:Iron Age: n. In the history of computing, 1961–1971 — the formative era of commercial {mainframe} technology, when {big iron} {dinosaur}s ruled the earth. These began with the delivery of the first PDP-1, coincided with the dominance of ferrite {core}, and ended with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor …
:core dump: n. [common {Iron Age} jargon, preserved by UNIX] 1. [techspeak] A copy of the contents of {core}, produced when a process is aborted by certain kinds of internal error. 2. By extension, used for humans passing out, vomiting, or registering extreme shock. “He dumped core. All over the …
:brain dump: n. The act of telling someone everything one knows about a particular topic or project. Typically used when someone is going to let a new party maintain a piece of code. Conceptually analogous to an operating system {core dump} in that it saves a lot of useful {state} …
:Big Room, the: n. The extremely large room with the blue ceiling and intensely bright light (during the day) or black ceiling with lots of tiny night-lights (during the night) found outside all computer installations. “He can’t come to the phone right now, he’s somewhere out in the Big Room.”
:flush: v. 1. To delete something, usually superfluous, or to abort an operation. “All that nonsense has been flushed.” 2. [UNIX/C] To force buffered I/O to disk, as with an `fflush(3)’ call. This is *not* an abort or deletion as in sense 1, but a demand for early completion! 3. …
:critical mass: n. In physics, the minimum amount of fissionable material required to sustain a chain reaction. Of a software product, describes a condition of the software such that fixing one bug introduces one plus {epsilon} bugs. When software achieves critical mass, it can only be discarded and rewritten.
:PDP-10: [Programmed Data Processor model 10] n. The machine that made timesharing real. It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU. Some aspects of the instruction set (most notably …
:shareware: /sheir’weir/ n. {Freeware} (sense 1) for which the author requests some payment, usually in the accompanying documentation files or in an announcement made by the software itself. Such payment may or may not buy additional support or functionality.
:guiltware: /gilt’weir/ n. 1. A piece of {freeware} decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send the poor suffering martyr gobs of money. 2. {Shareware} that works.
:freeware: n. Free software, often written by enthusiasts and distributed by users’ groups, or via electronic mail, local bulletin boards, {USENET}, or other electronic media. At one time, `freeware’ was a trademark of Andrew Fluegelman, the author of the well-known MS-DOS comm program PC-TALK III. It wasn’t enforced after his …
Copyright © 2019 Shrope.com