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.