Ourist Information N. Information In An On-line Display That Is Not Immediately Useful, But Contributes To A Viewer's Gestalt Of What's Going On With The Software Or Hardware Behind It.

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tourist information n.

Information in an on-line display
that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's
gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it.
Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly
on what the user is looking for at any given time. The `bytes
free' information at the bottom of an MS-DOS dir display is
tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information
in a Unix ps(1) display.

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