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.