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

the original QDOS (Quick and Dirty

Operating System) and is said to have regretted it ever since.

Microsoft licensed QDOS order to have something to demo for IBM on

time, and the rest is history. Numerous features, including vaguely

Unix-like but rather broken support for subdirectories, I/O

redirection, and pipelines, were hacked into Microsoft's 2.0 and

subsequent versions; as a result, there are two or more incompatible

versions of many system calls, and MS-DOS programmers can never agree

on basic things like what character to use as an option switch or

whether to be case-sensitive. The resulting appalling mess is now the

highest-unit-volume OS in history. Often known simply as DOS, which

annoys people familiar with other similarly abbreviated operating

systems (the name goes back to the mid-1960s, when it was attached to

IBM's first disk operating system for the 360). The name further

annoys those who know what the term [8943]operating system does (or

ought to) connote; DOS is more properly a set of relatively simple

interrupt services. Some people like to pronounce DOS like "dose", as

in "I don't work on dose, man!", or to compare it to a dose of

brain-damaging drugs (a slogan button in wide circulation among

hackers exhorts: "MS-DOS: Just say No!"). See [8944]mess-dos,

[8945]ill-behaved.

Node:mu, Next:[8946]MUD, Previous:[8947]MS-DOS, Up:[8948]= M =

mu /moo/

The correct answer to the classic trick question "Have you stopped

beating your wife yet?". Assuming that you have no wife or you have

never beaten your wife, the answer "yes" is wrong because it implies

that you used to beat your wife and then stopped, but "no" is worse

because it suggests that you have one and are still beating her.

According to various Discordians and Douglas Hofstadter the correct

answer is usually "mu", a Japanese word alleged to mean "Your question

cannot be answered because it depends on incorrect assumptions".

Hackers tend to be sensitive to logical inadequacies in language, and

many have adopted this suggestion with enthusiasm. The word `mu' is

actually from Chinese, meaning `nothing'; it is used in mainstream

Japanese in that sense. Native speakers do not recognize the

Discordian question-denying use, which almost certainly derives from

overgeneralization of the answer in the following well-known Rinzai

Zen [8949]koan:

A monk asked Joshu, "Does a dog have the Buddha nature?" Joshu

retorted, "Mu!"

See also [8950]has the X nature, [8951]Some AI Koans, and Douglas

Hofstadter's "G�del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid" (pointer

in the [8952]Bibliography in Appendix C.

Node:MUD, Next:[8953]muddie, Previous:[8954]mu, Up:[8955]= M =

MUD /muhd/ n.

[acronym, Multi-User Dungeon; alt. Multi-User Dimension] 1. A class of

[8956]virtual reality experiments accessible via the Internet. These

are real-time chat forums with structure; they have multiple

`locations' like an adventure game, and may include combat, traps,

puzzles, magic, a simple economic system, and the capability for

characters to build more structure onto the database that represents

the existing world. 2. vi. To play a MUD. The acronym MUD is often

lowercased and/or verbed; thus, one may speak of `going mudding', etc.

Historically, MUDs (and their more recent progeny with names of MU-

form) derive from a hack by Richard Bartle and Roy Trubshaw on the

University of Essex's DEC-10 in the early 1980s; descendants of that

game still exist today and are sometimes generically called

BartleMUDs. There is a widespread myth (repeated, unfortunately, by

earlier versions of this lexicon) that the name MUD was trademarked to

the commercial MUD run by Bartle on British Telecom (the motto: "You

haven't lived 'til you've died on MUD!"); however, this is false --

Richard Bartle explicitly placed `MUD' in the public domain in 1985.

BT was upset at this, as they had already printed trademark claims on

some maps and posters, which were released and created the myth.

Students on the European academic networks quickly improved on the MUD

concept, spawning several new MUDs (VAXMUD, AberMUD, LPMUD). Many of

these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction.

Because these had an image as `research' they often survived

administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the

fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult to get in the

U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there.

AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and

quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large

hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some

observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s).

The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize

social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed

to combat and competition (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes

referred to as MU*', withMUD' implicitly reserved for the more

game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third

major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of

AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996

the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more

extensible using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward

greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.

The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with

new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991

there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term [8957]MUD

itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names

corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. It

survived. See also [8958]bonk/oif, [8959]FOD, [8960]link-dead,

[8961]mudhead, [8962]talk mode.

Node:muddie, Next:[8963]mudhead, Previous:[8964]MUD, Up:[8965]= M =

muddie n.

Syn. [8966]mudhead. More common in Great Britain, possibly because

system administrators there like to mutter "bloody muddies" when

annoyed at the species.

Node:mudhead, Next:[8967]muggle, Previous:[8968]muddie, Up:[8969]= M =

mudhead n.

Commonly used to refer to a [8970]MUD player who eats, sleeps, and

breathes MUD. Mudheads have been known to fail their degrees, drop

out, etc., with the consolation, however, that they made wizard level.

When encountered in person, on a MUD, or in a chat system, all a

mudhead will talk about is three topics: the tactic, character, or

wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her from

becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD; why the specific game

he/she has experience with is so much better than any other; and the

MUD he or she is writing or going to write because his/her design

ideas are so much better than in any existing MUD. See also

[8971]wannabee.

