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together a quick-and-dirty 'stopgap editor' to be used until a better one was written. Unfortunately, the old one was never really discarded when new ones (in particular, TECO) came along. SOS is a descendant ('Son of Stopgap') of that editor, and many PDP-10 users gained the dubious pleasure of its acquaintance. Since then other programs similar in style to SOS have been written, notably the early font editor BILOS /bye'lohs/, the Brother-In-Law Of Stopgap (the alternate expansion 'Bastard Issue, Loins of Stopgap' has been proposed). 2. /sos/ vt. To decrease; inverse of AOS, from the PDP-10 instruction set. |
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source of all good bits n. A person from whom (or a place from which) useful information may be obtained. If you need to know about a program, a guru might be the source of all good bits. The title is often applied to a particularly competent secretary. |
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space-cadet keyboard n. A now-legendary device used on MIT LISP machines, which inspired several still-current jargon terms and influenced the design of EMACS. It was equipped with no fewer than seven shift keys: four keys for bucky bits ('control', 'meta', 'hyper', and 'super') and three like regular shift keys, called 'shift', 'top', and 'front'. Many keys had three symbols on them: a letter and a symbol on the top, and a Greek letter on the front. For example, the 'L' key had an 'L' and a two-way arrow on the top, and the Greek letter lambda on the front. By pressing this key with the right hand while playing an appropriate 'chord' with the left hand on the shift keys, you could get the following results: |
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two-way arrow ⟷ (front and shift are ignored) |
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And of course each of these might also be typed with any combination of the control, meta, hyper, and super keys. On this keyboard, you could type over 8000 different characters! This allowed the user to type very complicated mathematical text, and also to have thousands of single-character commands at his disposal. Many hackers were actually willing to memorize the command meanings of that many characters if it reduced typing time (this attitude obviously shaped the interface of EMACS). Other hackers, however, thought having that many bucky bits was overkill, and objected |
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