The gon File, 4.0.0 | Page 6

or greater-than signs).
Typographers in the {Real World} use angle brackets which are either
taller and slimmer (the ISO `Bra' and `Ket' characters), or significantly
smaller (single or double guillemets) than the less-than and greater-than
signs. See {broket}, {{ASCII}}.

:angry fruit salad: /n./ A bad visual-interface design that uses too many
colors. (This term derives, of course, from the bizarre day-glo colors
found in canned fruit salad.) Too often one sees similar effects from
interface designers using color window systems such as {X}; there is a
tendency to create displays that are flashy and attention-getting but
uncomfortable for long-term use.
:annoybot: /*-noy-bot/ /n./ [IRC] See {robot}.
:ANSI: /an'see/ 1. /n./ [techspeak] The American National Standards
Institute. ANSI, along with the International Organization for Standards
(ISO), standardized the C programming language (see {K&R},
{Classic C}), and promulgates many other important software
standards. 2. /n./ [techspeak] A terminal may be said to be `ANSI' if it
meets the ANSI X.364 standard for terminal control. Unfortunately,
this standard was both over-complicated and too permissive. It has
been retired and replaced by the ECMA-48 standard, which shares both
flaws. 3. /n./ [BBS jargon] The set of screen-painting codes that most
MS-DOS and Amiga computers accept. This comes from the
ANSI.SYS device driver that must be loaded on an MS-DOS computer
to view such codes. Unfortunately, neither DOS ANSI nor the BBS
ANSIs derived from it exactly match the ANSI X.364 terminal
standard. For example, the ESC-[1m code turns on the bold highlight
on large machines, but in IBM PC/MS-DOS ANSI, it turns on `intense'
(bright) colors. Also, in BBS-land, the term `ANSI' is often used to
imply that a particular computer uses or can emulate the IBM high-half
character set from MS-DOS. Particular use depends on context.
Occasionally, the vanilla ASCII character set is used with the color
codes, but on BBSs, ANSI and `IBM characters' tend to go together.
:AOS: 1. /aws/ (East Coast), /ay'os/ (West Coast) /vt. obs./ To increase
the amount of something. "AOS the campfire." [based on a PDP-10
increment instruction] Usage: considered silly, and now obsolete. Now
largely supplanted by {bump}. See {SOS}. 2. /n./ A
{{Multics}}-derived OS supported at one time by Data General. This
was pronounced /A-O-S/ or /A-os/. A spoof of the standard AOS
system administrator's manual ("How to Load and Generate your AOS
System") was created, issued a part number, and circulated as
photocopy folklore; it was called "How to Goad and Levitate your
CHAOS System". 3. /n./ Algebraic Operating System, in reference to

those calculators which use infix instead of postfix (reverse Polish)
notation. 4. A {BSD}-like operating system for the IBM RT.
Historical note: AOS in sense 1 was the name of a {PDP-10}
instruction that took any memory location in the computer and added 1
to it; AOS meant `Add One and do not Skip'. Why, you may ask, does
the `S' stand for `do not Skip' rather than for `Skip'? Ah, here was a
beloved piece of PDP-10 folklore. There were eight such instructions:
AOSE added 1 and then skipped the next instruction if the result was
Equal to zero; AOSG added 1 and then skipped if the result was
Greater than 0; AOSN added 1 and then skipped if the result was Not 0;
AOSA added 1 and then skipped Always; and so on. Just plain AOS
didn't say when to skip, so it never skipped.
For similar reasons, AOJ meant `Add One and do not Jump'. Even
more bizarre, SKIP meant `do not SKIP'! If you wanted to skip the next
instruction, you had to say `SKIPA'. Likewise, JUMP meant `do not
JUMP'; the unconditional form was JUMPA. However, hackers never
did this. By some quirk of the 10's design, the {JRST} (Jump and
ReSTore flag with no flag specified) was actually faster and so was
invariably used. Such were the perverse mysteries of assembler
programming.
:app: /ap/ /n./ Short for `application program', as opposed to a systems
program. Apps are what systems vendors are forever chasing
developers to create for their environments so they can sell more boxes.
Hackers tend not to think of the things they themselves run as apps;
thus, in hacker parlance the term excludes compilers, program editors,
games, and messaging systems, though a user would consider all those
to be apps. (Broadly, an app is often a self-contained environment for
performing some well-defined task such as `word processing'; hackers
tend to prefer more general-purpose tools.) See {killer app}; oppose
{tool}, {operating system}.
:arena: [Unix] /n./ The area of memory attached to a process by `brk(2)'
and `sbrk(2)' and used by `malloc(3)' as dynamic storage. So named
from a `malloc: corrupt arena' message emitted when some early
versions detected an impossible value in the free block list. See
{overrun screw}, {aliasing bug}, {memory leak}, {memory smash},
{smash