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foo. We believe specialist lexicographers will find many of the historical notes more than casually instructive. |
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The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). |
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The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as 'jargon-1' or 'the File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. Some terms in it date back considerably earlier (frob and some senses of moby, for instance, go back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to date at least back to the early 1960s). The revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered 'Version 1'. |
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In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to 'AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON. |
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The file was quickly renamed JARGON (the '' caused versioning under ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of correcting the term 'jargon' to 'slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as the Jargon File. |
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Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsquently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations). |
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The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages. |
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In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, pages 2635) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication. |
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