WhatIs

/tər-mə-nᵊl jəŋ-kē/

[UK]

/tər-mə-nᵊl il-nəs/

n. 1. Syn. raster burn.

2. The burn-in condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a screen saver.

/tər-mə-nᵊl brān deth/

n. The extreme form of terminal illness (sense 1). What someone who has obviously been hacking continuously for far too long is said to be suffering from.

/tər-mə-nak/

[Caltech, ca. 1979]

n. Any malfunctioning computer terminal. A common failure mode of Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the 'L' key to produce the 'K' code instead; complaints about this tended to look like

"Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease fix."

See sun-stools, Telerat, HP-SUX.

/ter-ə-fläp kləb/

[FLOP = Floating Point Operation]

n. A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder.

/ter-ə-/

[SI]

pref. See quantifiers.

/ten-yərd gra-jə-wāt stü-dᵊnt/

n. One who has been in graduate school for 10 years (the usual maximum is 5 or 6): a ten-yeared student (get it?). Actually, this term may be used of any grad student beginning in his seventh year. Students don't really get tenure, of course, the way professors do, but a tenth-year graduate student has probably been around the university longer than any untenured professor.

/ten(t)s/

adj. Of programs, very clever and efficient. A tense piece of code often got that way because it was highly bummed, but sometimes it was just based on a great idea. A comment in a clever routine by Mike Kazar, once a grad-student hacker at CMU:

"This routine is so tense it will bring tears to your eyes."

A tense programmer is one who produces tense code.

/ten-fiŋ-gər in-tər-fās/

n. The interface between two networks that cannot be directly connected for security reasons; refers to the practice of placing two terminals side by side and having an operator read from one and type into the other.

/tel-net/

vt. To communicate with another Internet host using the TELNET program. TOPS-10 people used the word IMPCOM, since that was the program name for them. Sometimes abbreviated to TN /T-N/.

"I usually TN over to SAIL just to read the AP News."