May 15, 2003

RTM

/R·T·M/

1. [Usenet: abbreviation for ‘Read The Manual’] Politer variant of RTFM.

2. Robert Tappan Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see Great Worm); villain to many, naive hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris's username on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.

Posted by Jargon File at May 15, 2003 10:31 AM

Comments
Post a comment









Remember personal info?