Related:

• go flatline v. [from cyberpunk SF, refers to flattening of EEG traces upon brain-death] (also adjectival `flatlined').
  1. To die, terminate, or fail, esp. irreversibly....
• cience-fiction fandom:: n. Another voluntary subculture having a very heavy overlap with hackerdom
  most hackers read SF and/or fantasy fiction avidly, and many go to `cons' (SF conventions) or are involved in fandom-connected activities such as the Society for Creative Anachronism....
• down: 1. adj. Not operating. "The up escalator is down" is considered a humorous thing to say
  and "The elevator is down" always means "The elevator isn't working" and never refers to what floor the elevator is on....
• ITS /I-T-S/ n. 1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though highly idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab.
  Much AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been `an ITS hacker' qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort....
• 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....
• down 1. adj. Not operating. "The up escalator is down" is considered a humorous thing to say (unless of course you were expecting to use it)
  and "The elevator is down" always means "The elevator isn't working" and never refers to what floor the elevator is on....
• Helen Keller mode: n. 1. State of a hardware or software system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.
  e., accepting no input and generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other excursion into {deep space}....
• 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....
• chase pointers: 1. vi. To go through multiple levels of indirection, as in traversing a linked list or graph structure.
  Used esp. by programmers in C, where explicit pointers are a very common data type....