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The Jargon File is a glossary and
usage dictionary A language-for-specific-purposes dictionary (LSP dictionary) is a reference work which defines the specialised vocabulary used by experts within a particular field, for example, architecture. The discipline that deals with these dictionaries is s ...
of slang used by
computer programmers A computer programmer, sometimes referred to as a software developer, a software engineer, a programmer or a coder, is a person who creates computer programs — often for larger computer software. A programmer is someone who writes/create ...
. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the
MIT AI Lab Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) is a research institute at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) formed by the 2003 merger of the Laboratory for Computer Science (LCS) and the Artificial Intelligence Lab ...
, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old
ARPANET The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the technical foun ...
AI/ LISP/
PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...
communities, including
Bolt, Beranek and Newman Raytheon BBN (originally Bolt Beranek and Newman Inc.) is an American research and development company, based next to Fresh Pond in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. In 1966, the Franklin Institute awarded the firm the Frank P. Brown ...
,
Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technolog ...
, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as ''The Hacker's Dictionary'' (edited by Guy Steele), revised in 1991 as ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (ed. Eric S. Raymond; third edition published 1996). The concept of the file began with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that came out of early
TX-0 The TX-0, for ''Transistorized Experimental computer zero'', but affectionately referred to as tixo (pronounced "tix oh"), was an early fully transistorized computer and contained a then-huge 64 K of 18-bit words of magnetic-core memory. Constru ...
and PDP-1 hackers in the 1950s, where the term hacker emerged and the ethic, philosophies and some of the nomenclature emerged.


1975 to 1983

The Jargon File (referred to here as "Jargon-1" or "the File") was made by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From that time until the plug was finally pulled on the
SAIL A sail is a tensile structure—which is made from fabric or other membrane materials—that uses wind power to propel sailing craft, including sailing ships, sailboats, windsurfers, ice boats, and even sail-powered land vehicles. Sails ma ...
computer in 1991, the File was named "AIWORD.RF P,DOC (" P,DOC was a system directory for "User Program DOCumentation" on the WAITS operating system). Some terms, such as '' frob'', ''
foo The terms foobar (), foo, bar, baz, and others are used as metasyntactic variables and placeholder names in computer programming or computer-related documentation. - Etymology of "Foo" They have been used to name entities such as variables, fu ...
'' and '' mung'' are believed to date back to the early 1950s from the Tech Model Railroad Club at
MIT The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of the m ...
and documented in the 1959 ''Dictionary of the TMRC Language'' compiled by Peter Samson. The revisions of Jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered "version 1". Note that it was always called "AIWORD" or "the Jargon file", never "the File"; the latter term was coined by Eric Raymond. In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to the MIT AI Lab. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to "AI words" and so stored the file on his directory, named as "AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON" ("AI" lab computer, directory "MRC", file "SAIL JARGON"). Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and
Don Woods Donald Woods (1933–2001) was a South African journalist and activist. Donald or Don Woods may also refer to: * Donald Woods (actor) (1906–1998), Canadian-born American film and television actor * Donald Devereux Woods (1912–1964), British ...
became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations). The File expanded by fits and starts until 1983.
Richard Stallman Richard Matthew Stallman (; born March 16, 1953), also known by his initials, rms, is an American free software movement activist and programmer. He campaigns for software to be distributed in such a manner that its users have the freedom to ...
was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages. The Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) was named to distinguish it from another early MIT computer operating system,
Compatible Time-Sharing System The Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS) was the first general purpose time-sharing operating system. Compatible Time Sharing referred to time sharing which was compatible with batch processing; it could offer both time sharing and batch proces ...
(CTSS). In 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in
Stewart Brand Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938) is an American writer, best known as editor of the ''Whole Earth Catalog''. He founded a number of organizations, including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the autho ...
's ''
CoEvolution Quarterly ''CoEvolution Quarterly'' (1974–1985) was a journal descended from Stewart Brand's '' Whole Earth Catalog''. Stewart Brand founded the ''CoEvolution Quarterly'' in 1974 using proceeds from the '' Whole Earth Catalog.'' It evolved out of the o ...
'' (issue 29, pages 26–35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of Steele's Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication. A late version of Jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as ''The Hacker's Dictionary'' (Harper & Row CN 1082, ). It included all of Steele's Crunchly cartoons. The other Jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as "Steele-1983" and those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors.


