|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Infocom n. A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that commercialized the MDL parser technology used for Zork to produce a line of text adventure games that remain favorites among hackers. Infocom's games were intelligent, funny, witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical, and most thoroughly hackish in spirit. The physical game packages from Infocom are now prized collector's items. The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written in a kind of P-code and distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and freeware emulators for that interpreter have been written to permit the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally graced. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
initgame /in-it' gaym/ n. [IRC] An IRC version of the venerable trivia game "20 questions", in which one user changes his nick to the initials of a famous person or other named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no questions, with the one to guess the person getting to be "it" next. As a courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a 4-letter hint of the form sex, nationality, life-status, reality-status. For example, MAAR means ''Male, American, Alive, Real" (as opposed to "fictional"). Initgame can be surprisingly addictive. See also hing. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
[1996 update: a recognizable version of the initgame has become a staple of some radio talk shows in the U.S. We had it first! ESR] |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
insanely great adj. [Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD Unix people via Bill Joy] Something so incredibly elegant that it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of hacker-natures. |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
INTERCAL /in't r-kal/ n. [said by the authors to stand for Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym] A computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written language, being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL Reference Manual will make the style of the language clear: |
|
|
|
 |
|
|
|
|
It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is: |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
DO :1 - #0$#256 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made |
|
|
|
|
|