:sunspots: n. 1. Notional cause of an odd error. “Why did the program suddenly turn the screen blue?” “Sunspots, I guess.” 2. Also the cause of {bit rot} — from the myth that sunspots will increase {cosmic rays}, which can flip single bits in memory. 3. In Ham Radio – …
:PostScript: n. A groundbreaking Page Description Language ({PDL}), based on work originally done by John Gaffney at Evans and Sutherland in 1976, evolving through `JaM’ (`John and Martin’, Martin Newell) at {XEROX PARC}, and finally implemented in its current form by John Warnock et al. after he and Chuck Geschke …
:kluge: /klooj/ [from the German `klug’, clever] 1. n. A Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson) device, whether in hardware or software. (A long-ago `Datamation’ article by Jackson Granholme said: “An ill-assorted collection of poorly matching parts, forming a distressing whole.”) 2. n. A clever programming trick intended to solve a …
:dinosaur: n. 1. Any hardware requiring raised flooring and special power. Used especially of old minis and mainframes, in contrast with newer microprocessor-based machines. In a famous quote from the 1988 UNIX EXPO, Bill Joy compared the mainframe in the massive IBM display with a grazing dinosaur “with a truck …
:cray: /kray/ n. 1. (properly, capitalized) One of the line of supercomputers designed by Cray Research. 2. Any supercomputer at all. 3. The {canonical} {number-crunching} machine. The term is actually the lowercased last name of Seymour Cray, a noted computer architect and co-founder of the company. Numerous vivid legends surround …
:Stone Age: n., adj. 1. In computer folklore, an ill-defined period from ENIAC (ca. 1943) to the mid-1950s; the great age of electromechanical {dinosaur}s. Sometimes used for the entire period up to 1960–61 (see {Iron Age}); however, it is funnier and more descriptive to characterize the latter period in terms …
:mainframe: n. Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or `main frame’ of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine. After the emergence of smaller `minicomputer’ designs in the early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as `mainframe computers’ and eventually just as mainframes. The …
:big iron: n. Large, expensive, ultra-fast computers. Used generally of {number-crunching} supercomputers such as Crays, but can include more conventional big commercial IBMish mainframes. Term of approval.
:core: n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; `in core’, for example, …
:core: n. Main storage or RAM. Dates from the days of ferrite-core memory; now archaic as techspeak most places outside IBM, but also still used in the UNIX community and by old-time hackers or those who would sound like them. Some derived idioms are quite current; `in core’, for example, …
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