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.