Computer Humor

Computer humour, also known as hacker humour, is humour on the subject of computers or their users.

Examples

Examples of computer humour include:
*"Any key", taken to mean pressing the (non-existent) "Any" key rather than any key
*April Fools' Day Request for Comments
*Bastard Operator From Hell, a fictional rogue computer operator
*Blinkenlights, a neologism for diagnostic lights
*Bogosort, a portmanteau of the words bogus and sort
*COMEFROM, an obscure programming language control flow structure, originally as a joke
*"The Complexity of Songs", a journal article published by computer scientist Donald Knuth in 1977 as an in-joke about computational complexity theory
*'' The Computer Contradictionary'', a non-fiction book by Stan Kelly-Bootle that compiles a satirical list of definitions of computer industry terms
*''The Daily WTF'', a humorous blog dedicated to "Curious Perversions in Information Technology"
*''Dilbert'', an American comic strip
*Easter egg, an intentional inside joke, hidden message or image, or secret feature of a work
**List of Google Easter eggs
**List of Easter eggs in Microsoft products
**''The Book of Mozilla''
*Elephant in Cairo, in computer programming, a piece of data inserted at the end of a search space, which matches the search criteria, in order to make sure the search algorithm terminates; it is a humorous example of a sentinel value
*Evil bit, a fictional IPv4 packet header field
*Eyeball search, humorous terminology
*FINO (first in, never out) (sometimes seen as "FISH", for first in, still here), a humorous scheduling algorithm, as opposed to traditional first in, first out (FIFO) and last in, first out (LIFO)
*Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO), the concept that flawed, or nonsense input data produces nonsense output
*J. Random Hacker, an arbitrary programmer (hacker)
* Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's CPU to cease meaningful operation
* Hex, a fictional computer featured in the ''Discworld'' novels by Terry Pratchett
*Hexspeak, like leetspeak, a novelty form of spelling using the hexadecimal digits
*Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP), a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots
*Interactive EasyFlow, a diagramming and flow charting software package that included a humorous software licence ''This is where the bloodthirsty licensing agreement is supposed to go...''
*Internet Oracle, an effort at collective humor in a pseudo-Socratic question-and-answer format
*IP over Avian Carriers, a joke proposal to carry IP traffic by birds such as homing pigeons
*''It's Geek 2 Me'', a tech cartoon
*Jargon File, a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers
*'' The Joy of Tech'', a webcomic
* Kitchen Table International, a fictitious computer company
*Kremvax, originally a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, named like the then large number of Usenet VAXen with names of the form foovax
*lp0 on fire (also known as Printer on Fire), is an outdated error message generated on some Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems in response to certain types of printer errors
*Magic smoke (also factory smoke, blue smoke, angry pixies, or the genie), a humorous name for the caustic smoke produced by burning out electronic circuits or components
* Ninety–ninety rule: "the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time"
*Null device, in programmer jargon, the bit bucket or black hole
*PC LOAD LETTER or PC LOAD A4, a printer error message that has entered popular culture as a technology meme referring to a confusing or inappropriate error message
*Slowsort, a humorous, not useful, sorting algorithm
*''The Tao of Programming'', a 1987 book by Geoffrey James
*TPS report, Testing Procedure Specification, has come to mean pointless, mindless paperwork
*User error, an error made by the human user of a complex system. Related slang terms include PMAC ("problem exists between monitor and chair"), identity error or ID-10T/1D-10T error ("idiot error"), PICNIC ("problem in chair, not in computer"), IBM error ("idiot behind machine error")
*''User Friendly'', a former daily webcomic
*''Working Daze'', a comic strip
*Write-only memory (joke)
*''xkcd'', a webcomic
* Zaltair, a fictional computer created by Steve Wozniak

See also

*Computational humor, a branch of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence which uses computers in humor research
*Humor on the internet
*Mathematical joke
*Geek
*Esoteric programming language
*List of humorous units of measurement

Computing-related lists