WhatIs

/mən-dān/

[from SF fandom]

n. 1. A person who is not in science fiction fandom.

2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my mundane life..."

See also Real World.

/mənch-kin/

[from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's The Wizard of Oz]

n. A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking BASIC or something else equally constricted. A term of mild derision -- munchkins are annoying but some grow up to be hackers after passing through a larval stage. The term urchin is also used.

See also wannabee, bitty box.

/mənchiŋ skwers/

n. A display-hack dating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T -- see HAKMEM items 146--148) to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects.

/mənchiŋ/

n. Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer for thrills, notoriety, or to annoy the system manager.

Compare cracker.

See also hacked off.

/mənch/

[often confused with mung, q.v.]

vt. To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related to crunch and nearly synonymous with grovel, but connotes less pain.

/məm-bəl/

interj. 1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion.

"Don't you think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?"

"Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it."

/məm-bə-läzh/

n. The topic of one's mumbling (see mumble). "All that mumblage" is used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear how the subject of discussion works, or like "all that crap" when 'mumble' is being used as an implicit replacement for pejoratives.

/məl-tē-task/

n. Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to describe a person doing several things at once (but see thrash). The term multiplex, from communications technology (meaning to handle more than one channel at the same time), is used similarly.

/məl-teks/

n. [from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"]

/məl-tē-shən/

[coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970]

n. Competent user of Multics. Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted the analogous Unician.