The Hackers Dictionary | Page 6

Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL
computer, {FTP}ed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to
`AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON.
The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the `>' means numbered with a version
number) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr.
Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of correcting the term `jargon' to
`slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as the Jargon File.
Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods
became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL
and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations).
The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was prominent
among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages.
In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published
in Russell Brand's `CoEvolution Quarterly' (pages 26-35) with illustrations by Phil
Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to
have been the File's first paper publication.
A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited
by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as `The Hacker's Dictionary' (Harper & Row
CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods,
and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did Richard M. Stallman and Geoff
Goodfellow. This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as `Steele-1983' and
those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors.
Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped growing and
changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to facilitate
the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the `temporary' freeze to
become permanent.
The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the resulting
administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software instead of
homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated LISP
Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the
AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts
and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central
MIT-AI computer became a {TWENEX} system rather than a host for the AI hackers'
beloved {ITS}.

The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL
computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until 1991. Stanford
became a major {TWENEX} site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20
systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the interesting software work was being done on
the emerging BSD UNIX standard.
In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a
death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at Digital Equipment Corporation.
The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly
a monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at
the time just how wide its influence was to be.
By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up around it
never quite died out. The book, and softcopies obtained off the ARPANET, circulated
even in cultures far removed from MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong and
continuing influence on hackish language and humor. Even as the advent of the
microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File
(and related materials such as the AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of
sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the
Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously
--- but the Jargon File, having passed from living document to icon, remained essentially
untouched for seven years.
This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of jargon-1 (a few obsolete
PDP-10-related entries were dropped after careful consultation with the editors of
Steele-1983). It merges in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing
material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now also obsolete.
This new version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim is to cover not just AI
or PDP-10 hacker culture but all the technical computing cultures wherein the true
hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries now derive from {USENET}
and represent jargon now current in the C and UNIX communities, but special efforts
have been made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM