Related:

• infant mortality n. It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large
  his term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile)....
• bathtub curve: n. Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time
  initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it `tires out'....
• bathtub curve n. Common term for the curve (resembling an end-to-end section of one of those claw-footed antique bathtubs) that describes the expected failure rate of electronics with time
  initially high, dropping to near 0 for most of the system's lifetime, then rising again as it `tires out'....
• burn-in period: n. 1. A factory test designed to catch systems with {marginal} components before they get out the doo
  he theory is that burn-in will protect customers by outwaiting the steepest part of the {bathtub curve} (see {infant mortality})....
• burn-in period n. 1. A factory test designed to catch systems with marginal components before they get out the doo
  the theory is that burn-in will protect customers by outwaiting the steepest part of the bathtub curve (see infant mortali using a computer is so intensely involved in his project that he forgets basic needs such as food, drink, sleep, etc....
• MS-DOS:: /M-S-dos/ [MicroSoft Disk Operating System] n.
  A {clone} of {{CP/M}} for the 8088 crufted together in 6 weeks by hacker Tim Paterson, who is said to have regretted it ever since....
• bug n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp.
  one that causes it to malfunction. Antonym of feature....
• mainframe: n. Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or `main frame' of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine.
  After the emergence of smaller `minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes....
• Internet n. The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET, a U.
  S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth...