The Jargon File is a
glossary
A glossary (from , ''glossa''; language, speech, wording), also known as a vocabulary or clavis, is an alphabetical list of Term (language), terms in a particular domain of knowledge with the definitions for those terms. Traditionally, a gloss ...
and
usage dictionary of
slang
A slang is a vocabulary (words, phrases, and linguistic usages) of an informal register, common in everyday conversation but avoided in formal writing and speech. It also often refers to the language exclusively used by the members of pa ...
used by
computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the
MIT AI Lab, the
Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old
ARPANET
The Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPANET) was the first wide-area packet-switched network with distributed control and one of the first computer networks to implement the TCP/IP protocol suite. Both technologies became the tec ...
AI/
LISP
Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation.
Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...
/
PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...
communities, including
Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN),
Carnegie Mellon University
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institu ...
, and
Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as ''The Hacker's Dictionary'' (edited by
Guy Steele) and revised in 1991 as ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (ed.
Eric S. Raymond; third edition published 1996).
The concept of the file began with the
Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that came out of early
TX-0 and
PDP-1 hackers in the 1950s, where the term ''
hacker
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...
'' emerged and the ethic, philosophies and some of the nomenclature emerged.
1975 to 1983
The Jargon File (referred to here as "Jargon-1" or "the File") was made by
Raphael Finkel at
Stanford in 1975. From that time until the plug was finally pulled on the
SAIL
A sail is a tensile structure, which is made from fabric or other membrane materials, that uses wind power to propel sailing craft, including sailing ships, sailboats, windsurfers, ice boats, and even sail-powered land vehicles. Sails may b ...
computer in 1991, the File was named "AIWORD.RF
P,DOC ("
P,DOC was a system directory for "User Program DOCumentation" on the
WAITS operating system). Some terms, such as ''
frob'', ''
foo'' and ''
mung'' are believed to date back to the early 1950s from the
Tech Model Railroad Club at
MIT and documented in the 1959 ''Dictionary of the TMRC Language'' compiled by Peter Samson. The revisions of Jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered "version 1". Note that it was always called "AIWORD" or "the Jargon file", never "the File"; the last term was coined by Eric Raymond.
In 1976,
Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer,
FTP
The File Transfer Protocol (FTP) is a standard communication protocol used for the transfer of computer files from a server to a client on a computer network. FTP is built on a client–server model architecture using separate control and dat ...
ed a copy of the File to the MIT AI Lab. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to "AI words", and so stored the file on his directory, named as "AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON" ("AI" lab computer, directory "MRC", file "SAIL JARGON").
Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and
Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations).
The File expanded by fits and starts until 1983.
Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and
ITS-related coinages. The Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS) was named to distinguish it from another early MIT computer operating system,
Compatible Time-Sharing System (CTSS).
In 1981, a
hacker
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...
named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in
Stewart Brand's ''
CoEvolution Quarterly'' (issue 29, pages 26–35) with illustrations by
Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of Steele's ''Crunchly'' cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication.
A late version of Jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as ''The Hacker's Dictionary'' (Harper & Row CN 1082, ). It included all of Steele's ''Crunchly'' cartoons. The other Jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and
Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did Stallman and
Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as "Steele-1983" and those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors.
1983 to 1990
Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to ease the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the "temporary" freeze to become permanent.
The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s, by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and associated
proprietary software
Proprietary software is computer software, software that grants its creator, publisher, or other rightsholder or rightsholder partner a legal monopoly by modern copyright and intellectual property law to exclude the recipient from freely sharing t ...
instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated
Lisp machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the
Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out west in
Silicon Valley
Silicon Valley is a region in Northern California that is a global center for high technology and innovation. Located in the southern part of the San Francisco Bay Area, it corresponds roughly to the geographical area of the Santa Clara Valley ...
. The startups built Lisp machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a
TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' ITS.
The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL computer continued as a computer science department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems, but by the mid-1980s, most of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging
BSD Unix standard.
