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Jargon File

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TheJargon Fileis aglossaryandusage dictionaryofslangused bycomputer programmers.The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as theMIT AI Lab,theStanford AI Lab(SAIL) and others of the oldARPANETAI/LISP/PDP-10communities, includingBolt, Beranek and Newman(BBN),Carnegie Mellon University,andWorcester Polytechnic Institute.It was published in paperback form in 1983 asThe Hacker's Dictionary(edited byGuy Steele), revised in 1991 asThe New Hacker's Dictionary(ed.Eric S. Raymond;third edition published 1996).

The concept of the file began with theTech Model Railroad Club(TMRC) that came out of earlyTX-0andPDP-1hackers in the 1950s, where the termhackeremerged and the ethic, philosophies and some of the nomenclature emerged.

1975 to 1983

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The Jargon File (referred to here as "Jargon-1" or "the File" ) was made byRaphael FinkelatStanfordin 1975. From that time until the plug was finally pulled on theSAILcomputer in 1991, the File was named "AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC]" ( "[UP,DOC]" was a system directory for "User Program DOCumentation" on theWAITSoperating system). Some terms, such asfrob,fooandmungare believed to date back to the early 1950s from theTech Model Railroad ClubatMITand documented in the 1959Dictionary of the TMRC Languagecompiled by Peter Samson.[1][2]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 last term was coined by Eric Raymond.

In 1976,Mark Crispin,having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer,FTPeda 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 andDon Woodsbecame 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 Stallmanwas prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT andITS-related coinages. The Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) was named to distinguish it from another early MIT computer operating system,Compatible Time-Sharing System(CTSS).

In 1981, ahackernamed Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published inStewart Brand'sCoEvolution Quarterly(issue 29, pages 26–35) with illustrations byPhil Wadlerand Guy Steele (including a couple of Steele'sCrunchlycartoons). 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 asThe Hacker's Dictionary(Harper & Row CN 1082,ISBN0-06-091082-8). It included all of Steele'sCrunchlycartoons. The other Jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, andMark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did Stallman andGeoff 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

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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 associatedproprietary softwareinstead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicatedLisp machines.At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups[3]along theRoute 128strip in Massachusetts and out west inSilicon Valley.The startups built Lisp machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became aTWENEXsystem rather than a host for the AI hackers' ITS.[4]

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 emergingBSD Unixstandard.

In April 1983, thePDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of theJupiter projectatDEC.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.[5]

As mentioned in some editions:[6]

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 theARPANET,circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT's; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hackish slang and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials like the AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-cultureMatter of Britainchronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously, but the Jargon File passed from living document to icon and remained essentially untouched for seven years.

1990 and later

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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 derived fromUsenetand represented jargon then current in theCandUnixcommunities, but special efforts were made to collect jargon from other cultures includingIBM PCprogrammers,Amigafans,Macenthusiasts, and even the IBMmainframeworld.[7]

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 byMIT Pressin 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.[8]After the second edition ofNHD(MIT Press, 1993; hereafter Raymond-1993), Raymond was accused of adding terms reflecting his own politics and vocabulary,[9]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".[10]

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 asThe New Hacker's Dictionary,Third Edition, in 1996.

As of January 2016,no updates have been made to the official Jargon File since 2003. A volunteer editor produced two updates, reflecting later influences (mostly excoriated) fromtext messaging language,LOLspeak,andInternet slangin general; the last was produced in January 2012.[11]

Impact and reception

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Influence

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Despite itstongue-in-cheekapproach, multiple otherstyle guidesand similar works have citedThe New Hacker's Dictionaryas a reference, and even recommended following some of its "hackish" best practices. TheOxford English Dictionaryhas used theNHDas a source for computer-relatedneologisms.[12]The Chicago Manual of Style,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" inThe New Hacker's Dictionary(and citesNHDfor nothing else).[13]The 16th edition (2010, and the current issue as of 2016) does likewise.[14]TheNational GeographicStyle ManuallistsNHDamong only 8 specialized dictionaries, out of 22 total sources, on which it is based. That manual is thehouse styleof NGS publications, and has been available online for public browsing since 1995.[15]TheNGSMdoes not specify what, in particular, it drew from theNHDor any other source.

