Great Worm, the
Great Worm, the n. The 1988 Internet {worm} perpetrated
by {RTM}. This is a play on Tolkien (compare {elvish},
{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
hack was a sort of devastating watershed event in hackish history;
certainly it did more to make non-hackers nervous about the
Internet than anything before or since.
HTML Conversion by AG2HTML.pl V2.94618 & witbrock@cs.cmu.edu