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.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary

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