In April 1983, the
PDP-10
Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC)'s PDP-10, later marketed as the DECsystem-10, is a mainframe computer family manufactured beginning in 1966 and discontinued in 1983. 1970s models and beyond were marketed under the DECsystem-10 name, especi ...
-centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the
Jupiter project at
DEC. The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be.
As mentioned in some editions:
1990 and later
A new revision was begun in 1990, which contained nearly the entire text of a late version of Jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after consultation with the editors of Steele-1983). It merged in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now only of historical interest.
The new version cast a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim was to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all of the technical computing cultures in which the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries derived from
Usenet
Usenet (), a portmanteau of User's Network, is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose UUCP, Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Elli ...
and represented jargon then current in the
C and
Unix
Unix (, ; trademarked as UNIX) is a family of multitasking, multi-user computer operating systems that derive from the original AT&T Unix, whose development started in 1969 at the Bell Labs research center by Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, a ...
communities, but special efforts were made to collect jargon from other cultures including
IBM PC
The IBM Personal Computer (model 5150, commonly known as the IBM PC) is the first microcomputer released in the List of IBM Personal Computer models, IBM PC model line and the basis for the IBM PC compatible ''de facto'' standard. Released on ...
programmers,
Amiga fans,
Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM
mainframe world.
Eric Raymond maintained the new File with assistance from Guy Steele, and is the credited editor of the print version of it, ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (published by
MIT Press
The MIT Press is the university press of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), a private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The MIT Press publishes a number of academic journals and has been a pioneer in the Open Ac ...
in 1991); hereafter Raymond-1991. Some of the changes made under his watch were controversial; early critics accused Raymond of unfairly changing the file's focus to the Unix hacker culture instead of the older hacker cultures where the Jargon File originated. Raymond has responded by saying that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should report on hacker culture, and not attempt to enshrine it. After the second edition of ''NHD'' (MIT Press, 1993; hereafter Raymond-1993), Raymond was accused of adding terms reflecting his own politics and vocabulary, even though he says that entries to be added are checked to make sure that they are in live use, not "just the private coinage of one or two people".
The Raymond version was revised again, to include terminology from the nascent subculture of the public Internet and the World Wide Web, and published by MIT Press as ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'', Third Edition, in 1996.
, no updates have been made to the official Jargon File since 2003. A volunteer editor produced two updates, reflecting later influences (mostly excoriated) from
text messaging language,
LOLspeak, and
Internet slang in general; the last was produced in January 2012.
Impact and reception
Influence
Despite its
tongue-in-cheek approach, multiple other
style guides and similar works have cited ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' as a reference, and even recommended following some of its "hackish" best practices. The ''
Oxford English Dictionary
The ''Oxford English Dictionary'' (''OED'') is the principal historical dictionary of the English language, published by Oxford University Press (OUP), a University of Oxford publishing house. The dictionary, which published its first editio ...
'' has used the ''NHD'' as a source for computer-related
neologism
In linguistics, a neologism (; also known as a coinage) is any newly formed word, term, or phrase that has achieved popular or institutional recognition and is becoming accepted into mainstream language. Most definitively, a word can be considered ...
s.
[ '']The Chicago Manual of Style
''The Chicago Manual of Style'' (''CMOS'') is a style guide for American English published since 1906 by the University of Chicago Press. Its 18 editions (the most recent in 2024) have prescribed writing and citation styles widely used in publ ...
'', the leading American academic and book-publishing style guide, beginning with its 15th edition (2003) explicitly defers, for "computer writing", to the quotation punctuation style '' logical quotation'' recommended by the essay "Hacker Writing Style" in ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (and cites ''NHD'' for nothing else). The 16th edition (2010, and the current issue ) does likewise. The '' National Geographic Style Manual'' lists ''NHD'' among only 8 specialized dictionaries, out of 22 total sources, on which it is based. That manual is the house style of NGS publications, and has been available online for public browsing since 1995. The ''NGSM'' does not specify what, in particular, it drew from the ''NHD'' or any other source.
