The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988) | Hacker News Reader

The Original Hacker's Dictionary (1988)

dourish.com

83 pointstosbourn24 comments

The modern version of this jargon file is maintained by esr here: http://www.catb.org/jargon/

I stumbled upon the last printed edition of this (ESR's version) at a bookstore in high school. I had dabbled with programming on and off since elementary school (back when that was unusual!), but now I was seriously getting into it.

While almost none of the terms in the book resonated with me as anything I had heard before, I strongly identified with the cultural aspects described in the book. I suddenly felt like my ways of thinking about computing, and about the world in general, were in fact not that strange, but shared by a lot of people who were into programming.

The book introduced me to many things that I went on to become more involved with; at least indirectly due to the book: learned LaTeX, Emacs, and Lisp; studied Knuth, reading carefully until I earned a check; volunteered for GNU, resulting in working directly with RMS.

As a technical resource, the book is close to useless now. But it was mostly useless when I encountered it. Maybe there's still some value left in it somewhere...

I'm more interested in what a modern jargon file would look like. (Don't even dare mention Raymonds version.) It's obvious to me that if you were to start today, it would make the most sense to start from scratch. You could probably even find them automatically with a script that searches for non-dictionary words. Any that show up often enough could be considered for entry into the new file. [0]

The main issue would be figuring out what counts as a hacker community, and what communities to grab words from.

[0]: Of course, this wouldn't catch words that have been re-purposed from their standard dictionary usage.

The peculiar nouns "-osity" thing was not originally a hacker thing. Discounting other unnecessary word endings being introduced to the public at large by the Fonz in Happy Days when he continually added the "-omundo" to the end of things, the "-osity" type of adjective -> noun mutilation may have been picked up from surfer/Cali talk, introduced into the mainstream by movies such as Fast Times at Ridgemont High (Spicoli) and later by Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Pauli Shore (on MTV and then in really bad movies).

By the same token terms like "barf" and "bogus" were just popular terms in the very early 80s because of all of the California influence.

Of all of these, the ones that look most familiar for the time that really have little to do with popular culture of the time were: BITBLT (just because I remember seeing it and thought "what the hell"), crash (mid to later 80s when used the first Macs), and down (which wasn't really used much until the 90s, because when you couldn't connect to a BBS or Compuserve, etc. - which almost was never the case to my memory - you just couldn't connect, and prior to modems there was no connection- just cassette tapes and eventually floppies - and no I did not have a card machine :) and I didn't see a minicomputer with a huge-ass 8 inch floppy until my first network admin job in the 90s).

Basically, the majority of this is "bogus". ;)

"crash" and "down" go back further than that. I'm looking at my copy of HoToGAMIT ("How to Get Around MIT") from 1972. In the Appendix there is a Lexicon of MIT Words, Phrases, Acronyms. The entry for "crash": "(1) To sleep in a place where one has not paid rent, such as a friend's apartment. (2) To join a party without being invited. (3) To cease functioning, as in a computer system."

And the entry for "down": "(1) Feeling depressed. Said of a person. (2) Non-working, gronked. Said of a machine."

The Lexicon occupies pages 222-232, so it isn't very long, and most of the entries are MIT-specific (such as acronyms for organizations). But there are some entries (like the one for "hack") which occur in the Hacker's Dictionary.

HoToGAMIT was published by the Tech Community Association, and was distributed to incoming freshmen.

Nice! Was just talking about my own personal experience. I'm sure that people that delt with mainframes talked about them being "down" when terminals weren't working. In the mid 90s I remember talking with my parents and them not knowing what a server was, but by ~2001 my dad at least probably knew about a website being "down".

I see a lot of the person who got me into programming in this original copy. The SNR of this document is favorable when compared to that of the currently maintained version, to my sensitibilities.

Always interested to see what domains are available in any old dictionary. I didn't see anything that I cared for, have at it:

chinenual.com

connectorconspiracy.com

doprotocol.com

fenceposterror.com

glasstty.com

hardwarily.com

linestarve.com

munchingsquares.com

pessimizingcompiler.com

realworldthe.com

rightthingthe.com

shiftleftrightlogical.com

smokingclover.com

softwarerot.com

waterbottlesoccer.com

yu-shiangwholefish.com

Meh. A record that doesn't evolve is dead; ESR gets a lot of criticism for his stewardship but I'll take a Jargon File that updates over one that doesn't any day

I disagree. Yes, this record is out of date and that limits its utility today as a decoding tool. However, its historical value is high because it is out of date.

I found it interesting to go through it and look at which usages had survived and which hadn't.

Exactly. Also, it is or should be obvious that its an historical artefact, and there for has important value, and not seen as something useful today. Although, it could be.

The site maintainer for the 1988 verion, Paul Dourish, gives a counterargument in his preface ('...Unfortunately, in the process, [Raymond] essentially destroyed what held it together, in various ways: first, by changing its emphasis from Lisp-based to UNIX-based (blithely ignoring the distinctly anti-UNIX aspects of the LISP culture celebrated in the original); second, by watering down what was otherwise the fairly undiluted record of a single cultural group through this kind of mixing; and third, by adding in all sorts of terms which are "jargon" only in the sense that they're technical...'). At the very least, the 1988 version is livelier.

For more amusing grumpiness, see The Unix Hater's Handbook:

http://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf

I'm torn, because while ESR did add a lot of emphasis on Unix/C culture (which is very important in hacker history), the last five or ten years he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.

...he's really taken it off the rails, adding terms from war blogging and other sources that really have nothing to do with hacking at all.

And terms of his own devising that haven't caught on. That seems like the cardinal sin of a lexicographer.

Here is the archive for the Unix Hater's mailing list: http://www.mindspring.com/~blackhart/

Download it and, in the first half of the (long) archive, you will find the users raising holy hell at Eric S. Raymond for what he was doing to the Jargon File at the time.

Raymond had changed the anti-Unix jokes, substituting MS-DOS for Unix in each case. The users of the mailing list would have been happy with Raymond coming up with original anti-Microsoft jokes, but were justifiably angry at Raymond for re-writing history.

I don't have quite as bad an opinion of Eric S. Raymond as do some people around here. In particular, his idea of Kafka trapping is insightful ( http://0-esr.ibiblio.org.librus.hccs.edu/?p=2122 ). I do note the irony of a libertarian who gripes at the distortions of the mainstream media having done a bit of media distortion of his own.

Oh I dunno, Rumours is still a great record.

There are people who haven't heard of the Jargon File?

That depends.

Do you mean this version of the Jargon File or the one on ESR's website?

As the intro points out, there's a difference.

Yes!

A part of me has this initial reaction as well: "Who has not heard of the Jargon File?!" But then I remember that there was a time once (long ago now) when I hadn't heard of it either -- and I remember my own delight in discovering and inhaling it. At the risk of sounding patronizing, discovering the Jargon File is practically a rite of passage for nerdy youth. So to anyone reading the Jargon File for the first time: enjoy it, and (as long as you're learning about our shared history and culture) take a moment to also read the Story of Mel, the Last Real Programmer.[1]

[1] http://www.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html

Same here - I discovered it in 1991 by buying the paperback edition from MIT Press. I still thumb through it from time to time (I'd say it's good bathroom reading but I don't want my wife to flag it).

It's a wonderful pre-Internet artifact that I love having. I really don't care about updates or active-vs-printed stuff.

To answer this and similar questions: http://xkcd.com/1053/ :).

I particularly enjoyed the entry on Tail Recursion.

I imagine a modern version would have an entry for Tail-Call Optimization that used history.replaceState().

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