The Jargon File by Eric S. Raymond (sites to read books for free .TXT) 📖

>of Death is a distressingly apt description of what this generally

does to the engine.

Node:fold case, Next:[5336]followup, Previous:[5337]FOD, Up:[5338]= F

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fold case v.

See [5339]smash case. This term tends to be used more by people who

don't mind that their tools smash case. It also connotes that case is

ignored but case distinctions in data processed by the tool in

question aren't destroyed.

Node:followup, Next:[5340]fontology, Previous:[5341]fold case,

Up:[5342]= F =

followup n.

[common] On Usenet, a [5343]posting generated in response to another

posting (as opposed to a [5344]reply, which goes by email rather than

being broadcast). Followups include the ID of the [5345]parent message

in their headers; smart news-readers can use this information to

present Usenet news in `conversation' sequence rather than

order-of-arrival. See [5346]thread.

Node:fontology, Next:[5347]foo, Previous:[5348]followup, Up:[5349]= F

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fontology n.

[XEROX PARC] The body of knowledge dealing with the construction and

use of new fonts (e.g., for window systems and typesetting software).

It has been said that fontology recapitulates file-ogeny.

[Unfortunately, this reference to the embryological dictum that

"Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny" is not merely a joke. On the

Macintosh, for example, System 7 has to go through contortions to

compensate for an earlier design error that created a whole different

set of abstractions for fonts parallel to files' andfolders' --ESR]

Node:foo, Next:[5350]foobar, Previous:[5351]fontology, Up:[5352]= F =

foo /foo/

interj. Term of disgust. 2. [very common] Used very generally as a

sample name for absolutely anything, esp. programs and files (esp.

scratch files). 3. First on the standard list of [5353]metasyntactic

variables used in syntax examples. See also [5354]bar, [5355]baz,

[5356]qux, [5357]quux, [5358]corge, [5359]grault, [5360]garply,

[5361]waldo, [5362]fred, [5363]plugh, [5364]xyzzy, [5365]thud.

When foo' is used in connection withbar' it has generally traced to

the WWII-era Army slang acronym [5366]FUBAR (`Fucked Up Beyond All

Repair'), later modified to [5367]foobar. Early versions of the Jargon

File interpreted this change as a post-war bowdlerization, but it it

now seems more likely that FUBAR was itself a derivative of `foo'

perhaps influenced by German furchtbar' (terrible) -foobar' may

actually have been the original form.

For, it seems, the word `foo' itself had an immediate prewar history

in comic strips and cartoons. The earliest documented uses were in the

"Smokey Stover" comic strip popular in the 1930s, which frequently

included the word "foo". Bill Holman, the author of the strip, filled

it with odd jokes and personal contrivances, including other nonsense

phrases such as "Notary Sojac" and "1506 nix nix". According to the

[5368]Warner Brothers Cartoon Companion Holman claimed to have found

the word "foo" on the bottom of a Chinese figurine. This is plausible;

Chinese statuettes often have apotropaic inscriptions, and this may

have been the Chinese word fu' (sometimes transliteratedfoo'),

which can mean "happiness" when spoken with the proper tone (the

lion-dog guardians flanking the steps of many Chinese restaurants are

properly called "fu dogs"). English speakers' reception of Holman's

foo' nonsense word was undoubtedly influenced by Yiddishfeh' and

English fooey' andfool'.

Holman's strip featured a firetruck called the Foomobile that rode on

two wheels. The comic strip was tremendously popular in the late

1930s, and legend has it that a manufacturer in Indiana even produced

an operable version of Holman's Foomobile. According to the

Encyclopedia of American Comics, `Foo' fever swept the U.S., finding

its way into popular songs and generating over 500 `Foo Clubs.' The

fad left `foo' references embedded in popular culture (including a

couple of appearances in Warner Brothers cartoons of 1938-39) but with

their origins rapidly forgotten.

