The New Hacker's Dictionary

The New Hacker's Dictionary--------------------------------------------------------------------------------@clear book @set hypertext @c Use to quote net addresses & host names @alias a=i@c Declare an ordinary headword @alias hd=headword @c Declare a topic headword@alias hdt=headword @c Refer to ordinary headword @alias es=href @c Refer to topicheadword @alias et=href @c Declare reference target. No-op in this mode, as it'salways used @c with section lines that will generate a target anyway.@definfoenclose htag,, @c Declare cited reference target @alias booktag=anchor @cFor references to Scandinavian slashed-O @definfoenclose Oslash,, @c End-of-

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header @alias tl=br @clear nothtmlThe New Hacker's DictionaryThird Editioncompiled byEric S. Raymondwith foreword and cartoonsGuy L. Steele Jr.The MIT PressCambridge, MassLondon, EnglandCopyright 1993 Eric S. Raymond. All rights reserved. No part of this book may bereproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means (includingphotocopying. recording, or information storage and retrieval) without permissionin writing from the publisher.Cover art by Duane Bibby.Dedication This edition is dedicated to my father, William J. Raymond, a computingpioneer who has made me proud to be a second-generation hacker. And to all theparents everywhere who have watched, amazed, as computers took their sons anddaughters through a sea-change, into something rich and strange...Disclaimer Much of the content of this book does not reflect the opinions of theeditors or publishers. In fact, if you could get all the contributors to agree onanything, you'd be ready for the Nobel Peace Prize.ContentsConfessions of a Happy HackerGuy L. Steele Jr.I was a teen-age hacker.When I was about twelve or so, a lab secretary at MIT who knew I was `interestedin science' (it might be more accurate to say `a latent nerd' -- more on thatlater) arranged for one of the computer hackers there to give me an informal tour.I remember stumbling around racks full of circuit boards and wires, a screechingcabinet that printed a full page every six seconds, and rows of blinking lights;the computer room was crammed full of equipment with no obvious organization. Oneset of gray cabinets had some trophies and plaques sitting on it: this was the

PDP-6 computer that, running a program called MacHack, won prizes playing againsthuman players in chess tournaments. The PDP-6 also had two speakers and a stereoamplifier sitting on top of it. The hacker typed a couple of commands on akeyboard, and the PDP-6 burst into a Bach Brandenburg concerto (no. 6, as Irecall).One part of that tour stands out most clearly in my mind. I was told to sit downin front of a large, round, glass screen and was given a box that had some buttonsand a stick on the top. My hacker guide typed another command on the keyboard and,suddenly, green and purple spaceships appeared on the screen! The purple onestarted shooting little red dots at the green one, which was soon obliterated in amulticolored shower of sparkles. The green ship was mine, and the hacker hadexpertly shot it down. Years later I learned that this had been a color version ofSpace War, one of the very first video games.Remember that this was years before `Apple' and `TRS-80' had become householdwords. Back then computers were still rather mysterious, hidden away in giantcorporations and university laboratories.Playing Space War was fun, but I learned nothing of programming then. I had thetrue fascination of computers revealed to me in November, 1968, when a chumslipped me the news that our school (Boston Latin) had an IBM computer locked upin the basement. I was dubious. I had earlier narrowly avoided buying from asenior a ticket to the fourth-floor swimming pool (Boston Latin has only threestories, and no swimming pool at all), and assumed this was another scam. So ofcourse I laughed in his face.When he persisted, I checked it out. Sure enough, in a locked basement room was anIBM 1130 computer. If you want all the specs: 4096 words of memory, 16 bits perword, a 15-character-per-second Selectric (`golf ball') printer, and a card reader(model 1442) that could read 300 cards per minute. Yes, this was back in the daysof punched cards. Personal computers were completely unheard of then.Nominally the computer was for the training of juniors and seniors, but I cajoleda math teacher into lending me a computer manual and spent all of Thanksgivingvacation reading it.I was hooked.No doubt about it. I was born to be a hacker. Fortunately, I didn't let my studiessuffer (as many young hackers do), but every spare moment I thought about thecomputer. It was spellbinding. I wanted to know all about it: what it could andcouldn't do, how its programs worked, what its circuits looked like. During studyhalls, lunch, and after school, I could be found in the computer room, punchingprograms onto cards and running them through the computer.I was not the only one. Very soon there was a small community of IBM 1130 hackers.We helped to maintain the computer and we tutored our less fanatical fellowstudents in the ways of computing. What could possibly compensate us for thesechores? Free rein in the computer room.Soon after that, I developed into one of the unauthorized but tolerated `randompeople' hanging around the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. A random hackeris to a computer laboratory much as a groupie is to a rock band: not really doinguseful work, but emotionally involved and contributing to the ambience, if nothingelse. After a while, I was haunting the computer rooms at off-hours, talking topeople but more often looking for chances to run programs. Sometimes `randoms'such as I were quite helpful, operating the computers for no pay and giving advice

