WhatIs

/ee'mayl/

1. n. Electronic mail automatically passed through computer networks and/or via modems over common-carrier lines. 

Contrast snail-mail, paper-net, voice-net.

See network address.

2. vt. To send electronic mail.

/ee'maks/

[from Editing MACroS]

n. The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a program editor with an entire LISP system inside it. It was originally written by Richard Stallman in TECO under ITS at the MIT AI lab, but the most widely used versions now run under UNIX. It includes facilities to run compilation subprocesses and send and receive mail; many hackers spend up to 80% of their tube time inside it.

/el-vish/

n. 1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the Book of Kells. Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of The Rings as an orthography for his fictional 'Elvish' languages, this system (which is both visually and phonetically elegant) has long fascinated hackers (who tend to be interested by artificial languages in general).

/*-li:'z* *-fekt'/

[AI community]

n. The tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience. For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol '+' that makes it well-suited to indicate addition; it's just that people associate it with addition. Using '+' or 'plus' to mean addition in a computer language is taking advantage of the ELIZA effect.

/e-lə-ˌvā-tər kən-ˈtrō-lər/

n. Another archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like toaster (which superseded it). During one period (1983-84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C standardization committee) this was the canonical example of a really stupid, memory-limited computation environment.

"You can't require 'printf(3)' to be part of the default runtime library -- what if you're targeting an elevator controller?"

/e-lə-ˈfan-ˌtēn/

adj. Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous hogs (owing perhaps to poor design founded on brute force and ignorance) and exceedingly hairy in source form. An elephantine program may be functional and even friendly, but (as in the old joke about being in bed with an elephant) it's tough to have around all the same (and, like a pachyderm, difficult to maintain).

/e-li-gənt/

[from mathematical usage]

adj. Combining simplicity, power, and a certain ineffable grace of design. Higher praise than clever, winning, or even cuspy.

/el-dər dāz/

n. The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly, pre-1980); the era of the PDP-10, TECO, ITS, and the ARPANET. This term has been rather consciously adopted from J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic 'The Lord of the Rings'.

Compare Iron Age; see also elvish.

/el' k*-mee'noh big'nuhm/

n. The road mundanely called El Camino Real, a road through the San Francisco peninsula that originally extended all the way down to Mexico City and many portions of which are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.

/ā-tē-kä-ləm mīnd/

[IBM]

n. The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the transition from punched card to tape was traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be buried 'face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1422 and 1602 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called "The Last Bug", the climactic lines of which are as follows: