Steve Wozniak

Did you know that Steve Wozniak was working for Hewlett Packard when he invented the Apple computer?

Grok

Grok: Taken from Robert Heinlein's book 'Stranger in a Strange Land', the word literally meaning 'to drink' but taken to mean 'understanding' and is often used by programmers and other assorted geeks.

Drunk Mouse Syndrome

Drunk Mouse Syndrome, also known as Mouse on Drugs, refers to a malady exhibited by the mouse pointing device of some computers. The typical symptom is for the mouse cursor on the screen to move in random directions and not in sync with the motion of the actual mouse.

Cokebottle

Did you know that the term Cokebottle refers to any very unusual character, particularly one you cannot type because it isn't on your keyboard?

Internet Connectivity

Did you know that the United States, Canada, France, Finland, Denmark, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Netherlands, and Mexico were the first ten countries to have Internet connectivity?

Sony PlayStation

Did you know that Sony's PlayStation began its life as a CD attachment for the Nintendo Super NES? When the two companies failed to agree on how the new device would sell, Sony decided to further develop it into a game machine of its own and released the PlayStation in 1995.

TANSTAAFL

TANSTAAFL: "There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch", often invoked when someone is balking at the prospect of using an unpleasantly heavyweight technique, or at the poor quality of some piece of software. Taken from Robert Heinlein's classic "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress".

Gibson Security Research

On May 4, 2001 Gibson Security Research Corp. came under DDoS attack and taken off-line by a 13-year-old hacker, because he believed that Steve Gibson had called him a name and later went ahead with it because it was fun.

David Levy

In 1968, International Master David Levy made a $3,000 bet with John McCarthy, researcher in Artificial Intelligence at Stanford, that no chess computer would beat him in 10 years. He won his bet.

Beepilepsy

Beepilepsy is the brief seizure people sometimes suffer when their beepers go off, especially in vibrator mode. Characterized by physical spasms, goofy facial expressions and stopping speech in mid-sentence.

Spontaneous Program Combustion

Spontaneous program combustion is when an application, which has been running normally for hours and in the absence of any other unusual phenomena, suddenly crashes.

Audion

In 1906, Lee de Forest developed the three electrode vacuum tube amplifier, which he called the Audion. The device was used as a detector of radio signals, an amplifier of audio and an oscillator for transmitting.

Burble

Burble is a message posted with the intention to insult and provoke, similar to flame, except here the "burbler" is totally clueless and ineffectual. The word comes from Lewis Carroll's nonsense poem, Jabberwocky.

Bit Twiddling

Bit twiddling is an exercise in tuning in which incredible amounts of time and effort go to produce little noticeable improvement, often with the result that the code becomes incomprehensible.

BELLE Computer

Did you know that in 1982 the U.S. State Department confiscated the BELLE computer as it was heading to the Soviet Union to participate in a computer chess tournament? The Department claimed it was a violation of a technology transfer law to ship a high technology computer to a foreign country.

Cyberpiracy

Cyberpiracy refers to the purchase of an Internet domain name that includes a company's registered trademark name, with the intention of selling the domain name to the company.

Kenji Urada

In 1981, a self-propelled robotic cart crushed Kenji Urada, 37, as he was trying to repair it in a Japanese factory. This was the first reported death caused by a robot.

Eudora

Did you know that the Eudora email program was named after the American writer Eudora Welty? Welty had written a short story called 'Why I Live at the P.O.'

Aluminum Book

Aluminum Book refers to the second edition of Guy L. Steele Jr.'s 'Common LISP: The Language' published in 1990. Due to a technical snag some printings of the second edition are actually what the author calls 'yucky green'.

Chris Lamprecht

On May 5, 1995, Chris Lamprecht (Minor Threat) became the first person to be banned from the Internet. Chris was sentenced for a number of crimes to which he pled guilty. In the early 1990s Chris had written a phone dialing program called ToneLoc (Tone Locator) to find open modem lines in telephone exchanges.

Hunger

Did you know that "Hunger" was the first computer animated film, produced by Rene Jodoin and directed and animated by Peter Foldes in 1974?

Rat Dance

Rat dance (from the Dilbert comic strip of Nov. 14, 1995) refers to a hacking run that produces results which, while superficially coherent, have little or nothing to do with its original objectives. In the comic strip, Ratbert is invited to dance on Dilbert's keyboard in order to produce bugs for him to fix, but instead authors a Web browser.

GIGO

GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) refers to the fact that computers, unlike humans, will unquestioningly process the most nonsensical of input data and produce nonsensical output. GIGO is usually said in response to lusers* who complain that a program didn't "do the right thing" when given imperfect input or otherwise mistreated in some way.

Luser - A user who is also a loser.

The Devil Book

The "Devil Book" refers to "The Design and Implementation of the 4.3BSD Unix Operating System", by Samuel J. Leffler, Marshall Kirk McKusick, Michael J. Karels and John S. Quarterman. The book, which is a standard reference book on the internals of BSD Unix, is so called because the cover has a picture depicting a little devil (a visual play on daemon) in sneakers, holding a pitchfork (referring to one of the characteristic features of Unix, the "fork" system call).

Original PC Motherboard

The original PC motherboard, which premiered in 1982, was a large printed circuit card that contained the 8088 microprocessor, the BIOS, sockets for the CPU's RAM and a collection of slots that auxiliary cards could plug into. Additions like a floppy disk drive or a parallel port or a joystick needed a separate card that was plugged into one of the slots.

