Related:

• videotex n. obs. An electronic service offering people the privilege of paying to read the weather on their television screens instead of having somebody read it to them for free while they brush their teeth.
  The idea bombed everywhere it wasn't government-subsidized, because by the time videotex was practical the installed base of personal computers could hook up to timesharing services and do the things for which videotex might have been worthwhile better and cheaper....
• vannevar: /van'*-var/ n. A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept, esp.
  one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the rule....
• gorilla arm: n. The side-effect that destroyed touch-screens as a mainstream input technology despite a promising start in the early 1980s.
  It seems the designers of all those {spiffy} touch-menu systems failed to notice that humans aren't designed to hold their arms in front of their faces making small motions....
• vannevar /van'*-var/ n. A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept, esp.
  one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the rule....
• wheel bit: n. A privilege bit that allows the possessor to perform some restricted operation on a timesharing system
  uch as read or write any file on the system regardless of protections, change or look at any address in the running monitor, crash or reload the system, and kill or create jobs and user accounts....
• Multics:: /muhl'tiks/ n. [from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An early (late 1960s) timesharing operating system co-designed by a consortium including MIT
  GE, and Bell Laboratories. Multics was very innovative for its time --- among other things, it introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files....
• moby /moh'bee/ [MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago.
  Derived from Melville's "Moby Dick" (some say from `Moby Pickle')....
• glitch: /glich/ [from German `glitschen' to slip, via Yiddish `glitshen', to slide or skid] 1.
  . A sudden interruption in electric service, sanity, continuity, or program function....
• creeping featurism: /kree'ping fee'chr-izm/ n. 1. Describes a systematic tendency to load more {chrome} and {feature}s onto systems at the expense of whatever elegance they may have possessed when originally designed.
  See also {feeping creaturism}. "You know, the main problem with {BSD} UNIX has always been creeping featurism....