Jargon File

Jargon File

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elephantine adj. Used of programs or systems that are both conspicuous hogs (owing perhaps to poor design founded on brute force and ignorance) and exceedingly hairy monstrosity.
See...
elevator controller n. An archetypal dumb embedded-systems application, like toaster (which superseded it).
During one period (1983-84) in the deliberations of ANSI X3J11 (the C standardi...
elite adj. Clueful. Plugged-in. One of the cognoscenti.
Also used as a general positive adjective. This term is not actually hacker slang in the strict sense...
ELIZA effect /*-li:'z* *-fekt'/ n. [AI community] The tendency of humans to attach associations to terms from prior experience.
For example, there is nothing magic about the symbol + tha...
elvish n. 1. The Tengwar of Feanor, a table of letterforms resembling the beautiful Celtic half-uncial hand of the "Book of Kells".
Invented and described by J. R. R. Tolkien in "The Lord...
EMACS /ee'maks/ n. [from Editing MACroS] The ne plus ultra of hacker editors, a programmable text editor with an entire LISP system inside it.
It was originally written by Richard Stallma...
email /ee'mayl/ (also written `e-mail' and `E-mail') 1.
. Electronic mail automatically passed through computer networks and/or via modems over common-carrier lines....
emoticon /ee-moh'ti-kon/ n. [common] An ASCII glyph used to indicate an emotional state in email or news.
Although originally intended mostly as jokes, emoticons (or some other explicit h...
EMP /E-M-P/ See spam.
empire n. Any of a family of military simulations derived from a game written by Peter Langston many years ago.
A number of multi-player variants of varying degrees of sophistication exist, ...

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