The Jargon File is a glossary of hacker slang. The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker slang from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). This is a list of glossaries (pages containing terms and their definitions or explanations). ... Hacker is a term used to describe different types of computer experts. ... Slang is the non-standard use of words in a language of a particular social group, and sometimes the creation of new words or importation of words from another language. ... ... The Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (commonly called the Stanford AI Lab, or SAIL), was one of the leading centres for artificial intelligence research from the 1960s through the 1980s. ... ARPANET logical map, March 1977. ... Artificial intelligence (also known as machine intelligence and often abbreviated as AI) is intelligence exhibited by any manufactured (i. ... Lisp is a functional programming language family with a long history. ... The PDP-10 was a computer manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) from the late 1960s on; the name stands for Programmed Data Processor model 10. It was the machine that made time-sharing common; it looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the 1970s by many... Bolt, Beranek and Newman (now called BBN Technologies) is a technology company that provides research and development services. ... Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. ... For other Worcester Colleges, see Worcester College (disambiguation). ...

1975 to 1983

The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as 'jargon-1' or 'the File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. Some terms in it date back considerably earlier (frob and some senses of moby, for instance, go back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to date at least back to the early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered 'Version 1'. Raphael Finkel is a professor of Computer Science at the University of Kentucky, who compiled the first version of the Jargon File. ... For other meanings of Stanford, see Stanford (disambiguation). ... 1975 was a common year starting on Wednesday (the link is to a full 1975 calendar). ... 1991 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... The Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC), a student organization at MIT, is one of the most famous model railroad clubs in the world. ... The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT, is a research institution and university located in the city of Cambridge, Massachusetts directly across the Charles River from Bostons Back Bay district. ... Events and trends The 1960s was a turbulent decade of change around the world. ...

In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to 'AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON. 1976 is a leap year starting on Thursday (link will take you to calendar). ... Mark Crispin (born 1956) is a staff member at the University of Washington, noted as the inventor of IMAP. He is the author or co-author of numerous RFCs; and is the principal author of UW-IMAP, one of the reference implementations of the IMAP4rev1 protocol described in RFC 3501. ...

The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the '>' caused versioning under ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy Steele. Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of correcting the term 'jargon' to 'slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as the Jargon File. Perhaps the term 'jargon' gave the compendium faux seriousness. Guy Lewis Steele, Jr. ...

Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations). Don Woods is a perennial hacker and computer programmer. ...

The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages. Richard Matthew Stallman, a. ... ITS, the Incompatible Timesharing System, was an early, revolutionary, and influential MIT time-sharing operating system; it was developed principally by the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory at MIT, with some help from Project MAC. ITS development was initiated in the late 1960s by those (notably the majority of the AI Lab...

In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, pages 26-35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication. 1981 is a common year starting on Thursday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Stewart Brand speaking September 5, 2004 Stewart Brand (born December 14, 1938 in Rockford, Illinois) is an author, editor, and creator of The Whole Earth Catalog, CoEvolution Quarterly, and the pioneering online community The WELL. He has also been an appointee to California state government and is one of the... CoEvolution Quarterly (later re-named Whole Earth Review) was one of the publishing ventures of the same visionary biologist (with interests in cultures and in art) who launched the Whole Earth Catalog and an early Internet community, still functioning, called the WELL. Stewart Brand is the name of this editor...

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, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did Richard M. 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 facilitate 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 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. Events and trends Although in the United States and in many other Western societies the 1970s are often seen as a period of transition between the turbulent 1960s and the more conservative 1980s and 1990s, many of the trends that are associated widely with the Sixties, from the Sexual Revolution... Proprietary software is a term used to describe software in which the user does not control what it does or cannot study or edit the code, in contrast to free software. ... Lisp machines were general purpose computers designed (often with hardware support) to efficiently run Lisp as their main language. ... Silicon Valley is a commonly used nickname for the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area in northern California, USA, originally referring to the concentration of silicon chip innovators and manufacturers, but eventually becoming a metaphor for the entire concentration of high tech businesses. ... The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC - the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 - preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not ITS or WAITS partisans). ...

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 standard. 1980 is a leap year starting on Tuesday. ... 1991 is a common year starting on Tuesday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) is the UNIX derivative distributed by the University of California, Berkeley starting in the 1970s. ...

In May 1983, the PDP-10-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. 1983 is an integer and composite number that represents a common year starting on Saturday of the Gregorian calendar. ... Digital Equipment Corporation was a pioneering company in the American computer industry. ...

By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hacker language and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials such as the Some AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously -- but the Jargon File, having passed from living document to icon, remained essentially untouched for seven years. Events and trends The 1980s marked an abrupt shift towards more conservative lifestyles after the momentous cultural revolutions which took place in the 1960s and 1970s and the definition of the AIDS virus in 1981. ... ARPANET logical map, March 1977. ... Apple IIc Generally, a microcomputer is a computer with a microprocessor (µP) as its CPU. Another general characteristic of these computers is that they occupy physically small amounts of space. ... The Matter of Britain is a name given collectively to the legends that concern the Celtic and legendary history of the British Isles, centering around King Arthur and the knights of the Round Table. ...

1990 and beyond

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 careful 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. 1990 is a common year starting on Monday of the Gregorian calendar. ...

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 the technical computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries now derive from Usenet and represent jargon now current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts have been made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM mainframe world. Usenet is a distributed Internet discussion system that evolved from a general purpose UUCP network of the same name. ... The C Programming Language, Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, the original edition that served for many years as an informal specification of the language The C programming language is a low-level standardized programming language developed in the early 1970s by Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie for use on the... UNIX is a portable, multi-tasking and multi-user computer operating system originally developed by a group of AT&T Bell Labs employees including Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, and Douglas McIlroy. ... IBM PC (IBM 5150) with keyboard and green screen monochrome monitor (IBM 5151), running MS-DOS 5. ... Amiga is the name of a range of home/personal computers primarily using the Motorola 68000 processor family, whose development started in 1982, initially as a game machine. ... Macintosh, also known as Mac, is a family of personal computers manufactured by Apple Computer, Inc. ...

Eric S. Raymond maintains the new File with assistance from Guy Steele, and is the credited editor of the print version, The New Hackers Dictionary. Critics lament that the new maintainer has added words of his own invention, or that he has spoiled the Jargon File as a record of a single historically interesting culture and turned it into a generic collection of technical terms. Raymond replies to this and other concerns in a page (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/jargtxt.html) at the jargon.org website. For those with such concerns, there are many archived versions of the Jargon File linked below. Eric S. Raymond Eric Steven Raymond (born December 4, 1957) (often referred to by his initials, ESR) is the author of The Cathedral and the Bazaar and the present maintainer of the Jargon File (also known as The New Hackers Dictionary). Though the Jargon File established his original reputation...

References

• Eric S. Raymond (Editor) (1996). The New Hacker's Dictionary. MIT Press; 3rd edition. ISBN 0262680920.

External links

• The original (unmaintained) Jargon File (http://www.dourish.com/goodies/jargon.html)
• The current Jargon File (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/) and its revision history (http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/revision-history.html)
• The Jargon Wiki
• Archive of the file (http://jargon-file.org/)

This article is based in part on the "Revision History" section of the Jargon File. The Jargon File is in the public domain. The public domain comprises the body of all creative works and other knowledge—writing, artwork, music, science, inventions, and others—in which no person or organization has any proprietary interest. ...