Jargon File

The Jargon File (also called The Hacker's Jargon File) is a dictionary of computer slang which was originally in plaintext format and is now available as HTML. It also includes a lot of computer hacker folklore, both in the appendixes and as part of the main text of the entries. The file originated in 1975, at a time when computers were only used by a few specialists. It was originally published in book form as The Hacker's Dictionary in 1983, edited by Guy L. Steele Jr.

At this point, the university AI labs that spawned the Jargon File were dying, and the Jargon File fell into disuse. It was picked up again by Eric Raymond in 1990; he maintained the file, adding new Internet-related material, and published several revisions in 1991, 1993 and 1996 as The New Hacker's Dictionary, though not without controversy (Raymond was accused of writing material that's more true of himself than of hackers in general).

The file is still around, but maintenance abruptly stopped in 2004, and the file is heavily subject to Technology Marches On, having never been fully adapted to the omnipresent Web-based Internet of modern times.

Every so often someone tries to make the file live again. No attempt has yet succeeded.

The last version, now more than a decade old, can be found here.


 * Ha Ha Only Serious
 * Ice Cream Koan

"A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on. Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly: "You can not fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong." Knight turned the machine off and on. The machine worked."
 * Ha Ha Only Serious: Defined by the file.
 * Ice Cream Koan: Several such sayings, in which reference to the phrase "ice cream koan" was coined, originated at MIT in the 1970s and found their way into the Jargon File. One example:


 * (It also plays on the absurdity that understanding alone is enough to make the exact same behavior work.)


 * Names Given to Computers: The real-life Shub-Internet was named after a joke in the Jargon File and operated as a server in the Pentagon for a number of years. Obviously a very silly type-6, relating to the Internet's origins as a US Defense Department project.
 * Too Many Cooks Spoil the Soup: The file contains an entry which states that "Adding manpower to a late project makes it later", with mathematical justification; dividing a task among N people gets the work done in O(N) time, but actually coordinating that work and getting it merged back into a completed project takes O(N^2) because of duplication, intercommunication problems (two people on a project have one line of communication (A<->B); four people have six), and general laziness (if there's a hundred people on a task, there will be a few who think they don't need to pull their weight).
 * Words Do Not Make the Magic: See the Ice Cream Koan quoted above.
 * Yiddish as a Second Language: Hacker parlance is absolutely full of Yiddish and Yiddish-derived words -- chainik (despite the Jargon File identifying it as Russian), DRECNET, farkled, foo, glitch and kludge, even (and especially) "hack" itself, just to name a few.