WhatIs

/bō-ə/

[ IBM ]

n. Any one of the fat cables that lurk under the floor in a dinosaur pen. Possibly so called because they display a ferocious life of their own when you try to lay them straight and flat after they have been coiled for some time. It is rumored within IBM that channel cables for the 370 are limited to 200 feet because beyond that length the boas get dangerous -- and it is worth noting that one of the major cable makers uses the trademark 'Anaconda'.

/B-N-F/

n. 1. [techspeak] Acronym for 'Backus-Naur Form', a metasyntactic notation used to specify the syntax of programming languages, command sets, and the like. Widely used for language descriptions but seldom documented anywhere, so that it must usually be learned by osmosis from other hackers. Consider this BNF for a U.S. postal address:

/blü gü/

n. Term for 'Police' nanobots intended to prevent gray goo, denature hazardous waste, destroy pollution, put ozone back into the stratosphere, prevent halitosis, and promote truth, justice, and the American way, etc.

See nanotechnology.

/blü glü/

[ IBM ]

n. IBM's SNA (Systems Network Architecture), an incredibly losing and bletcherous communications protocol widely favored at commercial shops that don't know any better. The official IBM definition is "that which binds blue boxes together."

See fear and loathing.

/blü bu̇k/

n. 1. Informal name for one of the three standard references on the page-layout and graphics-control language PostScript ('PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook', Adobe Systems, Addison-Wesley 1985, QA76.73.P67P68, ISBN 0-201-10179-3); the other two official guides are known as the Green Book and Red Book.

/B-L-T/, /bl*t/ or (rarely) /belt/

n.,vt. Synonym for BLIT.

This is the original form of BLIT and the ancestor of bitBLT.

It referred to any large bit-field copy or move operation (one resource-intensive memory-shuffling operation done on pre-paged versions of ITS, WAITS, and TOPS-10 was sardonically referred to as The Big BLT).

/blō əp/

vi. 1. [scientific computation] To become unstable. Suggests that the computation is diverging so rapidly that it will soon overflow or at least go nonlinear.

2. Syn. blow out.

/blō past/

vt. To blow out despite a safeguard.

"The server blew past the 5K reserve buffer."

/blō au̇t/

vi. Of software, to fail spectacularly; almost as serious as crash and burn.

See blow past, blow up.

/blō ə-ˈwā/

vt. To remove (files and directories) from permanent storage, generally by accident.

"He reformatted the wrong partition and blew away last night's netnews."

Oppose nuke.