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The Jargon File and the New Hacker's Dictionary
2007.05.13. 08:52
 The Jargon File
The name is a bit of a misnomer as instead of being a compendium of technical language, it is a collection of the slang1 that hackers2 use 'among themselves for fun, social communication, and technical debate'.
The file isn't just a fixed collection, with time the use of words changes, new words appear, and some pass into oblivion, so the file has gone through many revisions and several managements over its 28 years.
History of the File
The file was first incarnated at Standford in 1975, as a collection of the jargon used by hackers at the AI Labs at MIT and Stanford (SAIL), and in other communities connected by the old ARPANET. Until the SAIL computer was shutdown in 1991, the file was held there as AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC].
The file reached MIT in 1976, when Mark Crispin FTPed it to his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON. The name was quickly changed to JARGON> and a whole raft of changes where incorporated by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr5. Shortly afterwards, Raphael Finkel (the first SAIL contact for the file) handed over the SAIL management of the file to Don Woods. From then the file was kept in duplicate at both sites with the two teams organising periodic synchronisations.
The Printed Dictionary
The earliest printed publication of the file appears to have been in Stewart Brand's 'CoEvolution Quarterly'6 in 1971 through the efforts of Charles Spurgeon with illustrations from Phil Wadler and Guy Steele.
In 1983 a copy of the jargon file expanded with commentary to make it suitable for the mass market was published as 'The Hacker's Dictionary'7. The other editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) also contributed as did Richard M. Stallman8 and Geoff Goodfellow.
Until 1983 the file had been steadily expanding (data?) with many pieces of MIT (and ITS9) jargon being added. The file had been frozen (originally temporarily) to allow the book to be published, but funding cuts to the labs meant that the file stopped changing.
A New Decade, A New Book
For 7 years the file remained unchanged, until the publication in 1991 of The New Hacker's Dictionary, edited by Eric S. Raymond10.
History of the Jargon
Some of the terms in the jargon file date back before 1975 (when they were first collected) to the early 1960s, and the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC; footnote, linkify) at MIT.
Why?
Essential Hacker Publications
1 The Jargon File was named before someone pointed out that it was actually a collection of slang. This has meant that the slang term 'techspeak' (itself part of the Jargon File) is used in the jargon file to mean technical terms specific to a domain. This article will also follow that convention from this point on.
2 The term 'hacker' has had numerous definitions, the original defition according to FOLDOC3, and the Jargon File is 'someone who makes furniture with an axe'. Webster's (1913) unhelpfully suggests that a hacker is someone 'who, or that which, hacks'. WordNet on the other hand suggests as its first definition 'someone who plays golf poorly'; it also offers as its third definition 'one who works hard at boring tasks', and this nicely leads on to the major definitions given by WordNet, FOLDOC and the Jargon File.
WordNet sums up the modern definiton of a hacker succintly as 'a programmer for whom computing is its own reward; may enjoy the challenge of breaking into other computers', this subtly includes two different sets of people, and this causes some misunderstandings. Since the second part fo the definiton is now deprecated in favour of the term 'cracker', this article isn't going to discuss this much further apart from mentioning that hackers like puzzles too.
Common traits of hackers include an appreciation of 'hack value' [linkify], being able to code quickly and is enthusiastic about coding (rather than theorising about programming), enjoying exploring the details of a system stretching their capabilities, and finally the most inclusive trait: 'an expert or enthusiast of any kind'4, this means that one can find hackers in many fields from astronomy through to zoology (via topology and topography).
3 FOLDOC is the Free On-line Dictionary of Computing. It is a searchable, electronic dictionary of anything related to computing.
4 Including sub-area of computing such as a specific system, for example this researcher would describe himself as a 'perl hacker'.
5 Guy Lewis Steele Jr. is noted for contributing to the design of Scheme (with Gerald Sussman) and the design of the original Emacs command set. He has also contributed to the jargon file, and was the first TeX porter.
6 issue 29, pages 26-35
7 Edited by Guy Steele, Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8 (now out of print).
8 Richard M. Stallman ('rms') founder of the GNU project, which has become popular through the success of Linux, with an estimated 20 million users of GNU/Linux systems. He himself has written core parts of the GNU project including GNU Emacs, the GNU Compiler Collection, and the GNU symbolic debugger.
9 The time-sharing operating system used at the MIT AI Lab. It had a couple of notable features including transparent file sharing, and device-independant terminal I/O.
10 Eric S. Raymond ('esr') is most populary know for his essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar11, but he has a long list of essays on anthropology (hacker and open source), science, and opinion. He is a co-founder of the Open Source Initiative12, a maintains a selection of unix tools. Outside of computers he has interests in science fiction, wargaming, writing, martial arts, and notably firearms.
11 The Cathedral and the Bazaar is a book and an essay about the so-called 'bazaar' method of development popularised by the Linux kernel, where a large number of developers work successfully together to develop very quickly. Previously the rhetoric was that this would never work since the amount of management needs for such a large number of people would outweigh the amount of work done.
12 The Open Source Initiative is an organisation which promotes open source primarily by offering a certification that a product is open source.
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