:funny money: n. 1. Notional `dollar' units of computing time
and/or storage handed to students at the beginning of a computer
course; also called `play money' or `purple money' (in implicit
opposition to real or `green' money). In New Zealand and Germany
the odd usage `paper money' has been recorded; in Germany, the
particularly amusing synonym `transfer ruble' commemmorates the
funny money used for trade between COMECON countries back when the
Soviet Bloc still existed. When your funny money ran out, your
account froze and you needed to go to a professor to get more.
Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing cycles has made this
less common. The amounts allocated were almost invariably too
small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by with minimum
work. In extreme cases, the practice led to small-scale black
markets in bootlegged computer accounts. 2. By extension, phantom
money or quantity tickets of any kind used as a resource-allocation
hack within a system. Antonym: `real money'.
-- The AI Hackers Dictionary
