WhatIs

/glob/, *not* /glohb/

vt.,n. To expand special characters in a wildcarded name, or the act of so doing (the action is also called 'globbing'). The UNIX conventions for filename wildcarding have become sufficiently pervasive that many hackers use some of them in written English, especially in email or news on technical topics. Those commonly encountered include the following:

• *

  wildcard for any string (see also UN*X)

/glich/

[from German glitschen to slip, via Yiddish glitshen, to slide or skid]

1. n. A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function. Sometimes recoverable. An interruption in electric service is specifically called a 'power glitch'. This is of grave concern because it usually crashes all the computers. In jargon, though, a hacker who got to the middle of a sentence and then forgot how he or she intended to complete it might say,

"Sorry, I just glitched".

2. vi. To commit a glitch.

/glas'fet/

[by analogy with MOSFET, the acronym for 'Metal-Oxide-Semiconductor Field-Effect Transistor']

n. Syn. firebottle, a humorous way to refer to a vacuum tube.

/glas T-T-Y/ or /glas ti'tee/

n. A terminal that has a display screen but which, because of hardware or software limitations, behaves like a teletype or some other printing terminal, thereby combining the disadvantages of both: like a printing terminal, it can't do fancy display hacks, and like a display terminal, it doesn't produce hard copy. An example is the early 'dumb' version of Lear-Siegler ADM 3 (without cursor control).

See tube, tty.

See appendix A for an interesting true story about a glass tty.

/gläs/

[IBM]

n. Synonym for silicon.

/glärk/

vt. To figure something out from context.

"The System III manuals are pretty poor, but you can generally glark the meaning from context."

Interestingly, the word was originally 'glork'; the context was

"This gubblick contains many nonsklarkish English flutzpahs, but the overall pluggandisp can be glorked [sic] from context"

/gips/ or /jips/

[analogy with MIPS]

n. Giga-Instructions per Second (also possibly Gillions of Instructions per Second; see gillion). In 1991, this is used of only a handful of highly parallel machines, but this is expected to change.

Compare KIPS.

/gil'y*n/ or /jil'y*n/

[formed from Giga- by analogy with mega/million and tera/trillion] 

n. 

10⁹. Same as an American billion or a British milliard. How one pronounces this depends on whether one speaks Giga- with a hard or soft G.

/gi:'goh/

[acronym]

1. 'Garbage In, Garbage Out' -- usually said in response to lusers who complain that a program didn't complain about faulty data. Also commonly used to describe failures in human decision making due to faulty, incomplete, or imprecise data.

2. 'Garbage In, Gospel Out': this more recent expansion is a sardonic comment on the tendency human beings have to put excessive trust in 'computerized' data.

/ji'ga/ or /gi'ga/

[SI]

pref. 

See quantifiers.