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abbreviation '20x' was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as Unix or ITS but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 users to convert to VMS, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to Unix. |
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twiddle n. 1. Tilde (ASCII 1111110, '~'). Also called squiggle, sqiggle (sic pronounced /skig'l/), and twaddle, but twiddle is the most common term. 2. A small and insignificant change to a program. Usually fixes one bug and generates several new ones (see also shotgun debugging). 3. vt. To change something in a small way. Bits, for example, are often twiddled. Twiddling a switch or knob implies much less sense of purpose than toggling or tweaking it; see frobnicate. To speak of twiddling a bit connotes aimlessness, and at best doesn't specify what you're doing to the bit; 'toggling a bit' has a more specific meaning (see bit twiddling, toggle). |
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twilight zone n. [IRC] Notionally, the area of cyberspace where IRC operators live. An op is said to have a "connection to the twilight zone". |
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twink /twink/ n. [UCSC] Equivalent to read-only user. Also reported on the Usenet group soc.motss; may derive from gay slang for a cute young thing with nothing upstairs (compare mainstream 'chick'). |
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twirling baton n. [PLATO] The overstrike sequence -/|\-/|\- which produces an animated twirling baton. If you output it with a single backspace between characters, the baton spins in place. If you output the sequence BS SP between characters, the baton spins from left to right. If you output BS SP BS BS between characters, the baton spins from right to left. |
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The twirling baton was a popular component of animated signature files on the pioneering PLATO educational timesharing system. The archie Internet service is perhaps the best-known baton program today; it uses the twirling baton as an idler indicating that the program is working on a query. |
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two pi quant. The number of years it takes to finish one's thesis. Occurs in stories in the following form: "He started on his thesis; 2 pi years later " |
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two-to-the-N quant. An amount much larger than N but smaller than infinity. "I have 2-to-the-N things to do before I can go out for lunch" means you probably won't show up. |
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