May 15, 2003
I didn't change anything!
interj.
An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression
test. The canonical reply to this assertion is
Then it works just the same as it did before, doesn't it?
See also one-line fix. This is also heard from
applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications problem on
an unrelated systems software change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after
terminals were added to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be
false. Upon close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of
the program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but
which actually hosed the code completely.
I see no X here.
Hackers (and the interactive computer games they write)
traditionally favor this slightly marked usage over other possible
equivalents such as There's no X here!
or X is
missing.
or Where's the X?
. This goes back to the
original PDP-10 ADVENT, which would respond in this
wise if you asked it to do something involving an object not present at
your location in the game.
IBM
/I·B·M/Once upon a time, the computer company most hackers loved to hate; today, the one they are most puzzled to find themselves liking.
From hackerdom's beginnings in the mid-1960s to the early 1990s, IBM was regarded with active loathing. Common expansions of the corporate name included: Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-infinite number of even less complimentary expansions (see also fear and loathing). What galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that counted against them), but that the designs were incredibly archaic, crufty, and elephantine ... and you couldn't fix them — source code was locked up tight, and programming tools were expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you had found them.
We didn't know how good we had it back then. In the 1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft and lost its strategic way, receding from the hacker community's view. Then, in the 1990s, Microsoft became more noxious and omnipresent than IBM had ever been.
In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began shipping Linux systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a staunch friend of the hacker community and open source development.
This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to ‘IBM’; these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's formerly beleaguered hacker underground.
ICBM address
n.(Also missile address) The form used to register a site with the Usenet mapping project, back before the day of pervasive Internet, included a blank for longitude and latitude, preferably to seconds-of-arc accuracy. This was actually used for generating geographically-correct maps of Usenet links on a plotter; however, it became traditional to refer to this as one's ICBM address or missile address, and some people include it in their sig block with that name. (A real missile address would include target elevation.)
ice
n.[coined by Usenetter Tom Maddox, popularized by William Gibson's cyberpunk SF novels: a contrived acronym for ‘Intrusion Countermeasure Electronics’] Security software (in Gibson's novels, software that responds to intrusion by attempting to immobilize or even literally kill the intruder). Hence, icebreaker: a program designed for cracking security on a system.
Neither term is in serious use yet as of late 2002, but many hackers
find the metaphor attractive, and each may develop a denotation in the
future. In the meantime, the speculative usage could be confused with
‘ICE’, an acronym for in-circuit
emulator
.
In ironic reference to the speculative usage, however, some hackers and computer scientists formed ICE (International Cryptographic Experiment) in 1994. ICE is a consortium to promote uniform international access to strong cryptography.
ID10T error
/I·D·ten·T er'@r/
Synonym for PEBKAC, e.g. The user is
being an idiot
. Tech-support people passing a problem report to
someone higher up the food chain (and presumably better equipped to deal
with idiots) may ask the user to convey that there seems to be an I-D-ten-T
error. Users never twig.
idempotent
adj.[from mathematical techspeak] Acting as if used only once, even if used multiple times. This term is often used with respect to C header files, which contain common definitions and declarations to be included by several source files. If a header file is ever included twice during the same compilation (perhaps due to nested #include files), compilation errors can result unless the header file has protected itself against multiple inclusion; a header file so protected is said to be idempotent. The term can also be used to describe an initialization subroutine that is arranged to perform some critical action exactly once, even if the routine is called several times.
IDP
/I·D·P/ v.,n.[Usenet] Abbreviation for Internet Death Penalty. Common (probably now more so than the full form), and frequently verbed. Compare UDP.
If you want X, you know where to find it.
There is a legend that Dennis Ritchie, inventor of
C, once responded to demands for features resembling
those of what at the time was a much more popular language by observing
If you want PL/I, you know where to find it.
Ever since,
this has been hackish standard form for fending off requests to alter a new
design to mimic some older (and, by implication, inferior and
baroque) one. The case X =
Pascal manifests semi-regularly on Usenet's
comp.lang.c newsgroup. Indeed,
the case X = X has been reported in discussions of graphics software (see
X).
ill-behaved
adj.1. [numerical analysis] Said of an algorithm or computational method that tends to blow up because of accumulated roundoff error or poor convergence properties.
2. [obs.] Software that bypasses the defined OS interfaces to do things (like screen, keyboard, and disk I/O) itself, often in a way that depends on the hardware of the machine it is running on or which is nonportable or incompatible with other pieces of software. In the MS-DOS world, there was a folk theorem (nearly true) to the effect that (owing to gross inadequacies and performance penalties in the OS interface) all interesting applications were ill-behaved. See also bare metal. Oppose well-behaved. See also mess-dos.
