WhatIs

/wē-nē/

n. 1. When used with a qualifier (for example, as in UNIX weenie, VMS weenie, IBM weenie) this can be either an insult or a term of praise, depending on context, tone of voice, and whether or not it is applied by a person who considers him or herself to be the same sort of weenie.

/wēdz/

n. 1. Refers to development projects or algorithms that have no possible relevance or practical application. Comes from 'off in the weeds'. Used in phrases like "lexical analysis for microcode is serious weeds..."

2. At CDC/ETA before its demise, the phrase 'go off in the weeds' was equivalent to IBM's branch-to-fishkill and mainstream hackerdom's jump off into never-never land.

/wē-bəl/

[Cambridge]

interj. Used to denote frustration, usually at amazing stupidity.

"I stuck the disk in upside down."

"Weeble..."

Compare gurfle.

/we-ja-tüd/

n. The quality or state of being wedged.

/we-jē/

[Fairchild]

n. A bug. Prob. related to wedged.

/we-jəd/

[from a common description of recto-cranial inversion]

adj. 

/wē-zəl/

[Cambridge]

n. A naive user, one who deliberately or accidentally does things that are stupid or ill-advised. Roughly synonymous with loser.

/wāv ā ded chi-kᵊn/

v.,n. 

1. [techspeak] The action of checking the status of an input line, sensor, or memory location to see if a particular external event has been registered.
2. To repeatedly call or check with someone:
   "I keep polling him, but he's not answering his phone; he must be swapped out."
3. To ask.
   "Lunch? I poll for a takeout order daily."

/wȯ-tər M-I-P-S/

n. (see MIPS, sense 2) Large, water-cooled machines of either today's ECL-supercomputer flavor or yesterday's traditional mainframe type.

/wȯ-shiŋ mə-shēn/

n. Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the top-loading access to the media packs -- and, of course, they were always set on spin cycle. The washing-machine idiom transcends language barriers; it is even used in Russian hacker jargon.

See also walking drives.

The thick channel cables connecting these were called bit hoses (see hose).