1983 to 1990

Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to ease the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the "temporary" freeze to become permanent. The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and associated proprietary software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated Lisp machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the
Route 128 The following highways are numbered 128: Canada * New Brunswick Route 128 * Ontario Highway 128 (former) * Prince Edward Island Route 128 Costa Rica * National Route 128 India * National Highway 128 (India) Japan * Japan National Route 1 ...
strip in Massachusetts and out west in Silicon Valley. The startups built Lisp machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved ITS. The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL computer continued as a computer science department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems, but by the mid-1980s, most of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging
BSD Unix The Berkeley Software Distribution or Berkeley Standard Distribution (BSD) is a discontinued operating system based on Research Unix, developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG) at the University of California, Berke ...
standard. In May 1983, the
PDP-10 Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...
-centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at DEC. The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be. As mentioned in some editions:


1990 and later

A new revision was begun in 1990, which contained nearly the entire text of a late version of Jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after consultation with the editors of Steele-1983). It merged in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now only of historical interest. The new version cast a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim was to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all of the technical computing cultures in which the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries now derived from Usenet and represent jargon then current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts were made to collect jargon from other cultures including
IBM PC The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible de facto standard. Released on August 12, 1981, it was created by a team ...
programmers,
Amiga Amiga is a family of personal computers introduced by Commodore in 1985. The original model is one of a number of mid-1980s computers with 16- or 32-bit processors, 256 KB or more of RAM, mouse-based GUIs, and significantly improved graphi ...
fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM
mainframe A mainframe computer, informally called a mainframe or big iron, is a computer used primarily by large organizations for critical applications like bulk data processing for tasks such as censuses, industry and consumer statistics, enterprise ...
world. Eric Raymond maintained the new File with assistance from Guy Steele, and is the credited editor of the print version of it, ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (published by MIT Press in 1991); hereafter Raymond-1991. Some of the changes made under his watch were controversial; early critics accused Raymond of unfairly changing the file's focus to the Unix hacker culture instead of the older hacker cultures where the Jargon File originated. Raymond has responded by saying that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should report on hacker culture, and not attempt to enshrine it. After the second edition of ''NHD'' (MIT Press, 1993; hereafter Raymond-1993), Raymond was accused of adding terms reflecting his own politics and vocabulary, even though he says that entries to be added are checked to make sure that they are in live use, not "just the private coinage of one or two people". The Raymond version was revised again, to include terminology from the nascent subculture of the public Internet and the World Wide Web, and published by MIT Press as ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'', Third Edition, in 1996. , no updates have been made to the official Jargon File since 2003. A volunteer editor produced two updates, reflecting later influences (mostly excoriated) from text messaging language, LOLspeak, and
Internet slang Internet slang (also called Internet shorthand, cyber-slang, netspeak, digispeak or chatspeak) is a non-standard or unofficial form of language used by people on the Internet to communicate to one another. An example of Internet slang is "LOL" m ...
in general; the last was produced in January 2012.