To the anthropologically literate, this term may recall the Zuni/Hopi

legend of the mudheads or `koyemshi', mythical half-formed children of

an unnatural union. Figures representing them act as clowns in Zuni

sacred ceremonies. Others may recall the `High School Madness'

sequence from the Firesign Theatre album "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand

Me the Pliers", in which there is a character named "Mudhead".

Node:muggle, Next:[8972]multician, Previous:[8973]mudhead, Up:[8974]=

M =

muggle

[from J.K. Rowling's `Harry Potter' books, 1998] A non-[8975]wizard.

Not as disparaging as [8976]luser; implies vague pity rather than

contempt. In the universe of Rowling's enormously (and deservedly)

popular children's series, muggles and wizards inhabit the same modern

world, but each group is ignorant of the commonplaces of the others'

existence - most muggles are unaware that wizards exist, and wizards

(used to magical ways of doing everything) are perplexed and

fascinated by muggle artifacts.

In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers would adopt

this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily forms compounds such as

`muggle-friendly'. Compare [8977]luser, [8978]mundane.

Node:multician, Next:[8979]Multics, Previous:[8980]muggle, Up:[8981]=

M =

multician /muhl-ti'shn/ n.

[coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] Competent user of [8982]Multics.

Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted the analogous `Unician'.

Node:Multics, Next:[8983]multitask, Previous:[8984]multician,

Up:[8985]= M =

Multics /muhl'tiks/ n.

[from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An early

time-sharing [8986]operating system co-designed by a consortium

including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor to [8987]CTSS.

The design was first presented in 1965, planned for operation in 1967,

first operational in 1969, and took several more years to achieve

respectable performance and stability.

Multics was very innovative for its time -- among other things, it

provided a hierarchical file system with access control on individual

files and introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as

special files. It was also the first OS to run on a symmetric

multiprocessor, and the only general-purpose system to be awarded a B2

security rating by the NSA (see [8988]Orange Book).

Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging that

[8989]second-system effect had bloated Multics to the point of

practical unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in 1972 after

buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful: at

its peak in the 1980s, there were between 75 and 100 Multics sites,

each a multi-million dollar mainframe.

One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken Thompson,

and [8990]Unix deliberately carried through and extended many of

Multics' design ideas; indeed, Thompson described the very name `Unix'

as `a weak pun on Multics'. For this and other reasons, aspects of the

Multics design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See

also [8991]brain-damaged and [8992]GCOS.

MIT ended its development association with Multics in 1977. Honeywell

sold its computer business to Bull in the mid 80s, and development on

Multics was stopped in 1988. Four Multics sites were known to be still

in use as late as 1998. There is a Multics page at

[8993]http://www.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/multics.html.

Node:multitask, Next:[8994]mumblage, Previous:[8995]Multics,

Up:[8996]= M =

multitask n.

Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to

describe a person doing several things at once (but see [8997]thrash).

The term `multiplex', from communications technology (meaning to

handle more than one channel at the same time), is used similarly.

Node:mumblage, Next:[8998]mumble, Previous:[8999]multitask, Up:[9000]=

M =

mumblage /muhm'bl*j/ n.

The topic of one's mumbling (see [9001]mumble). "All that mumblage" is

used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear how the subject

of discussion works, or like "all that crap" when `mumble' is being

used as an implicit replacement for pejoratives.

Node:mumble, Next:[9002]munch, Previous:[9003]mumblage, Up:[9004]= M =

mumble interj.

Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate, or

the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or

indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion. "Don't

you think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid

reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big

enough and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?"

"Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it." 2. [MIT] Expression of

not-quite-articulated agreement, often used as an informal vote of

consensus in a meeting: "So, shall we dike out the COBOL emulation?"

"Mumble!" 3. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement

(distinguished from sense 2 by tone of voice and other cues). "I think

we should buy a [9005]VAX." "Mumble!" Common variant: `mumble frotz'

(see [9006]frotz; interestingly, one does not say `mumble frobnitz'

even though frotz' is short forfrobnitz'). 4. Yet another

[9007]metasyntactic variable, like [9008]foo. 5. When used as a

question ("Mumble?") means "I didn't understand you". 6. Sometimes

used in `public' contexts on-line as a placefiller for things one is

barred from giving details about. For example, a poster with

pre-released hardware in his machine might say "Yup, my machine now

has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for

Mumbleco." 7. A conversational wild card used to designate something

one doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be

[9009]glarked from context. Compare [9010]blurgle. 8. [XEROX PARC] A

colloquialism used to suggest that further discussion would be

fruitless.

Node:munch, Next:[9011]munching, Previous:[9012]mumble, Up:[9013]= M =

munch vt.

[often confused with [9014]mung, q.v.] To transform information in a

serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace

down a data structure. Related to [9015]crunch and nearly synonymous

with [9016]grovel, but connotes less pain.

Node:munching, Next:[9017]munching squares, Previous:[9018]munch,

Up:[9019]= M =

munching n.

Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer