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punched card code in the early 1960s and promulgated it as a customer-control tactic (see connector conspiracy), spurning the already established ASCII standard. Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own description of the EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them is still internally classified top-secret, burn-before-reading. Hackers blanch at the very name of EBCDIC and consider it a manifestation of purest evil. See also fear and loathing. |
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echo [FidoNet] n. A topic group on FidoNet's echomail system. Compare newsgroup. |
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eighty-column mind n. [IBM] The sort said to be possessed by persons for whom the transition from punched card to tape was traumatic (nobody has dared tell them about disks yet). It is said that these people, including (according to an old joke) the founder of IBM, will be buried 'face down, 9-edge first' (the 9-edge being the bottom of the card). This directive is inscribed on IBM's 1402 and 1622 card readers and is referenced in a famous bit of doggerel called "The Last Bug", the climatic lines of which are as follows: |
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He died at the console
Of hunger and thirst.
Next day he was buried,
Face down, 9-edge first. |
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The eighty-column mind is thought by most hackers to dominate IBM's customer base and its thinking. See IBM, fear and loathing, card walloper. |
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El Camino Bignum /el'  -mee'noh big'nuhm/ n. The road mundanely called El Camino Real, running along San Francisco peninsula. It originally extended all the way down to Mexico City; many portions of the old road are still intact. Navigation on the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south in many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers. |
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The Spanish word 'real' (which has two syllables: /ray-ahl'/) means 'royal'; El Camino Real is 'the royal road'. In the FORTRAN language, a 'real' quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a 'double precision' quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar 'real' types). |
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When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on 'real', he started calling it |
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