Revision History

Revision History
==================

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.  Some terms in it date back
considerably earlier ({frob} and some senses of {moby}, for instance,
go back to the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and are believed to
date at least back to the early 1960s).  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, {FTP}ed 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.

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 M. 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 hackish 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 {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.

This new 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 <esr@snark.thyrsus.com> maintains the new File with
assistance from Guy L. Steele Jr. <gls@think.com>; these are the
persons primarily reflected in the File's editorial `we', though we
take pleasure in acknowledging the special contribution of the other
coauthors of Steele-1983.  Please email all additions, corrections,
and correspondence relating to the Jargon File to jargon@thyrsus.com.

(Warning: other email addresses appear in this file *but are not
guaranteed to be correct* later than the revision date on the first
line.  *Don't* email us if an attempt to reach your idol bounces
--- we have no magic way of checking addresses or looking up people.)

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 September 1993 as the second
edition of "The New Hacker's Dictionary", again from MIT Press (ISBN
0-262-18154-1).

If you want the book, you should be able to find it at any of the
major bookstore chains.  Failing that, you can order by mail from

        The MIT Press
        55 Hayward Street
        Cambridge, MA 02142

or order by phone at (800)-356-0343 or (617)-625-8481.

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.

Here is a chronology of the high points in the recent on-line
revisions:

Version 2.1.1, Jun 12 1990: the Jargon File comes alive again after a
seven-year hiatus.  Reorganization and massive additions were by Eric
S.  Raymond, approved by Guy Steele.  Many items of UNIX, C, USENET,
and microcomputer-based jargon were added at that time.

Version 2.9.6, Aug 16 1991: corresponds to reproduction copy for book.
This version had 18952 lines, 148629 words, 975551 characters, and
1702 entries.

Version 2.9.8, Jan 01 1992: first public release since the book,
including over fifty new entries and numerous corrections/additions to
old ones.  Packaged with version 1.1 of vh(1) hypertext reader.  This
version had 19509 lines, 153108 words, 1006023 characters, and 1760
entries.

Version 2.9.9, Apr 01 1992: folded in XEROX PARC lexicon.  This
version had 20298 lines, 159651 words, 1048909 characters, and 1821
entries.

Version 2.9.10, Jul 01 1992: lots of new historical material.  This
version had 21349 lines, 168330 words, 1106991 characters, and 1891
entries.

Version 2.9.11, Jan 01 1993: lots of new historical material.  This
version had 21725 lines, 171169 words, 1125880 characters, and 1922
entries.

Version 2.9.12, May 10 1993: a few new entries & changes, marginal
MUD/IRC slang and some borderline techspeak removed, all in
preparation for 2nd Edition of TNHD.  This version had 22238 lines,
175114 words, 1152467 characters, and 1946 entries.

Version 3.0.0, Jul 27 1993: manuscript freeze for 2nd edition of TNHD.
This version had 22548 lines, 177520 words, 1169372 characters, and
1961 entries.

Version 3.1.0, Oct 15 1994: interim release to test WWW conversion.
This version had 23197 lines, 181001 words, 1193818 characters, and
1990 entries.

Version 3.2.0, Mar 15 1995: Spring 1995 update.  This version had
23822 lines, 185961 words, 1226358 characters, and 2031 entries.


Version numbering: Version numbers should be read as
major.minor.revision.  Major version 1 is reserved for the `old' (ITS)
Jargon File, jargon-1.  Major version 2 encompasses revisions by ESR
(Eric S. Raymond) with assistance from GLS (Guy L.  Steele, Jr.)
leading up to and including the second paper edition.  From now on,
major version number N.00 will probably correspond to the Nth paper
edition.  Usually later versions will either completely supersede or
incorporate earlier versions, so there is generally no point in
keeping old versions around.

Our thanks to the coauthors of Steele-1983 for oversight and
assistance, and to the hundreds of Usenetters (too many to name here)
who contributed entries and encouragement.  More thanks go to several
of the old-timers on the Usenet group alt.folklore.computers, who
contributed much useful commentary and many corrections and valuable
historical perspective: Joseph M. Newcomer <jn11+@andrew.cmu.edu>,
Bernie Cosell <cosell@bbn.com>, Earl Boebert <boebert@SCTC.com>, and
Joe Morris <jcmorris@mwunix.mitre.org>.

We were fortunate enough to have the aid of some accomplished
linguists.  David Stampe <stampe@uhunix.uhcc.hawaii.edu> and Charles
Hoequist <hoequist@bnr.ca> contributed valuable criticism; Joe Keane
<jgk@osc.osc.com> helped us improve the pronunciation guides.

A few bits of this text quote previous works.  We are indebted to
Brian A. LaMacchia <bal@zurich.ai.mit.edu> for obtaining permission
for us to use material from the "TMRC Dictionary"; also, Don Libes
<libes@cme.nist.gov> contributed some appropriate material from his
excellent book "Life With UNIX".  We thank Per Lindberg
<per@front.se>, author of the remarkable Swedish-language 'zine
"Hackerbladet", for bringing "FOO!" comics to our attention and
smuggling one of the IBM hacker underground's own baby jargon files
out to us.  Thanks also to Maarten Litmaath for generously allowing
the inclusion of the ASCII pronunciation guide he formerly maintained.
And our gratitude to Marc Weiser of XEROX PARC
<Marc_Weiser.PARC@xerox.com> for securing us permission to quote from
PARC's own jargon lexicon and shipping us a copy.

It is a particular pleasure to acknowledge the major contributions of
Mark Brader <msb@sq.com> and Steve Summit <scs@adam.mit.edu> to the
File and Dictionary; they have read and reread many drafts, checked
facts, caught typos, submitted an amazing number of thoughtful
comments, and done yeoman service in catching typos and minor usage
bobbles.  Their rare combination of enthusiasm, persistence,
wide-ranging technical knowledge, and precisionism in matters of
language has been of invaluable help.  The sustained volume and
quality of Mr. Brader's input over many months, especially, has only
allowed him to escape co-editor credit by the slimmest of margins.

Finally, George V. Reilly <georgere@microsoft.com> helped with TeX
arcana and painstakingly proofread some 2.7 and 2.8 versions, and Eric
Tiedemann <est@thyrsus.com> contributed sage advice throughout on
rhetoric, amphigory, and philosophunculism.