May 15, 2003
X
/X/ n.1. Used in various speech and writing contexts (also in lowercase) in roughly its algebraic sense of ‘unknown within a set defined by context’ (compare N). Thus, the abbreviation 680x0 stands for 68000, 68010, 68020, 68030, or 68040, and 80x86 stands for 80186, 80286, 80386, 80486, 80586 or 80686 (note that a Unix hacker might write these as 680[0-6]0 and 80[1-6]86 or 680?0 and 80?86 respectively; see glob).
2. [after the name of an earlier window system called ‘W’] An over-sized, over-featured, over-engineered and incredibly over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on Unix systems.
XEROX PARC
/zee´roks park´/ n.The famed Palo Alto Research Center. For more than a decade, from the early 1970s into the mid-1980s, PARC yielded an astonishing volume of groundbreaking hardware and software innovations. The modern mice, windows, and icons style of software interface was invented there. So was the laser printer and the local-area network; and PARC's series of D machines anticipated the powerful personal computers of the 1980s by a decade. Sadly, the prophets at PARC were without honor in their own company, so much so that it became a standard joke to describe PARC as a place that specialized in developing brilliant ideas for everyone else.
The stunning shortsightedness and obtusity of XEROX's top-level suits has been well anatomized in Fumbling The Future: How XEROX Invented, Then Ignored, the First Personal Computer by Douglas K. Smith and Robert C. Alexander (William Morrow & Co., 1988, ISBN 0-688-09511-9).
xor
/X´or/, /kzor/ conj.
Exclusive or. ‘A xor B’ means ‘A or B, but not
both’. I want to get cherry pie xor a banana split.
This derives from the technical use of the term as a function on
truth-values that is true if exactly one of its two arguments is
true.
XXX
/X·X·X/ n.A marker that attention is needed. Commonly used in program comments to indicate areas that are kluged up or need to be. Some hackers liken ‘XXX’ to the notional heavy-porn movie rating. Compare FIXME.
xyzzy
/X·Y·Z·Z·Y/, /X·Y·ziz´ee/, /ziz´ee/, or /ik·ziz´ee/ adj.
[from the ADVENT game] The canonical
‘magic word’. This comes from ADVENT,
in which the idea is to explore an underground cave with many rooms and to
collect the treasures you find there. If you type xyzzy at the appropriate time, you can move
instantly between two otherwise distant points. If, therefore, you
encounter some bit of magic, you might remark on
this quite succinctly by saying simply Xyzzy!
Ordinarily you can't look at someone else's screen if he has
protected it, but if you type quadruple-bucky-clear the system will let you
do it anyway.
Xyzzy!
It's traditional for xyzzy to
be an Easter egg in games with text
interfaces.
Xyzzy has actually been implemented as an undocumented no-op command
on several OSes; in Data General's AOS/VS, for example, it would typically
respond Nothing happens
, just as
ADVENT did if the magic was invoked at the wrong
spot or before a player had performed the action that enabled the word. In
more recent 32-bit versions, by the way, AOS/VS responds Twice as
much happens
.
Early versions of the popular ‘minesweeper’ game under Microsoft Windows had a cheat mode triggered by the command ‘xyzzy<enter><right-shift>’ that turns the top-left pixel of the screen different colors depending on whether or not the cursor is over a bomb. This feature temporarily disappeared in Windows 98, but reappeared in Windows 2000.
The following passage from The Wonderful Wizard of
Oz by L. Frank Baum, suggesting a possible pre-ADVENT origin,
has recently come to light: Ziz-zy, zuz-zy, zik!
said
Dorothy, who was now standing on both feet. This ended the saying of the
charm, and they heard a great chattering and flapping of wings, as the band
of Winged Monkeys flew up to them.
The text can be viewed at Project Gutenberg.