Aside from these guides and theEncyclopedia 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,cyberpunksubculture, computer jargon and online style, and the rise of the Internet as a public medium, in works as diverse as the 20th edition ofA Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philologyedited by José Ángel García Landa (2015);Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Ageby Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon ofWiredmagazine (1999);Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Ideaby David Livingstone (2015); Mark Dery'sFlame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture(1994) andEscape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century(2007);Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do-it-yourself Guide to the FuturebyGareth Branwynand Peter Sugarman (1991); and numerous others.

Timemagazine usedThe 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.NHDwas cited by name on the front page ofThe Wall Street Journal.[when?]Upon the release of the second edition,Newsweekused it as a primary source, and quoted entries in a sidebar, for a major article on the Internet and its history.[when?]TheMTVshowThis Week in Rockused excerpts from the Jargon File in its "CyberStuff" segments.Computing Reviewsused one of the Jargon File's definitions on its December 1991 cover.

On October 23, 2003,The New Hacker's Dictionarywas used in a legal case.SCO Groupcited the 1996 edition definition of "FUD" (fear, uncertainty and doubt), which dwelt on questionableIBMbusiness practices, in a legal filing in the civil lawsuitSCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.[16](In response, Raymond added SCO to the entry in a revised copy of theJargon File,feeling that SCO's own practices deserved similar criticism.[17])

Defense of the termhacker

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The book is particularly noted for helping (or at least trying) to preserve the distinction between ahacker(a consummate programmer) and acracker(acomputer criminal); even though not reviewing the book in detail, both theLondon Review of Books[18]andMIT Technology Review[19]remarked on it in this regard. In a substantial entry on the work, theEncyclopedia of New Mediaby Steve Jones (2002) observed that this defense of the termhackerwas a motivating factor for both Steele's and Raymond's print editions:[20]

The Hacker's DictionaryandThe New Hacker's Dictionarysought to celebrate hacker culture, provide a repository of hacking history for younger and future hackers, and perhaps most importantly, to represent hacker culture in a positive light to the general public. In the early 1990s in particular, many news stories emerged portraying hackers as law-breakers with no respect for the personal privacy or property of others. Raymond wanted to show some of the positive values of hacker culture, particularly the hacker sense of humor. Because love of humorous wordplay is a strong element of hacker culture, a slang dictionary works quite well for such purposes.

Reviews and reactions

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PC Magazinein 1984, stated thatThe Hacker's Dictionarywas superior to most other computer-humor books, and noted its authenticity to "hard-core programmers' conversations", especially slang from MIT and Stanford.[21]Reviews quoted by the publisher include:William SafireofThe New York Timesreferring to the Raymond-1991NHDas a "sprightly lexicon" and recommending it as a nerdy gift that holiday season[22](this reappeared in his "On Language" column again in mid-October 1992);Hugh KennerinBytesuggesting that it was so engaging that one's reading of it should be "severely timed if you hope to get any work done";[23]andMondo 2000describing 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".[24]Positive reviews were also published in academic as well as computer-industry publications, includingIEEE Spectrum,New Scientist,PC Magazine,PC World,Science,and (repeatedly)Wired.

US game designerSteve Jackson,writing forBoing Boingmagazine in its pre-blog, print days, describedNHD'sessay "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",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:[25]

[W]here else will you find, for instance, that one attoparsec per microfortnight is approximately equal to one inch per second? Or an example of the canonical use ofcanonical?Or a definition like "A cuspy but bogus raving story aboutNrandom broken people "?

The third print edition garnered additional coverage, in the usual places likeWired(August 1996), and even in mainstream venues, includingPeoplemagazine (October 21, 1996).[12]