3. In modern usage, a program is called ill-behaved if it uses interfaces to the OS or other programs that are private, undocumented, or grossly non-portable. Another way to be ill-behaved is to use headers or files that are theoretically private to another application.
IMHO
abbrev.
[from SF fandom via Usenet; abbreviation for ‘In My Humble
Opinion’] IMHO, mixed-case C names should be avoided, as
mistyping something in the wrong case can cause hard-to-detect errors
— and they look too Pascalish anyhow.
Also seen in variant
forms such as IMNSHO (In My Not-So-Humble Opinion) and IMAO (In My Arrogant
Opinion).
Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!
prov.
[Usenet] Since Usenet first got off the
ground in 1980--81, it has grown exponentially, approximately doubling in
size every year. On the other hand, most people feel the
signal-to-noise ratio of Usenet has dropped
steadily. These trends led, as far back as mid-1983, to predictions of the
imminent collapse (or death) of the net. Ten years and numerous doublings
later, enough of these gloomy prognostications have been confounded that
the phrase Imminent Death Of The Net Predicted!
has become a
running joke, hauled out any time someone grumbles about the
S/N ratio or the huge and steadily increasing volume, or the
possible loss of a key node or link, or the potential for lawsuits when
ignoramuses post copyrighted material, etc., etc., etc.
in the extreme
adj.A preferred superlative suffix for many hackish terms. See, for example, obscure in the extreme under obscure, and compare highly.
incantation
n.
Any particularly arbitrary or obscure command that one must mutter
at a system to attain a desired result. Not used of passwords or other
explicit security features. Especially used of tricks that are so poorly
documented that they must be learned from a wizard.
This compiler normally locates initialized data in the data segment,
but if you mutter the right incantation they will be
forced into text space.
include
vt.[Usenet]
1. To duplicate a portion (or whole) of another's message (typically with attribution to the source) in a reply or followup, for clarifying the context of one's response. See the discussion of inclusion styles under Hacker Writing Style.
2. [from C] #include
<disclaimer.h>
has appeared in
sig blocks to refer to a notional standard disclaimer
file.
include war
n.Excessive multi-leveled inclusion within a discussion thread, a practice that tends to annoy readers. In a forum with high-traffic newsgroups, such as Usenet, this can lead to flames and the urge to start a kill file.
indent style
n.
[C, C++, and Java programmers] The rules one uses to indent code in
a readable fashion. There are four major C indent styles, described below;
all have the aim of making it easier for the reader to visually track the
scope of control constructs. They have been inherited by C++ and Java,
which have C-like syntaxes. The significant variable is the placement of
{ and } with respect to the
statement(s) they enclose and to the guard or controlling statement
(if
, else
,
for
, while
,
or do
) on the block, if any.
K&R style — Named after Kernighan & Ritchie, because the examples in K&R are formatted this way. Also called kernel style because the Unix kernel is written in it, and the ‘One True Brace Style’ (abbrev. 1TBS) by its partisans. In C code, the body is typically indented by eight spaces (or one tab) per level, as shown here. Four spaces are occasionally seen in C, but in C++ and Java four tends to be the rule rather than the exception.
if (<cond>) { <body> }
Allman style — Named for Eric Allman, a Berkeley hacker who wrote a lot of the BSD utilities in it (it is sometimes called BSD style). Resembles normal indent style in Pascal and Algol. It is the only style other than K&R in widespread use among Java programmers. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four (or sometimes three) spaces are generally preferred by C++ and Java programmers.
if (<cond>) { <body> }
Whitesmiths style — popularized by the examples that came with Whitesmiths C, an early commercial C compiler. Basic indent per level shown here is eight spaces, but four spaces are occasionally seen.
if (<cond>) { <body> }
GNU style — Used
throughout GNU EMACS and the Free Software Foundation code, and just about
nowhere else. Indents are always four spaces per level, with {
and }
halfway
between the outer and inner indent levels.
if (<cond>) { <body> }
Surveys have shown the Allman and Whitesmiths styles to be the most
common, with about equal mind shares. K&R/1TBS used to be nearly
universal, but is now much less common in C (the opening brace tends to get
lost against the right paren of the guard part in an if
or while
, which
is a Bad Thing). Defenders of 1TBS argue that any
putative gain in readability is less important than their style's relative
economy with vertical space, which enables one to see more code on one's
screen at once. The Java Language Specification legislates not only the
capitalization of identifiers, but where nouns, adjectives, and verbs
should be in method, class, interface, and variable names (section
6.8). While the specification stops short of also standardizing on a
bracing style, all source code originating from Sun Laboratories uses the
K&R style. This has set a precedent for Java programmers, which most
follow.
