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extremely common on Usenet. See Black Screen of Death; compare X, sun-stools. |
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microtape /m 'kroh-tayp/ n. Occasionally used to mean a DECtape, as opposed to a macrotape. A DECtape is a small reel, about 4 inches in diameter, of magnetic tape about an inch wide. Unlike those for today's macrotapes, microtape drivers allowed random access to the data, and therefore could be used to support file systems and even for swapping (this was generally done purely for hack value, as they were far too slow for practical use). In their heyday they were used in pretty much the same ways one would now use a floppy disk: as a small, portable way to save and transport files and programs. Apparently the term microtape was actually the official term used within DEC for these tapes until someone coined the word 'DECtape', which, of course, sounded sexier to the marketroids; another version of the story holds that someone discovered a conflict with another company's 'microtape' trademark. |
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middle-endian adj. Not big-endian or little-endian. Used of perverse byte orders such as 3-4-1-2 or 2-1-4-3, occasionally found in the packed-decimal formats of minicomputer manufacturers who shall remain nameless. See NUXI problem. Non-US hackers use this term to describe the American mm/dd/yy style of writing dates. (Europeans write dd/mm/yy.) |
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milliLampson /mil' -lamp`sn/ n. A unit of talking speed, abbreviated mL. Most people run about 200 milliLampsons. The eponymous Butler Lampson (a CS theorist and systems implementor highly regarded among hackers) goes at 1000. A few people speak faster. This unit is sometimes used to compare the (sometimes widely disparate) rates at which people can generate ideas and actually emit them in speech. For example, noted computer architect C. Gordon Bell (designer of the PDP-11) is said, with some awe, to think at about 1200 mL but only talk at about 300; he is frequently reduced to fragments of sentences as his mouth tries to keep up with his speeding brain. |
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minifloppies n. 5.25-inch vanilla floppy disks, as opposed to 3.5-inch or microfloppies and the now-obsolescent 8-inch variety. At one time, this term was a trademark of Shugart Associates for their SA-400 minifloppy drive. Nobody paid any attention. See stiffy. |
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MIPS /mips/ n. [abbreviation] 1. A measure of computing speed; formally, 'Million Instructions Per Second' (that's 106 per second, not 220!); often rendered by hackers as 'Meaningless Indication of Processor Speed' or in other |
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