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grault
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= G =
gray goon.
A hypothetical substance composed ofsagans of sub-micron-sized self-replicating robots programmed to make copies of themselves out of whatever is available. The image that goes with the term is one of the entire biosphere of Earth being eventually converted to robot goo. This is the simplest of thenanotechnologydisaster scenarios, easily refuted by arguments from energy requirements and elemental abundances. Compareblue goo.
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Great Renaming
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Great Runes
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gray goo
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Great Renamingn.
Theflag dayin 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on theUsenethad their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. "The oldest sources group iscomp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it wasnet.sources." There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.
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Great Runes
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Great Worm
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Great Renaming
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Great Runesn.
Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See alsorunes,smash case,fold case.
There is a widespread legend (repeated by earlier versions of this entry, though tagged as folklore) that the uppercase-only support of various old character codes and I/O equipment was chosen by a religious person in a position of power at the Teletype Company because supporting both upper and lower cases was too expensive and supporting lower case only would have made it impossible to spell `God' correctly. Not true; the upper-case interpretation of teleprinter codes was well established by 1870, long before Teletype was even founded.
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Great Worm
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great-wall
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Great Runes
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Great Wormn.
The 1988 Internetwormperpetrated byRTM. This is a play on Tolkien (compareelvish,elder days). In the fantasy history of his Middle Earth books, there were dragons powerful enough to lay waste to entire regions; two of these (Scatha and Glaurung) were known as "the Great Worms". This usage expresses the connotation that the RTM crack was a sort of devastating watershed event in hacker history; certainly it did more to make non-hackers nervous about the Internet than anything before or since.
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great-wall
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Green Book
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great-wallvi.,n.
[from SF fandom] A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style and shared. There is a common heuristic about the amount of food to order, expressed as "Get N - 1 entrees"; the value of N, which is the number of people in the group, can be inferred from context (seeN). Seeoriental food,ravs,stir-fried random.
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Green Book
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green bytes
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Green Bookn.
1. One of the three standardPostScriptreferences: "PostScript Language Program Design", bylined `Adobe Systems' (Addison-Wesley, 1988; QA76.73.P67P66 ISBN 0-201-14396-8); see alsoRed Book,Blue Book, and theWhite Book(sense 2). 2. Informal name for one of the three standard references on SmallTalk: "Smalltalk-80: Bits of History, Words of Advice", by Glenn Krasner (Addison-Wesley, 1983; QA76.8.S635S58; ISBN 0-201-11669-3) (this, too, is associated with blue and red books). 3. The "X/Open Compatibility Guide", which defines an international standardUnixenvironment that is a proper superset of POSIX/SVID; also includes descriptions of a standard utility toolkit, systems administrations features, and the like. This grimoire is taken with particular seriousness in Europe. SeePurple Book. 4. The IEEE 1003.1 POSIX Operating Systems Interface standard has been dubbed "The Ugly Green Book". 5. Any of the 1992 standards issued by the CCITT's tenth plenary assembly. These include, among other things, the X.400 email standard and the Group 1 through 4 fax standards. See alsobook titles.
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green bytes
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green card
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Green Book
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green bytesn.
(also `green words') 1. Meta-information embedded in a file, such as the length of the file or its name; as opposed to keeping such information in a separate description file or record. The term comes from an IBM user's group meeting (ca. 1962) at which these two approaches were being debated and the diagram of the file on the blackboard had the `green bytes' drawn in green. 2. By extension, the non-data bits in any self-describing format. "A GIF file contains, among other things, green bytes describing the packing method for the image." Compareout-of-band,zigamorph,fence(sense 1).
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green card
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green lightning
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green bytes
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green cardn.
[after the "IBM System/360 Reference Data" card] A summary of an assembly language, even if the color is not green and not a card. Less frequently used now because of the decrease in the use of assembly language. "I'll go get my green card so I can check the addressing mode for that instruction."
The original green card became a yellow card when the System/370 was introduced, and later a yellow booklet. An anecdote from IBM refers to a scene that took place in a programmers' terminal room at Yorktown in 1978. Aluseroverheard one of the programmers ask another "Do you have a green card?" The other grunted and passed the first a thick yellow booklet. At this point the luser turned a delicate shade of olive and rapidly left the room, never to return.