to college students who were having trouble. Sometimes, however, we were quite anuisance. Once I was ejected from the Artificial Intelligence Laboratory by noneother than Richard Greenblatt, the very famous hacker who had written the MacHackprogram with which the PDP-6 had won its chess trophies. He threw me out because Iwas monopolizing the one terminal that produced letter-quality copy. (I was usingthe computer as a word processor to write customized form letters to variouscomputer manufacturers, asking them to send me computer manuals.) I deserved to betossed out and gave him no argument. But when you're hooked, you're hooked, and Iwas undaunted; within a week or two I was back again.Eventually I got a part-time job as a programmer at MIT's Project MAC computerlaboratory. There I became a full-fledged member of the hacker community, andultimately an MIT graduate student.I was never a lone hacker, but one of many. Despite stories you may have readabout anti-social nerds glued permanently to display screens, totally addicted tothe computer, hackers have (human) friends too. Through timesharing (where manypeople use one computer) and networking (where many computers are connectedtogether), the computer makes possible a new form of human communication, betterthan the telephone and the postal system put together. You can send a message byelectronic mail and get a reply within two minutes, or you can just link twoterminals together and have a conversation. This sort of thing used to be a near-exclusive province of hackers, but is nowadays quite commonplace throughcommercial services such as Compuserve and GEnie.Speaking of nerds: a hacker doesn't have to be a nerd (but it helps). Moreimportant, it is certainly not true that all nerds are hackers! Too many nerds arejust nerds. But I must mention one more story from my days at MIT. When the famousNational Lampoon "Are You a Nerd?" poster first came out in the mid-1970s, asecretary at MIT bought a copy to post outside her office door so everyone at thelaboratory could enjoy the joke (which we did, immensely). As she was taping itup, I happened to be leaving for dinner, briefcase in hand. I glanced at theposter, then put on my glasses (heavy black frames -- I still wear them), hiked upmy polyester slacks an extra half-inch, and assumed The Pose (booger and all). Imatched about 80% of the itemized points: button-down shirt with loose collar, sixpens in my shirt pocket, same haircut -- too bad I had left my slide rule at home.The poor secretary turned beet-red and protested, "N-no! I didn't mean you!" Ijust chuckled and told her that the poster artist had obviously done a remarkablygood job. (Being a nerd isn't all bad -- sometimes it can turn a girl's head.Once, when I was fifteen, I was strolling across Copley Square in downtown Bostonand passed three bubblegum teenyboppers. I just barely caught one of themexclaiming to her friends, "Wow! Did you see all those pens?")Perhaps one reason for the nerd-hacker connection is that the truly dedicatedhacker does little else but eat, sleep, and hack. Hackers often work strange hoursthat put them out of synch with normal humanity. Some hackers just get up atdinnertime and go to bed after breakfast, or perhaps get up at noon and sack outat 4 A.M. (See the terms @es{phase} and @es{night mode} for more information onhackers' sleeping schedules.) Before computers were inexpensive enough to be`personal', they had to be shared, either by taking turns or by what is calledtimesharing (where the computer is programmed to take turns at split-secondspeeds). Either way, there was heavier demand for the computer during the day thanat night, because non-hacker users tended to work during the day. Hackers oftentherefore worked late into the evening or night, when the other computer usersweren't competing for cycles. It's more fun, after all, to use the computer whenit's responding at split-second speeds.Now that personal computers and individual workstations are ubiquitous, there is