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1980s. The cabal mailing list disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight. |
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backbone site n. A key Usenet and email site; one that processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense of the term was beginning to pass out of general use due to wide availability of cheap Internet connections, included uunet and the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, DEC's Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the University of Texas. Compare rib site, leaf site. |
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[1996 update: This term is seldom heard any more. The UUCP network world that gave it meaning has nearly disappeared; everyone is on the Internet now and network traffic is distributed in very different patterns. ESR] |
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backgammon See bignum (sense 3), moby (sense 4), and pseudoprime. |
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background n.,adj.,vt. To do a task in background is to do it whenever foreground matters are not claiming your undivided attention, and to background something means to relegate it to a lower priority. "For now, we'll just print a list of nodes and links; I'm working on the graph-printing problem in background." Note that this implies ongoing activity but at a reduced level or in spare time, in contrast to mainstream 'back burner' (which connotes benign neglect until some future resumption of activity). Some people prefer to use the term for processing that they have queued up for their unconscious minds (a tack that one can often fruitfully take upon encountering an obstacle in creative work). Compare amp off, slopsucker. |
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Technically, a task running in background is detached from the terminal where it was started (and often running at a lower priority); oppose foreground. Nowadays this term is primarily associated with Unix, but it appears to have been first used in this sense on OS/360. |
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backspace and overstrike interj. Whoa! Back up. Used to suggest that someone just said or did something wrong. Common among APL programmers. |
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backward combatability /bak'w rd km-bat'-bil'-tee/ n. [CMU, Tektronix: from 'backward compatibility'] A property of hardware or software revisions in which previous protocols, formats, layouts, etc. are irrevocably discarded in favor of 'new and improved' protocols, formats, and layouts, leaving the previous ones not merely deprecated but actively defeated. (Too |
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