One place they are known to have remained live is in the U.S. military

during the WWII years. In 1944-45, the term `foo fighters' was in use

by radar operators for the kind of mysterious or spurious trace that

would later be called a UFO (the older term resurfaced in popular

American usage in 1995 via the name of one of the better grunge-rock

bands). Informants connected the term to the Smokey Stover strip.

The U.S. and British militaries frequently swapped slang terms during

the war (see [5369]kluge and [5370]kludge for another important

example) Period sources reported that `FOO' became a semi-legendary

subject of WWII British-army graffiti more or less equivalent to the

American Kilroy. Where British troops went, the graffito "FOO was

here" or something similar showed up. Several slang dictionaries aver

that FOO probably came from Forward Observation Officer, but this

(like the contemporaneous "FUBAR") was probably a [5371]backronym .

Forty years later, Paul Dickson's excellent book "Words" (Dell, 1982,

ISBN 0-440-52260-7) traced "Foo" to an unspecified British naval

magazine in 1946, quoting as follows: "Mr. Foo is a mysterious Second

World War product, gifted with bitter omniscience and sarcasm."

Earlier versions of this entry suggested the possibility that hacker

usage actually sprang from "FOO, Lampoons and Parody", the title of a

comic book first issued in September 1958, a joint project of Charles

and Robert Crumb. Though Robert Crumb (then in his mid-teens) later

became one of the most important and influential artists in

underground comics, this venture was hardly a success; indeed, the

brothers later burned most of the existing copies in disgust. The

title FOO was featured in large letters on the front cover. However,

very few copies of this comic actually circulated, and students of

Crumb's `oeuvre' have established that this title was a reference to

the earlier Smokey Stover comics. The Crumbs may also have been

influenced by a short-lived Canadian parody magazine named `Foo'

published in 1951-52.

An old-time member reports that in the 1959 "Dictionary of the TMRC

Language", compiled at [5372]TMRC, there was an entry that went

something like this:

FOO: The first syllable of the sacred chant phrase "FOO MANE PADME

HUM." Our first obligation is to keep the foo counters turning.

(For more about the legendary foo counters, see [5373]TMRC.) This

definition used Bill Holman's nonsense word, only then two decades old

and demonstrably still live in popular culture and slang, to a

[5374]ha ha only serious analogy with esoteric Tibetan Buddhism.

Today's hackers would find it difficult to resist elaborating a joke

like that, and it is not likely 1959's were any less susceptible.

Almost the entire staff of what later became the MIT AI Lab was

involved with TMRC, and the word spread from there.

Node:foobar, Next:[5375]fool, Previous:[5376]foo, Up:[5377]= F =

foobar n.

[very common] Another widely used [5378]metasyntactic variable; see

[5379]foo for etymology. Probably originally propagated through

DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation ([5380]DEC) in

1960s and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972.

Hackers do not generally use this to mean [5381]FUBAR in either the

slang or jargon sense. See also [5382]Fred Foobar. In RFC1639,

"FOOBAR" was made an abbreviation for "FTP Operation Over Big Address

Records", but this was an obvious [5383]backronym.

Node:fool, Next:[5384]fool file, Previous:[5385]foobar, Up:[5386]= F =

fool n.

As used by hackers, specifically describes a person who habitually

reasons from obviously or demonstrably incorrect premises and cannot

be persuaded by evidence to do otherwise; it is not generally used in

its other senses, i.e., to describe a person with a native incapacity

to reason correctly, or a clown. Indeed, in hackish experience many

fools are capable of reasoning all too effectively in executing their

errors. See also [5387]cretin, [5388]loser, [5389]fool file.

The Algol 68-R compiler used to initialize its storage to the

character string "F00LF00LF00LF00L..." because as a pointer or as a

floating point number it caused a crash, and as an integer or a

character string it was very recognizable in a dump. Sadly, one day a

very senior professor at Nottingham University wrote a program that

called him a fool. He proceeded to demonstrate the correctness of this

assertion by lobbying the university (not quite successfully) to

forbid the use of Algol on its computers. See also [5390]DEADBEEF.