Aside from these guides and the ''Encyclopedia of New Media'', the Jargon file, especially in print form, is frequently cited for both its definitions and its essays, by books and other works on hacker history, cyberpunk
Cyberpunk is a subgenre of science fiction in a dystopian futuristic setting said to focus on a combination of "low-life and high tech". It features futuristic technological and scientific achievements, such as artificial intelligence and cyberwa ...
subculture, computer jargon and online style, and the rise of the Internet as a public medium, in works as diverse as the 20th edition of ''A Bibliography of Literary Theory, Criticism and Philology'' edited by José Ángel García Landa (2015); ''Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age'' by Constance Hale and Jessie Scanlon of '' Wired'' magazine (1999); ''Transhumanism: The History of a Dangerous Idea'' by David Livingstone (2015); Mark Dery's ''Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture'' (1994) and ''Escape Velocity: Cyberculture at the End of the Century'' (2007); ''Beyond Cyberpunk! A Do-it-yourself Guide to the Future'' by Gareth Branwyn and Peter Sugarman (1991); and numerous others.
''Time
Time is the continuous progression of existence that occurs in an apparently irreversible process, irreversible succession from the past, through the present, and into the future. It is a component quantity of various measurements used to sequ ...
'' magazine used ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' (Raymond-1993) as the basis for an article about online culture in the November 1995 inaugural edition of the "Time Digital" department. ''NHD'' was cited by name on the front page of ''The Wall Street Journal
''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...
''. Upon the release of the second edition, ''Newsweek
''Newsweek'' is an American weekly news magazine based in New York City. Founded as a weekly print magazine in 1933, it was widely distributed during the 20th century and has had many notable editors-in-chief. It is currently co-owned by Dev P ...
'' used it as a primary source, and quoted entries in a sidebar, for a major article on the Internet and its history. The MTV show ''This Week in Rock'' used excerpts from the Jargon File in its "CyberStuff" segments. '' Computing Reviews'' used one of the Jargon File's definitions on its December 1991 cover.
On October 23, 2003, ''The New Hacker's Dictionary'' was used in a legal case. SCO Group cited the 1996 edition definition of "FUD" ( fear, uncertainty and doubt), which dwelt on questionable IBM
International Business Machines Corporation (using the trademark IBM), nicknamed Big Blue, is an American Multinational corporation, multinational technology company headquartered in Armonk, New York, and present in over 175 countries. It is ...
business practices, in a legal filing in the civil lawsuit '' SCO Group, Inc. v. International Business Machines Corp.''[ The correct version number is actually 4.4.7, as given in the rest of the documents there.] (In response, Raymond added SCO to the entry in a revised copy of the ''Jargon File'', feeling that SCO's own practices deserved similar criticism.)
Defense of the term ''hacker''
The book is particularly noted for helping (or at least trying) to preserve the distinction between a hacker
A hacker is a person skilled in information technology who achieves goals and solves problems by non-standard means. The term has become associated in popular culture with a security hackersomeone with knowledge of bug (computing), bugs or exp ...
(a consummate programmer) and a cracker (a computer criminal); even though not reviewing the book in detail, both the ''London Review of Books
The ''London Review of Books'' (''LRB'') is a British literary magazine published bimonthly that features articles and essays on fiction and non-fiction subjects, which are usually structured as book reviews.
History
The ''London Review of Book ...
'' and '' MIT Technology Review'' remarked on it in this regard. In a substantial entry on the work, the ''Encyclopedia of New Media'' by Steve Jones (2002) observed that this defense of the term ''hacker'' was a motivating factor for both Steele's and Raymond's print editions:
-P Convention
The "-P Convention" or "P Question" refers to the act of making a statement into a question by appending "P." When spoken aloud, the "P" is literally pronounced as a separate syllable "Pee." This usage was immortalized in the Jargon File and from there the use spread to some younger users seeking to be part of the classical Internet
The Internet (or internet) is the Global network, global system of interconnected computer networks that uses the Internet protocol suite (TCP/IP) to communicate between networks and devices. It is a internetworking, network of networks ...
community.
This practice originated among users of the Lisp programming language
Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation.
Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...
, in which there is the convention of appending the letter "P" on elements to denote a predicate (a yes or no question). It is most commonly used at MIT and the University of California, Berkeley
The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California), is a Public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Berkeley, California, United States. Founded in 1868 and named after t ...
, or among computer scientists working in Artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...
(which frequently uses Lisp). M-expression and S-expression were other new information representations introduced in a related context.
The typical example of use is:
Q: "Foodp?" (Do you want food?)
A: "T!" (Literally, True: yes)
A: "Nil." (Also Null; no, I don't want food).
Reviews and reactions
''PC Magazine
''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and continues .
Overview
''PC Mag ...
'' in 1984, stated that ''The Hacker's Dictionary'' was superior to most other computer-humor books, and noted its authenticity to "hard-core programmers' conversations", especially slang from MIT and Stanford. Reviews quoted by the publisher include: William Safire of ''The New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...
'' referring to the Raymond-1991 ''NHD'' as a "sprightly lexicon" and recommending it as a nerdy gift that holiday season (this reappeared in his "On Language" column again in mid-October 1992); Hugh Kenner in ''Byte
The byte is a unit of digital information that most commonly consists of eight bits. Historically, the byte was the number of bits used to encode a single character of text in a computer and for this reason it is the smallest addressable un ...
'' suggesting that it was so engaging that one's reading of it should be "severely timed if you hope to get any work done"; and '' Mondo 2000'' describing it as "slippery, elastic fun with language", as well as "not only a useful guidebook to very much un-official technical terms and street tech slang, but also a de facto ethnography of the early years of the hacker culture". Positive reviews were also published in academic as well as computer-industry publications, including '' IEEE Spectrum'', ''New Scientist
''New Scientist'' is a popular science magazine covering all aspects of science and technology. Based in London, it publishes weekly English-language editions in the United Kingdom, the United States and Australia. An editorially separate organ ...
'', ''PC Magazine
''PC Magazine'' (shortened as ''PCMag'') is an American computer magazine published by Ziff Davis. A print edition was published from 1982 to January 2009. Publication of online editions started in late 1994 and continues .
Overview
''PC Mag ...
'', '' PC World'', ''Science
Science is a systematic discipline that builds and organises knowledge in the form of testable hypotheses and predictions about the universe. Modern science is typically divided into twoor threemajor branches: the natural sciences, which stu ...
'', and (repeatedly) ''Wired''.
US game designer Steve Jackson, writing for '' Boing Boing'' magazine in its pre-blog, print days, described ''NHD'' essay "A Portrait of J. Random Hacker" as "a wonderfully accurate pseudo-demographic description of the people who make up the hacker culture". He was nevertheless critical of Raymond's tendency to editorialize, even " flame", and of the Steele cartoons, which Jackson described as "sophomoric, and embarrassingly out of place beside the dry and sophisticated humor of the text". He wound down his review with some rhetorical questions:[ Originally published in '' Boing Boing'' magazine, Vol. 1, No. 10.]
The third print edition garnered additional coverage, in the usual places like ''Wired'' (August 1996), and even in mainstream venues, including ''People
The term "the people" refers to the public or Common people, common mass of people of a polity. As such it is a concept of human rights law, international law as well as constitutional law, particularly used for claims of popular sovereignty. I ...
'' magazine (October 21, 1996).
References
*
Further reading
*
*
*
*
External links
* (2004)
Jargon File Text Archive
(1981–2003); Steven Ehrbar's:
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* {{webarchive , url=https://web.archive.org/web/20130827121341/http://cosman246.com/jargon.html , date=August 27, 2013 , title=Ver. 5.0.1 (2012) post-Raymond; last major revision
1991 non-fiction books
Books about computer hacking
Books by Eric S. Raymond
Books by Guy L. Steele Jr.
Computer books
Computer humour
Computer jargon
Computer programming folklore
Computer-related introductions in 1975
Creative Commons-licensed books
English dictionaries
Free software culture and documents
Software engineering folklore
Works about computer hacking