[common] A user; esp. one who is also a
loser. (luser and
loser are pronounced identically.) This word was
coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a
terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it
printed out some status information, including how many people were already
using the computer; it might print 14 users
, for example.
Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print
14 losers
instead. There ensued a great controversy, as
some of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to their
faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers
struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the
others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money whether it
would say users
or losers
. Finally, someone
tried the compromise lusers
, and it stuck. Later one of the
ITS machines supported luser
as a
request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a
museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the term luser is often seen in program comments and on
Usenet. Compare mundane,
muggle, newbie,
chainik.