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my curiosity pooh-poohed by my father's mainframe colleagues. When I moved to the 'burbs in '83 I learned C and sold my new employers on the idea of training me into their house UNIX wizard and that's just what I did for two and a half years. I grew into my maturity as a programmer right along with UNIX and C, watching them spread from a few niches in academic and research environments into an unstoppable tide that completely transformed the computing landscape. |
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The second time I saw the Jargon File was in late '83, right around the time the first edition of The Hacker's Dictionary came out with nary a word about C or microcomputers or UNIX or any of the areas where I knew the hottest action in computers was happening. At the time I just accepted it in fact, I printed out a copy and gave it to my boss as a joke, in a report folder blazoned with ''UNDERSTANDING YOUR HACKER" in big letters on the outside. And then I hardly thought about it for the next six years. I was very busy programming, writing, consulting, and building a professional reputation as a UNIX expert. I was lucky; my background convinced me earlier than most that UNIX on microcomputers was going to be the wave of the commodity-computing future, so I was out front ready to catch it as it rose. |
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When I stumbled across the Jargon File again in early 1990, then, I saw it from a new and more confident point of view. By then, I'd known Richard Stallman for years and had brought EMACS into the UNIX shops I'd been working in. I'd grown used to seeing my own history and skills as a bridge between the 'old' LISP/PDP-10/ARPANET culture and the huge newer community of C and UNIX hackers and Usenetters and personal computer hobbyists in which I'd spent most of the 1980s. I'd even originated some jargon terms myself that I'd seen pass into fairly wide use on Usenet or elsewhere (See: bondage & discipline language, code-grinder, crawling horror, defenestration, drool-proof paper, fear and loathing, larval stage, nailed to the wall, quantum bogodynamics, raster burn, rice box, silly walk). |
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So I called Guy Steele one day, and we hit it off well and got to talking and the result is this New Hacker's Dictionary you hold in your hands. It's more than just a meeting of two cultures, his and mine, because we decided to make an effort to get input from all the different technical cultures we could reach. |
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So although a bit over half the entries are from the C/UNIX world and many of the rest are from the ITS/LISP culture of the 'old' Jargon file, there are healthy contributions from supercomputing, graphics, the compiler-design community, TCP/IP wizards, microcomputer developers, |
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