WhatIs

/wȯl/

[WPI]

interj. 1. An indication of confusion, usually spoken with a quizzical tone: "Wall??"

2. A request for further explication.

Compare octal forty.

/wȯ-kiŋ drīvz/

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.

/wȯk ȯf t͟hə end əv/

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.

/wȯk/

n.,vt. Traversal of a data structure, especially an array or linked-list data structure in core.

See also codewalker, silly walk, clobber.

/wȯl-dō/

[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.

/wātz/

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.

/wɑːd/

In the realm of computing, a "Wad" refers to a condensed aggregation of data or information. This term is often used to describe a bundle or collection of related files, resources, or assets, typically compressed for more efficient storage and distribution.

Wads are commonly utilized in the context of video games, where they serve as a container for game assets such as textures, sounds, and levels. By packaging these resources together, game developers can streamline the distribution and installation process for players.

/wa-bət/

[almost certainly from Elmer Fudd's immortal line "You wascawwy wabbit!"]

n. 1. A legendary early hack reported on a System/360 at RPI and elsewhere around 1978. 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 also cookie monster.

/vəl-chər ka-pə-tə-list/

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.

/vəl-kən nərv 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 many micros this is Ctrl-Alt-Del; on Suns, L1-A; on some Macintoshes, it is <Cmd>-<Power switch>! Also called three-finger salute.

Compare quadruple bucky.