References

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  1. ^"TMRC".The Jargon File.
  2. ^"Dictionary of the TMRC Language".Archived fromthe originalon 2018-01-02.Retrieved2017-10-05.
  3. ^Levy, Steven(May 2010) [Originally published in 1984 by Doubleday]. Hendrickson, Mike (ed.).Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution; 25th Anniversary Edition.Sebastopol, California:O'Reilly Media, Inc.ISBN978-1-449-38839-3.pp. 446–447:The [MIT] AI lab became a virtual battleground between two sides, and the two firms, especially Symbolics, hired away many of the lab's remaining hackers.
  4. ^Eric S. Raymond (ESR)(ed.)."[Jargon File] Revision History".Archivedfrom the original on 2024-07-29.Retrieved2024-08-19.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 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.
  5. ^Eric S. Raymond (ESR)(ed.)."[Jargon File] Revision History".Archivedfrom the original on 2024-07-29.Retrieved2024-08-19.In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the [Jargon] File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at Digital Equipment Corporation. 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.
  6. ^"THIS IS THE JARGON FILE, VERSION 2.6.2, 14 FEB 1991".
  7. ^"IBM Jargon and General Computing Dictionary Tenth Edition"(PDF).IBMJARG.May 1990.Archived(PDF)from the original on 2024-05-20.Retrieved2024-06-04.
  8. ^Raymond, Eric."Updating JARGON.TXT Is Not Bogus: An Apologia".Retrieved2007-01-26.
  9. ^"Need To Know 2003-06-06".6 June 2003.Retrieved2007-01-25.
  10. ^Raymond, Eric S. (29 December 2003)."You Too, Can Add an Entry!".Jargon File.Retrieved28 January2015.
  11. ^Raymond, Eric S. (2002-01-05). Tulsyan, Y. (ed.)."The Jargon File".cosman246.5.0.1. Archived fromthe originalon 2013-08-27.Retrieved2015-09-08.
  12. ^abRaymond, Eric S.(October 27, 2003)."The Book on the File".Jargon File Resources.RetrievedSeptember 23,2015.
  13. ^"Closing Quotation Marks in Relation to Other Punctuation: 6.8. Period and commas".The Chicago Manual of Style(15th ed.). U. of Chicago Pr. August 2003. p.242.ISBN978-0-321115-83-6.For related matters in computer writing, see Eric S. Raymond, 'Hacker Writing Style,' inThe New Hacker's Dictionary(bibliog. 5).
  14. ^"Computer Terms: 7.75. Distinguishing words to be typed and other elements".The Chicago Manual of Style(16th ed.). U. of Chicago Pr. August 2010. pp. 371–372 (7.75).ISBN978-0-226104-20-1.RetrievedSeptember 22,2015.Same quotation as in the 15th ed.
  15. ^Brindley, David; Style Committee, eds. (2014)."Sources".National Geographic Style Manual.Washington, DC:National Geographic Society.Archived fromthe originalon September 22, 2015.RetrievedSeptember 22,2015.As of 2016,it was last updated in 2014
  16. ^Raymond, Eric S. (October 1, 2004)."The Jargon File, version 4.4.8 [sic]".CatB.org.RetrievedJanuary 5,2016.On 23 October 2003, the Jargon File achieved the dubious honor of being cited in the SCO-vs.-IBM lawsuit. See the FUD entry for details.The correct version number is actually 4.4.7, as given in the rest of the documents there.
  17. ^Raymond, Eric S., ed. (December 29, 2003)."FUD".The Jargon File.4.4.7.
  18. ^Stewart, Ian (4 November 1993)."Oops".London Review of Books.15(21): 38–39.Retrieved18 October2016.
  19. ^Garfinkel, Simson."Hack License".Retrieved18 October2016.
  20. ^Jones, Steve (December 2002).Encyclopedia of New Media: An Essential Reference to Communication and Technology.SAGE Publications.p.345.ISBN978-1-452265-28-5.RetrievedSeptember 23,2015.Hacker's Dictionary Mondo 2000 -amazon.
  21. ^Langdell, James (April 3, 1984)."Hacker Spoken Here".PC Magazine.p. 39.RetrievedOctober 24,2013.
  22. ^Safire, William(December 8, 1991)."On Language".The New York Times.Section 6, p. 26.Retrieved17 February2021.
  23. ^Kenner, Hugh (January 1992)."Dead Chickens A-Wavin'".Print Queue.Byte.Vol. 17, no. 1. p. 404.
  24. ^The New Hacker's Dictionary,Third Edition.Cambridge, MA:Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press.2015.ISBN9780262181457.RetrievedSeptember 22,2015.
  25. ^Jackson, Steve(1991)."The New Hacker's Dictionary: Book review".Steve Jackson Games.RetrievedSeptember 22,2015.Originally published inBoing Boingmagazine, Vol. 1, No. 10.

Further reading

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