In fall 2000 it was reported from Electronic Data Systems that the green card for 370 machines has been a blue-green booklet since 1989.
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green lightning
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green machine
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green card
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green lightningn.
[IBM] 1. Apparently random flashing streaks on the face of 3278-9 terminals while a new symbol set is being downloaded. This hardware bug was left deliberately unfixed, as some genius within IBM suggested it would let the user know that `something is happening'. That, it certainly does. Later microprocessor-driven IBM color graphics displays were actuallyprogrammedto produce green lightning! 2. [proposed] Any bug perverted into an alleged feature by adroit rationalization or marketing. "Motorola calls the CISC cruft in the 88000 architecture `compatibility logic', but I call it green lightning". See alsofeature(sense 6).
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green machine
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Green's Theorem
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green lightning
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green machinen.
A computer or peripheral device that has been designed and built to military specifications for field equipment (that is, to withstand mechanical shock, extremes of temperature and humidity, and so forth). Comes from the olive-drab `uniform' paint used for military equipment.
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Green's Theorem
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greenbar
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green machine
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Green's Theoremprov.
[TMRC] For any story, in any group of people there will be at least one person who has not heard the story. A refinement of the theorem states that there will beexactlyone person (if there were more than one, it wouldn't be as bad to re-tell the story). [The name of this theorem is a play on a fundamental theorem in calculus. --ESR]
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greenbar
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grep
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Green's Theorem
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greenbarn.
A style of fanfolded continuous-feed paper with alternating green and white bars on it, especially used in old-style line printers. This slang almost certainly dates way back to mainframe days.
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grep
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gribble
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greenbar
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grep/grep/ vi.
[from the qed/ed editor idiom g/re/p, whererestands for a regular expression, to Globally search for the Regular Expression and Print the lines containing matches to it, viaUnixgrep(1)] To rapidly scan a file or set of files looking for a particular string or pattern (when browsing through a large set of files, one may speak of `grepping around'). By extension, to look for something by pattern. "Grep the bulletin board for the system backup schedule, would you?" See alsovgrep.
[It has also been alleged that the source is from the title of a paper "A General Regular Expression Parser" -ESR]
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gribble
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grilf
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gribblen.
Random binary data rendered as unreadable text. Noise characters in a data stream are displayed as gribble. Modems with mismatched bitrates usually generate gribble (more specifically,baud barf). Dumping a binary file to the screen is an excellent source of gribble, and (if the bell/speaker is active) headaches.
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grilf
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grilf// n.
Girlfriend. Likenewsfroupandfilk, a typo reincarnated as a new word. Seems to have originated sometime in 1992 onUsenet. [A friend tells me there was a Lloyd Biggle SF novel "Watchers Of The Dark", in which alien species after species goes insane and begins to chant "Grilf! Grilf!". A human detective eventually determines that the word means "Liar!" I hope this has nothing to do with the popularity of the Usenet term. --ESR]
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grind
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grindvt.
1. [MIT and Berkeley; now rare] To prettify hardcopy of code, especially LISP code, by reindenting lines, printing keywords and comments in distinct fonts (if available), etc. This usage was associated with the MacLISP community and is now rare;prettyprintwas and is the generic term for such operations. 2. [Unix] To generate the formatted version of a document from thenroff,troff,TeX, or Scribe source. 3. [common] To run seemingly interminably, esp. (but not necessarily) if performing some tedious and inherently useless task. Similar tocrunchorgrovel. Grinding has a connotation of using a lot of CPU time, but it is possible to grind a disk, network, etc. See alsohog. 4. To make the whole system slow. "Troff really grinds a PDP-11." 5. `grind grind' excl. Roughly, "Isn't the machine slow today!"
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grind crank
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grind crankn. //
A mythical accessory to a terminal. A crank on the side of a monitor, which when operated makes a zizzing noise and causes the computer to run faster. Usually one does not refer to a grind crank out loud, but merely makes the appropriate gesture and noise. Seegrind.
Historical note: At least one real machine actually had a grind crank -- the R1, a research machine built toward the end of the days of the great vacuum tube computers, in 1959. R1 (also known as `The Rice Institute Computer' (TRIC) and later as `The Rice University Computer' (TRUC)) had a single-step/free-run switch for use when debugging programs. Since single-stepping through a large program was rather tedious, there was also a crank with a cam and gear arrangement that repeatedly pushed the single-step button. This allowed one to `crank' through a lot of code, then slow down to single-step for a bit when you got near the code of interest, poke at some registers using the console typewriter, and then keep on cranking.
