WhatIs

/gos'p*r-izm/

A hack, invention, or saying by arch-hacker R. William (Bill) Gosper. This notion merits its own term because there are so many of them. Many of the entries in HAKMEM are Gosperisms; see also life.

/goz'maks/

[contraction of 'Gosling EMACS']

n. The first EMACS-in-C implementation, predating but now largely eclipsed by GNUMACS. Originally freeware; a commercial version is now modestly popular as 'UniPress EMACS'. The author (James Gosling) went on to invent NeWS.

/gȯrp/

[CMU: perhaps from the canonical hiker's food, Good Old Raisins and Peanuts]

Another metasyntactic variable, like foo and bar.

/gə-ˈri-lə ärm/

n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s. It seems the designers of all those spiffy touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions. After more than a very few selections, the arm begins to feel sore, cramped, and oversized; hence 'gorilla arm'. This is now considered a classic cautionary tale to human-factors designers;

/gu̇d thiŋ/

n.,adj. Often capitalized; always pronounced as if capitalized.

1. Self-evidently wonderful to anyone in a position to notice:

"The Trailblazer's 19.2Kbaud PEP mode with on-the-fly Lempel-Ziv compression is a Good Thing for sites relaying netnews."

2. Something that can't possibly have any ill side-effects and may save considerable grief later:

"Removing the self-modifying code from that shared library would be a Good Thing."

/gän-(ˌ)zō/

[from Hunter S. Thompson]

adj. Overwhelming; outrageous; over the top; very large, esp. used of collections of source code, source files, or individual functions. Has some of the connotations of moby and hairy, but without the implication of obscurity or complexity.

/gäŋk-kyə-ˌlā-tər/

[from the old Hogan's Heroes TV series]

n. A pretentious piece of equipment that actually serves no useful purpose. Usually used to describe one's least favorite piece of computer hardware.

See gonk.

/gäŋk/

vt.,n. 1. To prevaricate or to embellish the truth beyond any reasonable recognition. It is alleged that in German the term is (mythically) gonken; in Spanish the verb becomes gonkar.

"You're gonking me. That story you just told me is a bunch of gonk."

In German, for example, "Du gonkst mir" (You're pulling my leg).

See also gonkulator.

2. [British] To grab some sleep at an odd time; compare gronk out.

/gälf-bȯl prin-tər/

n. The IBM 2741, a slow but letter-quality printing device and terminal based on the IBM Selectric typewriter. The 'golf ball' was a round object bearing reversed embossed images of 88 different characters arranged on four meridians of latitude; one could change the font by swapping in a different golf ball.

This was the technology that enabled APL to use a non-EBCDIC, non-ASCII, and in fact completely non-standard character set.

/gōl-dən/

adj. [prob. from folklore's golden egg] When used to describe a magnetic medium (e.g., golden disk, golden tape), describes one containing a tested, up-to-spec, ready-to-ship software version.

Compare platinum-iridium.