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Dick Sites from DEC as saying "I'd rather write programs to write programs than write programs". |
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topic drift n. Term used on GEnie, Usenet and other electronic fora to describe the tendency of a thread to drift away from the original subject of discussion (and thus, from the Subject header of the originating message), or the results of that tendency. Often used in gentle reminders that the discussion has strayed off any useful track. "I think we started with a question about Niven's last book, but we've ended up discussing the sexual habits of the common marmoset. Now that's topic drift!" |
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topic group n. Syn. forum. |
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TOPS-10 /tops-ten/ n. DEC's proprietary OS for the fabled PDP-10 machines, long a favorite of hackers but now effectively extinct. A fountain of hacker folklore; see Appendix A. See also ITS, TOPS-20, TWENEX, VMS, operating system. TOPS-10 was sometimes called BOTS-10 (from 'bottoms-ten') as a comment on the inappropriateness of describing it as the top of anything. |
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TOPS-20 /tops-twen'tee/ n. See TWENEX. |
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tourist n. [ITS] A guest on the system, especially one who generally logs in over a network from a remote location for comm mode, email, games, and other trivial purposes. One step below luser. Hackers often spell this turist, perhaps by some sort of tenuous analogy with luser (this also expresses the ITS culture's penchant for six-letterisms). Compare twink, read-only user. |
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tourist information n. Information in an on-line display that is not immediately useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what the user is looking for at any given time. The 'bytes free' information at the bottom of an MS-DOS dir display is tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME information in a Unix ps (1) display. |
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touristic adj. Having the quality of a tourist. Often used as a pejorative, as in 'losing touristic scum'. Often spelled 'turistic' or 'turistik', so that phrase might be more properly rendered 'lusing turistic scum'. |
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toy n. A computer system; always used with qualifiers. 1. nice toy: One that supports the speaker's hacking style adequately. 2. just a toy: A machine that yields insufficient computrons for the speaker's preferred uses. This is not |
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