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Swedish). This may be the most remarkable hacker project in history an entire clone of Unix for 386, 486 and Pentium micros, distributed for free with sources over the net (ports to Alpha and Sparc-based machines are underway). This is what GNU aimed to be, but the Free Software Foundation has not (as of early 1996) produced the kernel to go with its Unix toolset (which Linux uses). Other, similar efforts like FreeBSD and NetBSD have been much less successful. The secret of Linux's success seems to be that Linus worked much harder early on to keep the development process open and recruit other hackers, creating a snowball effect. |
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lion food n. [IBM] Middle management or HQ staff (or, by extension, administrative drones in general). From an old joke about two lions who, escaping from the zoo, split up to increase their chances but agree to meet after 2 months. When they finally meet, one is skinny and the other overweight. The thin one says: "How did you manage? I ate a human just once and they turned out a small army to chase me guns, nets, it was terrible. Since then I've been reduced to eating mice, insects, even grass." The fat one replies: "Well, I hid near an IBM office and ate a manager a day. And nobody even noticed!" |
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Lions Book n. Source Code and Commentary on Unix level 6, by John Lions. The two parts of this book contained (1) the entire source listing of the Unix Version 6 kernel, and (2), a commentary on the source discussing the algorithms. These were circulated internally at the University of New South Wales beginning 197677, and were, for years after, the only detailed kernel documentation available to anyone outside Bell Labs. Because Western Electric wished to maintain trade secret status on the kernel, the Lions Book was only supposed to be distributed to affiliates of source licensees. In spite of this, it soon spread by samizdat to a good many of the early Unix hackers. |
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LISP n. [from 'LISt Processing language', but mythically from 'Lots of Irritating Superfluous Parentheses'] AI's mother tongue, a language based on the ideas of (a) variable-length lists and trees as fundamental data types, and (b) the interpretation of code as data and vice-versa. Invented by John McCarthy at MIT in the late 1950s, it is actually older than any other HLL still in use except FORTRAN. Accordingly, it has undergone considerable adaptive radiation over the years; modern variants are quite different in detail from the original LISP 1.5. The dominant HLL among hackers un- |
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