Doubtless these issues will continue to be the subject of holy wars.
Indent-o-Meter
[] A fiendishly clever ASCII display hack that became a brief fad in 1993-1994; it used combinations of tabs and spaces to produce an analog indicator of the amount of indentation an included portion of a reply had undergone. The full story is at http://world.std.com/~mmcirvin/indent.html.
infant mortality
n.It is common lore among hackers (and in the electronics industry at large; this term is possibly techspeak by now) that the chances of sudden hardware failure drop off exponentially with a machine's time since first use (that is, until the relatively distant time at which enough mechanical wear in I/O devices and thermal-cycling stress in components has accumulated for the machine to start going senile). Up to half of all chip and wire failures happen within a new system's first few weeks; such failures are often referred to as infant mortality problems (or, occasionally, as sudden infant death syndrome). See bathtub curve, burn-in period.
infinite
adj.
[common] Consisting of a large number of objects; extreme. Used
very loosely as in: This program produces infinite garbage.
He is an infinite loser.
The word most likely to follow
infinite, though, is
hair. (It has been pointed out that fractals are an
excellent example of infinite hair.) These uses are abuses of the word's
mathematical meaning. The term semi-infinite, denoting an immoderately large
amount of some resource, is also heard. This compiler is taking a
semi-infinite amount of time to optimize my program.
See also
semi.
infinite loop
n.
One that never terminates (that is, the machine
spins or buzzes forever and
goes catatonic). There is a standard joke that has
been made about each generation's exemplar of the ultra-fast machine:
The Cray-3 is so fast it can execute an infinite loop in under 2
seconds!
Infinite-Monkey Theorem
n.
If you put an infinite number of
monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash out the script for
Hamlet.
(One may also hypothesize a small number of monkeys and a
very long period of time.) This theorem asserts nothing about the
intelligence of the one random monkey that
eventually comes up with the script (and note that the mob will also type
out all the possible incorrect versions of Hamlet).
It may be referred to semi-seriously when justifying a brute force method; the implication is that, with enough resources
thrown at it, any technical challenge becomes a one-banana problem. This argument gets more respect since
Linux justified the bazaar
mode of development.
Other hackers maintain that the Infinite-Monkey Theorem cannot be true — otherwise Usenet would have reproduced the entire canon of great literature by now.
In mid-2003, researchers at Plymouth Univesity in England actually
put a working computer in a cage with six crested macaques. The monkeys
proceeded to bash the machine with a rock, urinate on it, and type the
letter S a lot (later, the letters A, J, L, and M also crept in). The
results were published in a limited-edition book, Notes Towards
The Complete Works of Shakespeare. A researcher reported:
They were quite interested in the screen, and they saw that when
they typed a letter, something happened. There was a level of intention
there.
Scattered field reports that there are AOL users this
competent have been greeted with well-deserved skepticism.
This theorem has been traced to the mathematiciamn Émile Borel in 1913, and was first popularized by the astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington. It became part of the idiom of techies via the classic SF short story Inflexible Logic by Russell Maloney, and many younger hackers know it through a reference in Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Some other references have been collected on the Web. On 1 April 2000 the usage acquired its own Internet standard, RFC2795 (Infinite Monkey Protocol Suite).
infinity
n.1. The largest value that can be represented in a particular type of variable (register, memory location, data type, whatever).
2. minus infinity: The smallest such value, not necessarily or even usually the simple negation of plus infinity. In N-bit twos-complement arithmetic, infinity is 2N-1 - 1 but minus infinity is - (2N-1), not -(2N-1 - 1). Note also that this is different from time T equals minus infinity, which is closer to a mathematician's usage of infinity.
inflate
vt.To decompress or puff a file. Rare among Internet hackers, used primarily by MS-DOS/Windows types.
Infocom
n.
A now-legendary games company, active from 1979 to 1989, that
commercialized the MDL parser technology used for
Zork to produce a line of text adventure games that
remain favorites among hackers. Infocom's games were intelligent, funny,
witty, erudite, irreverent, challenging, satirical, and most thoroughly
hackish in spirit. The physical game packages from Infocom are now prized
collector's items. After being acquired by Activision in 1989 they did a
few more modern
(e.g. graphics-intensive) games which were
less successful than reissues of their classics.