Lehigh

Did you know that Lehigh, which appeared in 1987, was the first memory resident virus? The Lehigh virus attacked the 'command.com' file, which was a program file that gave important start-up directions to the computer.

The Colossus Computer

The "Colossus" computer, used to crack German signals intelligence during World War II, was built by Tommy Flowers and crew at the British Post Office Research Station at Dollis Hill.

Spamhaus

Spamhaus, the plural being spamhausen, is a pejorative term for an Internet service provider that permits or even encourages spam mailings from its systems.

Ray Tomlinson

In October 1971, Ray Tomlinson, who has been called the father of email, invented the software that allowed messages to be sent between computers. His email address was tomlinson@bbn-tenexa. BBN was his employer and Tenex was the operating system used by machines at the company.

Featurectomy

Featurectomy is the act of removing a feature from a program. There are two types of featurectomies, the "righteous" and the "reluctant". Righteous featurectomies are performed when the remover believes the program would be more elegant without the feature, or there is a better way to achieve the same end. Reluctant featurectomies are done to satisfy some external constraint such as code size or execution speed.

Hao Jinglong & Hao Jingwen

In 1998, a Chinese court sentenced to death the twin brothers, Hao Jinglong and Hao Jingwen, for breaking into the Industrial and Commercial Bank of China computers and stealing $87,000. The Yangzhou Intermediate People's Court in the eastern Jiangsu province rejected Jingwen's appeal and upheld the death sentence, while suspending Jinglong's sentence in return for his testimony.

Atari Pong

When Atari Pong, the home version of the popular Atari arcade Pong game, was released in 1975, it made a huge cultural splash and started the video game boom. The game, sold through Sears-Roebuck, had two built-in controllers and of course, only played Pong.

The Book of Mozilla

Did you know that if you are using Netscape Navigator and type 'about:mozilla' as a URL, you should see a passage from The Book of Mozilla?

Ninety-Ninety Rule

The Ninety-Ninety Rule is an aphorism attributed to Tom Cargill of Bell Labs. "The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."

Atari's VCS

Atari's VCS (Video Computer System) also called 2600, released in 1977, was the first Atari 8-bit video console that revolutionized the home video game market by refining the concept of a game system that used interchangeable cartridges. Available until around 1990, the console has the longest market time in history.

John Scoch

John Scoch created the idea of a worm at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the late 1970s. The worm was meant to travel through computers on a network, looking for those that were idle and not at work. The worm would then allow people who needed computer time to borrow the idle PC's processing power.

Guiltware

Guiltware is a piece of freeware decorated with a message telling one how long and hard the author worked on it and intimating that one is a no-good freeloader if one does not immediately send him loads of money.

Washing Machines

Did you know that the term Washing Machines refer to old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets? They were so called because of the size of the cabinet and the 'top-loading' access to the media packs and because they were always set on 'spin cycle'.

Virtual Beer

Virtual beer could either signify praise or thanks. The term is used universally in the Linux community. Originally this term signified cash, after the famous incident in which some Brits, who wanted to buy Linus a beer, sent him the money to do so in Finland.

Project Gutenberg

The first etext to appear under the Project Gutenberg was the "Declaration of Independence" typed by Michael Hart himself, the founder of the project.

Lip Service

Did you know that Lip Service by M. J. Rose is said to be the first ebook to be discovered online by the mainstream publishing industry?

Sensorama

In 1956, Morton Heilig invented the Sensorama, the first device for providing multi-sensory virtual experiences. The Sensorama combined projected film, audio, vibration, wind and odors, all designed to make the user feel as if he were actually in the film rather than simply watching it.

HP Pavilion 6330

In 1996, HP and AMD began their collaboration with the introduction of the HP Pavilion 6330, the first AMD processor-based consumer PC from a major manufacturer. The computer featured an AMD K6-2 microprocessor and was priced at $949.

First English Calculator

Did you know that the first English calculator was built in the UK by Sir Samuel Norland in 1688? It was a non-decimal adding machine suitable for use with English money. The device used auxiliary dials instead of a carry mechanism, which required the user to re-enter the numbers manually.

Floating-Point Algorithm

The use of algorithms is fundamental to developing computer programs. But did you know that the Babylonians, during Hammurabi's dynasty (1800-1600 B.C.), used the floating-point algorithm, which included conditional branches and iterations, for excavations, linear equations and geometric problems?

Perl

Perl, which was created almost single-handedly by Larry Wall, stands for Practical Extraction and Report Language. But did you know that Larry also endorsed an alternative meaning - 'Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister'?

Ian Goldberg

On January 28, 1997, Ian Goldberg took on RSA Data Security's challenge and cracked the 40-bit code by linking together 250 idle workstations that allowed him to test 100 billion possible "keys" per hour. In three and a half hours Goldberg decoded the message, which read, "This is why you should use a longer key."

Symantec Probe Network

Did you know that the Symantec Probe Network currently has more than two million decoy accounts, which attract email messages from 20 different countries around the world, allowing Symantec to gauge global spam and phishing activity?

Shigeru Miyamoto

Shigeru Miyamoto, the creator of Mario, once said in an interview that Mario wore a cap because he found it difficult to draw hair. Of course, technology restrictions in the mid-'80s prevented them from animating hair.

Smoke Test

A Smoke Test is a rudimentary form of testing applied to electronic equipment following repair or reconfiguration, in which power is applied and the tester checks for sparks, smoke, or other dramatic signs of fundamental failure.