WhatIs

/plān a-skē/

Syn. flat-ASCII.

/pēt-sə, an(t)-sē stan-dərd/

[CMU]

Pepperoni and mushroom pizza. Coined allegedly because most pizzas ordered by CMU hackers during some period leading up to mid-1990 were of that flavor.

See also rotary debugger; compare tea, ISO standard cup of.

/pēt-sə bäks/

[Sun]

n. The largish thin box housing the electronics in (especially Sun) desktop workstations, so named because of its size and shape and the dimpled pattern that looks like air holes.

Two meg single-platter removable disk packs used to be called pizzas, and the huge drive they were stuck into was referred to as a pizza oven. It's an index of progress that in the old days just the disk was pizza-sized, while now the entire computer is.

/pi-stᵊl/

[IBM]

n. A tool that makes it all too easy for you to shoot yourself in the foot.

"UNIX rm * makes such a nice pistol!"

/pē-ī-pē/

[Peripheral Interchange Program]

vt.,obs. To copy; from the program PIP on CP/M, RSX-11, RSTS/E, and OS/8 (derived from a utility on the PDP-6) that was used for file copying (and in OS/8 and RT-11 for just about every other file operation you might want to do). It is said that when the program was originated, during the development of the PDP-6 in 1963, it was called ATLATL ('Anything, Lord, to Anything, Lord').

/piŋk-shərt bu̇k/

'The Peter Norton Programmer's Guide to the IBM PC'. The original cover featured a picture of Peter Norton with a silly smirk on his face, wearing a pink shirt. Perhaps in recognition of this usage, the current edition has a different picture of Norton wearing a pink shirt.

See also book titles.

/piŋ/

[from the TCP/IP acronym 'Packet INternet Groper', prob. originally contrived to match the submariners' term for a sonar pulse]

1. n. Slang term for a small network message (ICMP ECHO) sent by a computer to check for the presence and aliveness of another. Occasionally used as a phone greeting.

See ACK, also ENQ.

2. vt. To verify the presence of.

3. vt. To get the attention of. From the UNIX command 'ping(1)' that sends an ICMP ECHO packet to another host.

/pī-lət er-ər/

[Sun: from aviation]

n. A user's misconfiguration or misuse of a piece of software, producing apparently buglike results (compare UBD).

"Joe Luser reported a bug in sendmail that causes it to generate bogus headers."

"That's not a bug, that's pilot error. His 'sendmail.cf' is hosed."

/pig, rən līk ā/

v. To run very slowly on given hardware, said of software. Distinct from hog.

/pē-kō/

[SI: a quantifier meaning * 10^-12]

pref. Smaller than nano-; used in the same rather loose connotative way as nano- and micro-. This usage is not yet common in the way nano- and micro- are, but should be instantly recognizable to any hacker.

See also quantifiers, micro-.