Impact and reception


Influence

Despite its tongue-in-cheek approach, multiple other
style guides A style guide or manual of style is a set of standards for the writing, formatting, and design of documents. It is often called a style sheet, although that term also has multiple other meanings. The standards can be applied either for gener ...
and similar works have cited ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' as a reference, and even recommended following some of its "hackish" best practices. The '' Oxford English Dictionary'' has used the ''NHD'' as a source for computer-related neologisms. ''
The Chicago Manual of Style ''The Chicago Manual of Style'' (abbreviated in writing as ''CMOS'' or ''CMS'', or sometimes as ''Chicago'') is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its 17 editions have prescribed writi ...
'', the leading American academic and book-publishing style guide, beginning with its 15th edition (2003) explicitly defers, for "computer writing", to the quotation punctuation style '' logical quotation'' recommended by the essay "Hacker Writing Style" in ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (and cites ''NHD'' for nothing else). The 16th edition (2010, and the current issue ) does likewise. The '' National Geographic Style Manual'' lists ''NHD'' among only 8 specialized dictionaries, out of 22 total sources, on which it is based. That manual is the house style of NGS publications, and has been available online for public browsing since 1995. The ''NGSM'' does not specify what, in particular, it drew from the ''NHD'' or any other source. Aside from these guides and the ''Encyclopedia of New Media'', the Jargon file, especially in print form, is frequently cited for both its definitions and its essays, by books and other works on hacker history, cyberpunk subculture, computer jargon and online style, and the rise of the Internet as a public medium, in works as diverse as the 20th edition of ''A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology'' edited by José Ángel García Landa (2015); ''Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age'' by Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon of ''
Wired ''Wired'' (stylized as ''WIRED'') is a monthly American magazine, published in print and online editions, that focuses on how emerging technologies affect culture, the economy, and politics. Owned by Condé Nast, it is headquartered in San Fran ...
'' magazine (1999); ''Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea'' by David Livingstone (2015); Mark Dery's ''Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture'' (1994) and ''Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century'' (2007); ''Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do-it-yourself Guide to the Future'' by Gareth Branwyn and Peter Sugarman (1991); and numerous others. '' Time'' magazine used ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (Raymond-1993) as the basis for an article about online culture in the November 1995 inaugural edition of the "Time Digital" department. ''NHD'' was cited by name on the front page of '' The Wall Street Journal''. Upon the release of the second edition, '' Newsweek'' used it as a primary source, and quoted entries in a sidebar, for a major article on the Internet and its history. The
MTV MTV (Originally an initialism of Music Television) is an American cable channel that launched on August 1, 1981. Based in New York City, it serves as the flagship property of the MTV Entertainment Group, part of Paramount Media Networks, a di ...
show ''This Week in Rock'' used excerpts from the Jargon File in its "CyberStuff" segments. ''
Computing Reviews ''ACM Computing Reviews'' (''CR'') is a scientific journal that reviews literature in the field of computer science. It is published by the Association for Computing Machinery and the editor-in-chief is Carol Hutchins (New York University). See al ...
'' used one of the Jargon File's definitions on its December 1991 cover. On October 23, 2003, ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' was used in a legal case. SCO Group cited the 1996 edition definition of "FUD" (
fear, uncertainty and doubt Fear, uncertainty and doubt (often shortened to FUD) is a propaganda tactic used in sales, marketing, public relations, politics, polling and cults. FUD is generally a strategy to influence perception by disseminating negative and dubious or f ...
), which dwelt on questionable IBM business practices, in a legal filing in the civil lawsuit '' SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.''. The correct version number is actually 4.4.7, as given in the rest of the documents there. (In response, Raymond added SCO to the entry in a revised copy of the ''Jargon File'', feeling that SCO's own practices deserved similar criticism.)


Defense of the term ''hacker''

The book is particularly noted for helping (or at least trying) to preserve the distinction between a hacker (a consummate programmer) and a
cracker Cracker, crackers or The Crackers may refer to: Animals * ''Hamadryas'' (butterfly), or crackers, a genus of brush-footed butterflies * '' Sparodon'', a monotypic genus whose species is sometimes known as "Cracker" Arts and entertainment Films ...
(a computer criminal); even though not reviewing the book in detail, both the '' London Review of Books'' and ''
MIT Technology Review ''MIT Technology Review'' is a bimonthly magazine wholly owned by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and editorially independent of the university. It was founded in 1899 as ''The Technology Review'', and was re-launched without "The" in ...
'' remarked on it in this regard. In a substantial entry on the work, the ''Encyclopedia of New Media'' by Steve Jones (2002) observed that this defense of the term ''hacker'' was a motivating factor for both Steele's and Raymond's print editions:


