Mung is

computer A computer is a machine that can be programmed to carry out sequences of arithmetic or logical operations ( computation) automatically. Modern digital electronic computers can perform generic sets of operations known as programs. These prog ...

jargon Jargon is the specialized terminology associated with a particular field or area of activity. Jargon is normally employed in a particular communicative context and may not be well understood outside that context. The context is usually a partic ...

for a series of potentially destructive or irrevocable changes to a piece of data or a file. It is sometimes used for vague data transformation steps that are not yet clear to the speaker. Common munging operations include removing punctuation or HTML tags, data parsing, filtering, and transformation. The term was coined in 1958 in the Tech Model Railroad Club at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a private land-grant research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Established in 1861, MIT has played a key role in the development of modern technology and science, and is one of th ...

. In 1960 the

backronym A backronym is an acronym formed from an already existing word by expanding its letters into the words of a phrase. Backronyms may be invented with either serious or humorous intent, or they may be a type of false etymology or folk etymology. The ...

"Mash Until No Good" was created to describe Mung, and by 1976 it was revised to "Mung Until No Good", making it one of the first

recursive acronym A recursive acronym is an acronym that refers to itself, and appears most frequently in computer programming. The term was first used in print in 1979 in Douglas Hofstadter's book '' Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid'', in which Hofs ...

s. It lived on as a recursive command in the editing language TECO. It differs from the very similar term munge, because munging usually implies destruction of data, while mungeing usually implies modifying data (simple passwords) in order to create protection related to that data. Munging may also describe the constructive operation of tying together systems and interfaces that were not specifically designed to interoperate (also called 'duct-taping'). Munging can also describe the processing or filtering of raw data into another form. As the "no good" part of the acronym implies, munging often involves irrevocable destruction of data. Hence in the early text-adventure game ''

Zork ''Zork'' is a text-based adventure game first released in 1977 by developers Tim Anderson, Marc Blank, Bruce Daniels, and Dave Lebling for the PDP-10 mainframe computer. The original developers and others, as the company Infocom, expanded a ...

'', the user could ''mung'' an object and thereby destroy it, making it impossible to finish the game if the object was an important item.

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