Related:

• ilo n. The FIFO input-character buffer in an RS-232 line card.
  So called from DEC terminology used on DH and DZ line cards for the VAX and PDP-11, presumably because it was a storage space for fungible stuff that went in at the top and came out at the bottom....
• buffer overflow: n. What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding area) than it can handle.
  This may be due to a mismatch in the processing rates of the producing and consuming processes (see {overrun} and {firehose syndrome}), or because the buffer is simply too small to hold all the data that must accumulate before a piece of it can be processed....
• line starve: [MIT] 1. vi. To feed paper through a printer the wrong way by one line (most printers can't do this).
  On a display terminal, to move the cursor up to the previous line of the screen....
• bit bang: n. Transmission of data on a serial line, when accomplished by rapidly tweaking a single output bit, in software, at the appropriate times.
  The technique is a simple loop with eight OUT and SHIFT instruction pairs for each byte....
• buffer overflow n. What happens when you try to stuff more data into a buffer (holding area) than it can handle.
  This problem is commonly exploited by crackers to get arbitrary commands executed by a program running with root permissions....
• plat: n. 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk (`*') character (ASCII 0101010).
  This may derive from the `squashed-bug' appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers....
• line 666: [from Christian eschatological myth] n. The notional line of source at which a program fails for obscure reaso
  implying either that *somebody* is out to get it (when you are the programmer), or that it richly deserves to be so gotten (when you are not)....
• PDP-10: [Programmed Data Processor model 10] n. The machine that made timesharing real.
  It looms large in hacker folklore because of its adoption in the mid-1970s by many university computing facilities and research labs, including the MIT AI Lab, Stanford, and CMU....
• overrun: n. 1. [techspeak] Term for a frequent consequence of data arriving faster than it can be consumed, esp.
  in serial line communications. For example, at 9600 baud there is almost exactly one character per millisecond, so if a {silo} can hold only two characters and the machine takes longer than 2 msec to get to service the interrupt, at least one character will be lost....