Node:fool file, Next:[5391]Foonly, Previous:[5392]fool, Up:[5393]= F =

fool file n.

[Usenet] A notional repository of all the most dramatically and

abysmally stupid utterances ever. An entire subgenre of [5394]sig

blocks consists of the header "From the fool file:" followed by some

quote the poster wishes to represent as an immortal gem of dimwittery;

for this usage to be really effective, the quote has to be so

obviously wrong as to be laughable. More than one Usenetter has

achieved an unwanted notoriety by being quoted in this way.

Node:Foonly, Next:[5395]footprint, Previous:[5396]fool file,

Up:[5397]= F =

Foonly n.

The [5398]PDP-10 successor that was to have been built by the Super

Foonly project at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory

along with a new operating system. (The name itself came from FOO NLI,

an error message emitted by a PDP-10 assembler at SAIL meaning "FOO is

Not a Legal Identifier". The intention was to leapfrog from the old

[5399]DEC timesharing system SAIL was then running to a new

generation, bypassing TENEX which at that time was the ARPANET

standard. ARPA funding for both the Super Foonly and the new operating

system was cut in 1974. Most of the design team went to DEC and

contributed greatly to the design of the PDP-10 model KL10. 2. The

name of the company formed by Dave Poole, one of the principal Super

Foonly designers, and one of hackerdom's more colorful personalities.

Many people remember the parrot which sat on Poole's shoulder and was

a regular companion. 3. Any of the machines built by Poole's company.

The first was the F-1 (a.k.a. Super Foonly), which was the

computational engine used to create the graphics in the movie "TRON".

The F-1 was the fastest PDP-10 ever built, but only one was ever made.

The effort drained Foonly of its financial resources, and the company

turned towards building smaller, slower, and much less expensive

machines. Unfortunately, these ran not the popular [5400]TOPS-20 but a

TENEX variant called Foonex; this seriously limited their market.

Also, the machines shipped were actually wire-wrapped engineering

prototypes requiring individual attention from more than usually

competent site personnel, and thus had significant reliability

problems. Poole's legendary temper and unwillingness to suffer fools

gladly did not help matters. By the time of the Jupiter project

cancellation in 1983, Foonly's proposal to build another F-1 was

eclipsed by the [5401]Mars, and the company never quite recovered. See

the [5402]Mars entry for the continuation and moral of this story.

Node:footprint, Next:[5403]for free, Previous:[5404]Foonly, Up:[5405]=

F =

footprint n.

The floor or desk area taken up by a piece of hardware. 2. [IBM]

The audit trail (if any) left by a crashed program (often in plural,

`footprints'). See also [5406]toeprint. 3. RAM footprint: The minimum

amount of RAM which an OS or other program takes; this figure gives

one an idea of how much will be left for other applications. How

actively this RAM is used is another matter entirely. Recent

tendencies to featuritis and software bloat can expand the RAM

footprint of an OS to the point of making it nearly unusable in

practice. [This problem is, thankfully, limited to operating systems

so stupid that they don't do virtual memory - ESR]

Node:for free, Next:[5407]for the rest of us,

Previous:[5408]footprint, Up:[5409]= F =

for free adj.

[common] Said of a capability of a programming language or hardware

that is available by its design without needing cleverness to

implement: "In APL, we get the matrix operations for free." "And owing

to the way revisions are stored in this system, you get revision trees

for free." The term usually refers to a serendipitous feature of doing

things a certain way (compare [5410]big win), but it may refer to an

intentional but secondary feature.

Node:for the rest of us, Next:[5411]for values of, Previous:[5412]for

free, Up:[5413]= F =

for the rest of us adj.

[from the Mac slogan "The computer for the rest of us"] 1. Used to

describe a [5414]spiffy product whose affordability shames other

comparable products, or (more often) used sarcastically to describe

[5415]spiffy but very overpriced products. 2. Describes a program with

a limited interface, deliberately