The software, thankfully, is still extant; Infocom games were written in a kind of P-code (called, actually, z-code) and distributed with a P-code interpreter core, and not only open-source emulators for that interpreter but an actual compiler as well have been written to permit the P-code to be run on platforms the games never originally graced. In fact, new games written in this P-code are still being written. There is a home page at http://www.csd.uwo.ca/Infocom/, and it is even possible to play these games in your browser if it is Java-capable.
initgame
/in·it´gaym/ n.
[IRC] An IRC version of the trivia game
Botticelli
, in which one user changes his
nick to the initials of a famous person or other
named entity, and the others on the channel ask yes or no questions, with
the one to guess the person getting to be it
next. As a
courtesy, the one picking the initials starts by providing a 4-letter hint
of the form sex, nationality, life-status, reality-status. For example,
MAAR means Male, American, Alive, Real
(as opposed to
fictional
). Initgame can be surprisingly addictive. See
also hing.
[1996 update: a recognizable version of the initgame has become a staple of some radio talk shows in the U.S. We had it first! -- ESR]
insanely great
adj.[Mac community, from Steve Jobs; also BSD Unix people via Bill Joy] Something so incredibly elegant that it is imaginable only to someone possessing the most puissant of hacker-natures.
installfest
[Linux community since c.1998] Common portmanteau word for
installation festival
; Linux user groups frequently run
these. Computer users are invited to bring their machines to have Linux
installed on their machines. The idea is to get them painlessly over the
biggest hump in migrating to Linux, which is initially installing and
configuring it for the user's machine.
INTERCAL
/in´t@r·kal/ n.[said by the authors to stand for Compiler Language With No Pronounceable Acronym] A computer language designed by Don Woods and James Lyons in 1972. INTERCAL is purposely different from all other computer languages in all ways but one; it is purely a written language, being totally unspeakable. An excerpt from the INTERCAL Reference Manual will make the style of the language clear:
It is a well-known and oft-demonstrated fact that a person whose work is incomprehensible is held in high esteem. For example, if one were to state that the simplest way to store a value of 65536 in a 32-bit INTERCAL variable is:
DO :1 <- #0$#256
any sensible programmer would say that that was absurd. Since this is indeed the simplest method, the programmer would be made to look foolish in front of his boss, who would of course have happened to turn up, as bosses are wont to do. The effect would be no less devastating for the programmer having been correct.
INTERCAL has many other peculiar features designed to make it even more unspeakable. The Woods-Lyons implementation was actually used by many (well, at least several) people at Princeton. The language has been recently reimplemented as C-INTERCAL and is consequently enjoying an unprecedented level of unpopularity; there is even an alt.lang.intercal newsgroup devoted to the study and ... appreciation of the language on Usenet.
Inevitably, INTERCAL has a home page on the Web: http://www.catb.org/~esr/intercal/. An extended version, implemented in (what else?) Perl and adding object-oriented features, is rumored to exist. See also Befunge.
interesting
adj.
In hacker parlance, this word has strong connotations of
‘annoying’, or ‘difficult’, or both. Hackers
relish a challenge, and enjoy wringing all the irony possible out of the
ancient Chinese curse May you live in interesting times
.
Oppose trivial,
uninteresting.
Internet
n.
The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as
the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has
been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture
for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and
including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from
the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce
large-computer resources. Robert Herzfeld, who was director of ARPA at
the time, has been at some pains to debunk the
survive-a-nuclear-war
myth, but it seems unkillable.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication between humans and linked up in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The
typical machine/OS combination moved from DEC
PDP-10s and PDP-20s, running
TOPS-10 and TOPS-20, to
PDP-11s and VAXen and Suns running
Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel
microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably
in the move from NCP/IP to TCP/IP in 1982 and the
implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this time
that people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks
with ARPANET at its core as the Internet
.
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines -- connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications companies until the Internet backbone had gone completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered the Internet. Once again, the killer app was not the anticipated one — rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecoms monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. By 1996 it had become a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet would become the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See also the network.
Internet Death Penalty
[Usenet] (often abbreviated IDP) The ultimate sanction against spam-emitting sites — complete shunning at the router level of all mail and packets, as well as Usenet messages, from the offending domain(s). Compare Usenet Death Penalty, with which it is sometimes confused.
Internet Exploder
[very common] Pejorative hackerism for Microsoft's Internet
Explorer
web browser (also Internet
Exploiter
). Compare HP-SUX,
Macintrash, sun-stools,
Slowlaris.
