The New Hackers Dictionary | Page 4

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 Stewart Brand's "CoEvolution Quarterly" (issue
29, 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
[45]TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved
[46]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 [47]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 hacker 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 [48]Some 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 [49]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 PC
programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM
mainframe world.
Eric S. Raymond [50] maintains the new File
with assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. [51]; these are
the persons primarily reflected in the File's editorial `we', though we
take pleasure in acknowledging the special contribution of the other
coauthors of Steele-1983. Please email all additions, corrections, and
correspondence relating to the Jargon File to [52][email protected].
(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file but are not
guaranteed to be correct later than the revision date on the first line.
Don't email us if an attempt to reach your idol bounces -- we have no
magic way of checking addresses or looking up people.)
The 2.9.6 version became the