derivatives, for example the the verbs bogotify, "make bogus," and bogue out, "act bogus." Bogosity is theoretically measurable on a bogometer; its basic quantum unit is the bogon.
boink, an event where Net users gather for social interaction in person. From the mainstream slang for "intercourse."
bozon, the quantum unit of stupidity. From bozo, a clown, a loser. Adjective bozotic.
brain-damaged, brain-dead, so poorly designed or stupid as to be useless. Generally refers to lame or cretinous software, but may extend to humans as well.
brain dump, the act of telling someone everything one knows about a particular subject, typically before leaving for another job. From core dump, early mainframe term (perpetuated in the UNIX world) for a copy of the full contents of the computer's core memory, usually produced when a process is interrupted unexpectedly.
brain fart, the result of a glitch, or minor error, in brain activity, such as typing a DOS command on a UNIX computer. It is the result of a braino, an alternative term for thinko, an unintentional error in thinking (by analogy with typo).
brochureware, software that is advertised and promoted although it does not exist, in order to stall prospective customers from purchasing an existing product from the competition. Compare freeware, shareware, vaporware.
bug, an error or other flaw in a system or program. The term appeared as early as 1896 in Hawkin's New Catechism of Electricity, where it was defined as "any fault or trouble in the connections or working of electric apparatus," and was known in Edison's time as a term for an industrial defect. It seems to have come from telegraphers' usage, but whether its ultimate origin goes back to the word for "insect" or the Welsh loanword meaning "scarecrow, hobgoblin" (as in bugbear) is unclear.
CFV, Call for Votes. The final step in the process of creating a new Usenet newsgroup, following the RFD, Request for Discussion. Because Usenet has no central authority, decisions on creating new groups are made through a process of discussion and voting by all interested users. Usenet enthusiasts often point to the RFD/CFV process as a model of true grass-roots democracy and successful anarchic government.
clickstream (also mouse trails), the path a user takes while surfing the Web. Advertisers developed software to track this trail in order to gather demographic data on potential customers.
cobweb site, a web site that has not been updated recently.
cool, early jazz and mainstream 60s slang ubiquitous in WWW usage, where it is diluted to mean essentially "interesting." Its near-synonym is hot, "very interesting" or "highly popular." Popularity of a Web site can be measured by counting the number of hits, or times its home page is accessed.
cyber-, prefix extracted from cyberspace, referring to practically anything having to do with computers and the online world. Although this usage is disapproved by Internet veterans and experienced users, it is highly productive. Representative examples: cybernaut, one who navigates cyberspace; cybrarian, one who makes a living searching online data resources, library catalogs, etc.; cyberporn, sexually explicit material available from online sources; cyberdate, a romantic interest one meets online, through chat forums and email; cybercreep, an obnoxious character encountered while looking for a cyberdate; cybershopping, viewing and purchasing goods through the World Wide Web, often at an online shopping mall; cybercrime, theft, fraud, or other crime committed over computer networks.
data mining, extracting valuable information from large databases.
dead tree edition, the paper version of a newspaper or magazine that is also available in electronic, online form.
delurk, to post an article in a newsgroup where one has been lurking.
dot, pronunciation of a period in an Internet address. For example, "ftp.uu.net" is pronounce "F-T-P dot U-U dot net."
feeb, an incompetent lamer (from feeble).
finger, a UNIX utility program that reports information on another user's status--last login, whether unread mail is waiting, etc. Often used as a verb: "Finger my account for my public encryption key."
firewall, a small computer, containing security and monitoring software but no critical or sensitive data, which serves as a connection point or gateway from the outside world to a networked computer system. Breaking into a firewalled system may be attempted either by defeating the security systems or by discovering a back door, an undocumented or unprotected alternate entry method.
freeware, software which the author distributes at no cost to anyone. Compare brochureware, shareware, vaporware.
grep, to search for, from the name of the UNIX command for searching for text in a file (Global Regular Expression [search and] Print).
grilf, girlfriend. Originally a typo.
handle, a fictitious name used on an online service. More common on BBSes and IRC than on Usenet. (CB radio slang.)
haque, an elegant example of hacking.
kill file, a list of subjects or names that are automatically ignored when reading Usenet news. "I have added you to my kill file" means "I will not see any more comments from you." Also a verb, to killfile.
link-dead (used of MUD characters) frozen in place because the user's connection to the Net has been lost unexpectedly.
mode, the state one is in or what one is doing at a given time. Common examples are sleep mode, work mode, and flame mode.
munge, to garble information in transfer. "That newsreader munges the headers of Usenet articles." (Possibly from Scottish/North English dialect, "to chew up.")
pencil and paper [from the New Hacker's Dictionary],
An archaic information storage and transmission device that works by depositing smears of graphite on bleached wood pulp. More recent developments in paper-based technology include improved "write-once" update devices which use tiny rolling heads similar to mouse balls to deposit colored pigment. All these devices require an operator skilled at so-called "handwriting" technique. These technologies are ubiquitous outside hackerdom, but nearly forgotten inside it. Most hackers had terrible handwriting to begin with, and years of keyboarding tend to have encouraged it to degrade further. Perhaps for this reason, hackers deprecate pencil-and-paper technology and often resist using it in any but the most trivial contexts.
robot or bot, an automated process that runs in the background. On IRC, robots perform such tasks as greeting new visitors to a channel with a personal message or ensuring that a user does not adopt a nickname that has already been claimed by another user. In MUDs, robots are often written to appear to be real users. A more practical use of the robot concept is the knowbot, an automated software agent that actively searches the Net for specified kinds of information.
shareware, software that is distributed at no cost for evaluation puposes, thus saving the author the cost of advertising and packaging. Those who find the program suitable and use it are expected to pay for it. One technique for reminding users of this last condition involves a reminder screen which appears whenever entering or exiting the program, leading to the designation nagware. Compare brochureware, freeware, vaporware.
signal-to-noise ratio, the proportion of useful information to useless junk on a data channel; inversely proportional to the amount of wasted bandwidth. Complaints about decreasing signal-to-noise ratio grew steadily as public access to the Internet expanded.
UNIX, widely used computer operating system, written in the C programming language so that it can run on a large number of computer system architectures.
URL, Uniform Resource Locator, a string of characters specifying the location of a document on the World Wide Web, for example "http://www.yahoo.com."
vaporware, software that is advertised as forthcoming but never appears. Compare brochureware, freeware, shareware.
virtual, denoting a simulated thing or event as opposed to its counterpart in the real world. Technically and originally, it refers to the addressing of physical devices, memory locations, and the like by "logical" names. This meaning is still discernible in virtual reality, a space where computer-generated virtual objects appear as (and are sometimes connected to) real ones. From this arose the general sense, essentially synonymous with cyber-.
virus, a program that propagates by copying itself into other programs on a user's computer, usually in order to do some damage to data on the system. Because viruses can be "caught" through the unprotected exchange of software, a large body of punning humor is devoted to the parallels between Net SEX (Software EXchange) and sexually transmitted diseases. One variation on the virus concept is the Trojan horse, a program distributed in a glossy package and having the appearance of a commercial product but containing a virus.
Thanks to the "Jargon File," version 3.3.3, 25 March 1996.
Copyright 1996 by David M. Weeks