Reviews and reactions

''
PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...
'' in 1984, stated that ''The Hacker's Dictionary'' was superior to most other computer-humor books, and noted its authenticity to "hard-core programmers' conversations", especially slang from MIT and Stanford. Reviews quoted by the publisher include: William Safire of '' The New York Times'' referring to the Raymond-1991 ''NHD'' as a "sprightly lexicon" and recommending it as a nerdy gift that holiday season (this reappeared in his "On Language" column again in mid-October 1992);
Hugh Kenner William Hugh Kenner (January 7, 1923 – November 24, 2003) was a Canadian literary scholar, critic and professor. He published widely on Modernist literature with particular emphasis on James Joyce, Ezra Pound, and Samuel Beckett. His major ...
in ''
Byte The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable uni ...
'' suggesting that it was so engaging that one's reading of it should be "severely timed if you hope to get any work done"; and ''
Mondo 2000 ''Mondo 2000'' was a glossy cyberculture magazine published in California during the 1980s and 1990s. It covered cyberpunk topics such as virtual reality and smart drugs. It was a more anarchic and subversive prototype for the later-founded '' ...
'' describing it as "slippery, elastic fun with language", as well as "not only a useful guidebook to very much un-official technical terms and street tech slang, but also a de facto ethnography of the early years of the hacker culture". Positive reviews were also published in academic as well as computer-industry publications, including ''
IEEE Spectrum ''IEEE Spectrum'' is a magazine edited by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers. The first issue of ''IEEE Spectrum'' was published in January 1964 as a successor to ''Electrical Engineering''. The magazine contains peer-reviewe ...
'', '' New Scientist'', ''
PC Magazine ''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and have continued to the present d ...
'', '' PC World'', '' Science'', and (repeatedly) ''Wired''. US game designer Steve Jackson, writing for ''
Boing Boing ''Boing Boing'' is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice w ...
'' magazine in its pre-blog, print days, described ''NHD'' essay "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" as "a wonderfully accurate pseudo-demographic description of the people who make up the hacker culture". He was nevertheless critical of Raymond's tendency to editorialize, even "
flame A flame (from Latin '' flamma'') is the visible, gaseous part of a fire. It is caused by a highly exothermic chemical reaction taking place in a thin zone. When flames are hot enough to have ionized gaseous components of sufficient density they ...
", and of the Steele cartoons, which Jackson described as "sophomoric, and embarrassingly out of place beside the dry and sophisticated humor of the text". He wound down his review with some rhetorical questions: Originally published in ''
Boing Boing ''Boing Boing'' is a website, first established as a zine in 1988, later becoming a group blog. Common topics and themes include technology, futurism, science fiction, gadgets, intellectual property, Disney, and left-wing politics. It twice w ...
'' magazine, Vol. 1, No. 10.
The third print edition garnered additional coverage, in the usual places like ''Wired'' (August 1996), and even in mainstream venues, including ''
People A person ( : people) is a being that has certain capacities or attributes such as reason, morality, consciousness or self-consciousness, and being a part of a culturally established form of social relations such as kinship, ownership of propert ...
'' magazine (October 21, 1996).


References

*


Further reading

* * * *


External links

* (2004), Raymond's; mentions 4.4.8, but the available copy is 4.4.7
Archive
(1981–2003); Steven Ehrbar's: ** ** ** ** ** ** ** * {{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130827121341/http://cosman246.com/jargon.html , date=August 27, 2013 , title=Ver. 5.0.1 (2012) post-Raymond; last major revision 1991 non-fiction books Books about computer hacking Books by Eric S. Raymond Books by Guy L. Steele Jr. Computer books Computer humor Computer jargon Computer programming folklore Computer-related introductions in 1975 Creative Commons-licensed books English dictionaries Free software culture and documents Software engineering folklore Works about computer hacking