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The Jargon File is a dictionary of common computer lingo (the "jargon"). It is quite funny in many places, though slightly out of date in others. It is also known as The Hacker's Dictionary, or the Hacker's Jargon File. It is public domain, but the authors request attribution. The current incarnation is maintained by Eric S Raymond, and is located here: http://www.catb.org/jargon/ In addition to the glossary of hacker terms which forms the bulk of the file, there are several longer pieces in various appendices.

1 The Jargon File and this Wiki
2 History of the Jargon File
3 See also
4 External links

The Jargon File and this Wiki

Since the Jargon File is in the public domain, entries from the Jargon File can be incorporated into this wiki at will. Keep in mind that the authors of the Jargon File request attribution.

The creators of the File assumed that the reader had some knowledge of the technical meaning of the terms. Also, the File focuses on humor rather than information. Subjects that are the basis of holy wars are explained in a provocative manner, to increase entertainment value, so it is a good idea to edit LQwiki incorporated entries with an eye towards NPOV (neutral point of view). Despite all of this, the File does serve a purpose here. It provides a starting point that LQwiki contributors can build on, which prevents us from having to reinvent the wheel. Also, the file, which was started in the elder days provides insight into the hacker culture which created Linux, and its history.

If you wish to help incorporate the Jargon File into this wiki, it is advised that you concentrate on incorporating Jargon material into existing articles first, and then creating new articles from the Special:Wantedpages list. This will help to ensure that the incorporated entries are on topic.

To add the appropriate attribution to an entry with information from the Jargon File, please include the following:

This will produce "This article is based, in whole or in part, on entry or entries in the Jargon File."

History of the Jargon File

This section comes from the revision history chapter of the Jargon File. http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/revision-history.html

The original Jargon File was a collection of hacker jargon from technical cultures including the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI lab (SAIL), and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities including Bolt, Beranek and Newman (BBN), Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU), and Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI).

The Jargon File (hereafter referred to as `jargon-1' or `the File') was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From this time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC] there. The revisions of jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered `Version 1'.

In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, FTPed a copy of the File to MIT. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to `AI words' and so stored the file on his directory as AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON.

The file was quickly renamed JARGON > (the `>' caused versioning under ITS) as a flurry of enhancements were made by Mark Crispin and Guy L. Steele Jr. Unfortunately, amidst all this activity, nobody thought of correcting the term `jargon' to `slang' until the compendium had already become widely known as the Jargon File.

Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations).

The File expanded by fits and starts until about 1983; Richard Stallman was prominent among the contributors, adding many MIT and ITS-related coinages.

In Spring 1981, a hacker named Charles Spurgeon got a large chunk of the File published in Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quarterly (issue 29, pages 26-35) with illustrations by Phil Wadler and Guy Steele (including a couple of the Crunchly cartoons). This appears to have been the File's first paper publication. (The version of the File located at http://www.catb.org/jargon/ includes the Crunchly cartoons.)

A late version of jargon-1, expanded with commentary for the mass market, was edited by Guy Steele into a book published in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary (Harper & Row CN 1082, ISBN 0-06-091082-8). The other jargon-1 editors (Raphael Finkel, Don Woods, and Mark Crispin) contributed to this revision, as did Richard Stallman and Geoff Goodfellow. This book (now out of print) is hereafter referred to as `Steele-1983' and those six as the Steele-1983 coauthors.

Shortly after the publication of Steele-1983, the File effectively stopped growing and changing. Originally, this was due to a desire to freeze the file temporarily to facilitate the production of Steele-1983, but external conditions caused the `temporary' freeze to become permanent.

The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved ITS.

The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD Unix standard.

In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter project at Digital Equipment Corporation. The File's compilers, already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be.

By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong and continuing influence on hacker language and humor. Even as the advent of the microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of hackerdom, the File (and related materials such as the Some AI Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large accelerated tremendously - but the Jargon File, having passed from living document to icon, remained essentially untouched for seven years.

This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of jargon-1 (a few obsolete PDP-10-related entries were dropped after careful consultation with the editors of Steele-1983). It merges in about 80% of the Steele-1983 text, omitting some framing material and a very few entries introduced in Steele-1983 that are now also obsolete.

The http://www.catb.org/jargon/ version casts a wider net than the old Jargon File; its aim is to cover not just AI or PDP-10 hacker culture but all the technical computing cultures wherein the true hacker-nature is manifested. More than half of the entries now derive from Usenet and represent jargon now current in the C and Unix communities, but special efforts have been made to collect jargon from other cultures including IBM PC programmers, Amiga fans, Mac enthusiasts, and even the IBM mainframe world.

Eric S. Raymond maintains the new File with assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr.; these are the persons primarily reflected in the File's editorial `we', though the editors take pleasure in acknowledging the special contribution of the other coauthors of Steele-1983.

The 2.9.6 version became the main text of The New Hacker's Dictionary, by Eric Raymond (ed.), MIT Press 1991, ISBN 0-262-68069-6.

The 3.0.0 version was published in August 1993 as the second edition of The New Hacker's Dictionary, again from MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-18154-1).

The 4.0.0 version was published in September 1996 as the third edition of The New Hacker's Dictionary from MIT Press (ISBN 0-262-68092-0).

The maintainers are committed to updating the on-line version of the Jargon File through and beyond paper publication, and will continue to make it available to archives and public-access sites as a trust of the hacker community.