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gripenet
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gritch
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gripenetn.
[IBM] A wry (and thoroughly unofficial) name for IBM's internal VNET system, deriving from its common use by IBMers to voice pointed criticism of IBM management that would be taboo in more formal channels.
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gritch
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grok
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gritch/grich/
[MIT] 1. n. A complaint (often caused by aglitch). 2. vi. To complain. Often verb-doubled: "Gritch gritch". 3. A synonym forglitch(as verb or noun).
Interestingly, this word seems to have a separate history fromglitch, with which it is often confused. Back in the early 1960s, when `glitch' was strictly a hardware-tech's term of art, the Burton House dorm at M.I.T. maintained a "Gritch Book", a blank volume, into which the residents hand-wrote complaints, suggestions, and witticisms. Previous years' volumes of this tradition were maintained, dating back to antiquity. The word "gritch" was described as a portmanteau of "gripe" and "bitch". Thus, sense 3 above is at least historically incorrect.
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grok
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gronk
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grok/grok/, var. /grohk/ vt.
[from the novel "Stranger in a Strange Land", by Robert A. Heinlein, where it is a Martian word meaning literally `to drink' and metaphorically `to be one with'] The emphatic form is `grok in fullness'. 1. To understand, usually in a global sense. Connotes intimate and exhaustive knowledge. Contrastzen, which is similar supernal understanding experienced as a single brief flash. See alsoglark. 2. Used of programs, may connote merely sufficient understanding. "Almost all C compilers grok thevoidtype these days."
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gronk
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gronk/gronk/ vt.
[popularized by Johnny Hart's comic strip "B.C." but the word apparently predates that] 1. To clear the state of a wedged device and restart it. More severe than `tofrob' (sense 2). 2. [TMRC] To cut, sever, smash, or similarly disable. 3. The sound made by many 3.5-inch diskette drives. In particular, the microfloppies on a Commodore Amiga go "grink, gronk".
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gronk out
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gronked
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gronk
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gronk outvi.
To cease functioning. Of people, to go home and go to sleep. "I guess I'll gronk out now; see you all tomorrow."
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gronked
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gronkedadj.
1. Broken. "The teletype scanner was gronked, so we took the system down." 2. Of people, the condition of feeling very tired or (less commonly) sick. "I've been chasing that bug for 17 hours now and I am thoroughly gronked!" Comparebroken, which means about the same asgronkused of hardware, but connotes depression or mental/emotional problems in people.
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grovel
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grue
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grovelvi.
1. To work interminably and without apparent progress. Often used transitively with `over' or `through'. "The file scavenger has been groveling through the /usr directories for 10 minutes now." Comparegrindandcrunch. Emphatic form: `grovel obscenely'. 2. To examine minutely or in complete detail. "The compiler grovels over the entire source program before beginning to translate it." "I grovelled through all the documentation, but I still couldn't find the command I wanted."
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grue
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grunge
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gruen.
[from archaic English verb for `shudder', as with fear] The grue was originated in the gameZork(Dave Lebling took the name from Jack Vance's "Dying Earth" fantasies) and used in several otherInfocomgames as a hint that you should perhaps look for a lamp, torch or some type of light source. Wandering into a dark area would cause the game to prompt you, "It is very dark. If you continue you are likely to be eaten by a grue." If you failed to locate a light source within the next couple of moves this would indeed be the case.
The grue, according to scholars of the Great Underground Empire, is a sinister, lurking presence in the dark places of the earth. Its favorite diet is either adventurers or enchanters, but its insatiable appetite is tempered by its extreme fear of light. No grues have ever been seen by the light of day, and only a few have been observed in their underground lairs. Of those who have seen grues, few have survived their fearsome jaws to tell the tale. Grues have sharp claws and fangs, and an uncontrollable tendency to slaver and gurgle. They are certainly the most evil-tempered of all creatures; to say they are touchy is a dangerous understatement. "Sour as a grue" is a common expression, even among themselves.
All this folklore is widely known among hackers.
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grunge
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gubbish