Internet Exploiter
n.Another common name-of-insult for Internet Explorer, Microsoft's overweight Web Browser; more hostile than Internet Exploder. Reflects widespread hostility to Microsoft and a sense that it is seeking to hijack, monopolize, and corrupt the Internet. Compare Exploder and the less pejorative Netscrape.
interrupt
1. [techspeak] n. On a computer,
an event that interrupts normal processing and temporarily diverts
flow-of-control through an interrupt handler
routine. See
also trap.
2. interj. A request for
attention from a hacker. Often explicitly spoken. Interrupt
— have you seen Joe recently?
See
priority interrupt.
interrupts locked out
adj.
When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several
fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might well
observe She must have interrupts locked out
. The synonym
interrupts disabled is also common.
Variations abound; to have one's interrupt mask bit set
and
interrupts masked out
are also heard. See also
spl.
intertwingled
adj. [Invented by Theodor Holm
Nelson, prob. a blend of mingled
and
intertwined
.] Connected together in a complex way;
specifically, composed of one another's components.
intro
n.[demoscene] Introductory screen of some production.
2. A short demo, usually showing just one or two screens.
3. Small, usually 64k, 40k or 4k demo. Sizes are generally dictated by compo rules. See also dentro, demo.
IRC
/I·R·C/ n.
[Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide party line
network
that allows one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as
a network of Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from
client programs, one per user. The IRC community and the
Usenet and MUD communities
overlap to some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have
discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some Usenet jargon has been
adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such as
emoticons. There is also a vigorous native jargon,
represented in this lexicon by entries marked ‘[IRC]’. See
also talk mode.
iron
n.Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of mainframe class with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrase big iron. Oppose silicon. See also dinosaur.
Iron Age
n.In the history of computing, 1961-1971 — the formative era of commercial mainframe technology, when ferrite-core dinosaurs ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also Stone Age; compare elder days.
iron box
n.[Unix/Internet] A special environment set up to trap a cracker logging in over remote connections long enough to be traced. May include a modified shell restricting the cracker's movements in unobvious ways, and ‘bait’ files designed to keep him interested and logged on. See also back door, firewall machine, Venus flytrap, and Clifford Stoll's account in The Cuckoo's Egg of how he made and used one (see the Bibliography in Appendix C). Compare padded cell, honey pot.
ISO standard cup of tea
n.[South Africa] A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on.
This may derive from the NATO standard
cup of coffee
and tea (milk and two sugars), military slang going back to the late 1950s
and parodying NATO's relentless bureaucratic drive to standardize parts
across European and U.S. militaries.
Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous ANSI standard cup of tea and wind up with a political situation distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious technical contexts. (Milk and lemon don't mix very well.)
[2000 update: There is now, in fact, an ISO standard 3103: ‘Method for preparation of a liquor of tea for use in sensory tests.’, alleged to be equivalent to British Standard BS6008: How to make a standard cup of tea. —ESR]
ISP
/I·S·P/Common abbreviation for Internet Service Provider, a kind of company that barely existed before 1993. ISPs sell Internet access to the mass market. While the big nationwide commercial BBSs with Internet access (like America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, Netcom, etc.) are technically ISPs, the term is usually reserved for local or regional small providers (often run by hackers turned entrepreneurs) who resell Internet access cheaply without themselves being information providers or selling advertising. Compare NSP.
ITS
/I·T·S/ n.1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though highly idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab. Much AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been ‘an ITS hacker’ qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort. ITS pioneered many important innovations, including transparent file sharing between machines and terminal-independent I/O. After about 1982, most actual work was shifted to newer machines, with the remaining ITS boxes run essentially as a hobby and service to the hacker community. The shutdown of the lab's last ITS machine in May 1990 marked the end of an era and sent old-time hackers into mourning nationwide (see high moby). There is an ITS home page.
2. A mythical image of operating-system perfection worshiped by a bizarre, fervent retro-cult of old-time hackers and ex-users (see troglodyte, sense 2). ITS worshipers manage somehow to continue believing that an OS maintained by assembly-language hand-hacking that supported only monocase 6-character filenames in one directory per account remains superior to today's state of commercial art (their venom against Unix is particularly intense). See also holy wars, Weenix.
IYFEG
[Usenet] Abbreviation for ‘Insert Your Favorite Ethnic Group’. Used as a meta-name when telling ethnic jokes on the net to avoid offending anyone. See JEDR.