The New Hacker's Dictionary
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The mother of all networks. First incarnated beginning in 1969 as the ARPANET, a U.S. Department of Defense research testbed. Though it has been widely believed that the goal was to develop a network architecture for military command-and-control that could survive disruptions up to and including nuclear war, this is a myth; in fact, ARPANET was conceived from the start as a way to get most economical use out of then-scarce large-computer resources.
As originally imagined, ARPANET's major use would have been to support what is now called remote login and more sophisticated forms of distributed computing, but the infant technology of electronic mail quickly grew to dominate actual usage. Universities, research labs and defense contractors early discovered the Internet's potential as a medium of communication between humans and linked up in steadily increasing numbers, connecting together a quirky mix of academics, techies, hippies, SF fans, hackers, and anarchists. The roots of this lexicon lie in those early years.
Over the next quarter-century the Internet evolved in many ways. The typical machine/OS combination moved from [7241]DEC [7242]PDP-10s and [7243]PDP-20s, running [7244]TOPS-10 and [7245]TOPS-20, to PDP-11s and VAXes and Suns running [7246]Unix, and in the 1990s to Unix on Intel microcomputers. The Internet's protocols grew more capable, most notably in the move from NCP/IP to [7247]TCP/IP in 1982 and the implementation of Domain Name Service in 1983. It was around this time that people began referring to the collection of interconnected networks with ARPANET at its core as "the Internet".
The ARPANET had a fairly strict set of participation guidelines - connected institutions had to be involved with a DOD-related research project. By the mid-80s, many of the organizations clamoring to join didn't fit this profile. In 1986, the National Science Foundation built NSFnet to open up access to its five regional supercomputing centers; NSFnet became the backbone of the Internet, replacing the original ARPANET pipes (which were formally shut down in 1990). Between 1990 and late 1994 the pieces of NSFnet were sold to major telecommunications companies until
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the Internet backbone had gone completely commercial.
That year, 1994, was also the year the mainstream culture discovered the Internet. Once again, the [7248]killer app was not the anticipated one - rather, what caught the public imagination was the hypertext and multimedia features of the World Wide Web. Subsequently the Internet has seen off its only serious challenger (the OSI protocol stack favored by European telecom monopolies) and is in the process of absorbing into itself many of the proprietary networks built during the second wave of wide-area networking after 1980. It is now (1996) a commonplace even in mainstream media to predict that a globally-extended Internet will become the key unifying communications technology of the next century. See also [7249]the network and [7250]Internet address.
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Internet address n.
1. [techspeak] An absolute network address of the form foo@bar.baz, where foo is a user name, bar is a [7254]sitename, and baz is a `domain' name, possibly including periods itself. Contrast with [7255]bang path; see also [7256]the network and [7257]network address. All Internet machines and most UUCP sites can now resolve these addresses, thanks to a large amount of behind-the-scenes magic and [7258]PD software written since 1980 or so. See also [7259]bang path, [7260]domainist. 2. More loosely, any network address reachable through Internet; this includes [7261]bang path addresses and some internal corporate and government networks.
Reading Internet addresses is something of an art. Here are the four most important top-level functional Internet domains followed by a selection of geographical domains:
com commercial organizations
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edu educational institutions
gov U.S. government civilian sites
mil U.S. military sites
Note that most of the sites in the com and edu domains are in the U.S. or Canada.
us sites in the U.S. outside the functional domains
su sites in the ex-Soviet Union (see [7262]kremvax).
uk sites in the United Kingdom
Within the us domain, there are subdomains for the fifty states, each generally with a name identical to the state's postal abbreviation. Within the uk domain, there is an ac subdomain for academic sites and a co domain for commercial ones. Other top-level domains may be divided up in similar ways.
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Internet Death Penalty
[Usenet] (often abbreviated IDP) The ultimate sanction against [7266]spam-emitting sites - complete shunning at the router level of all mail and packets, as well as Usenet messages, from the offending domain(s). Compare [7267]Usenet Death Penalty, with which it is sometimes confused.
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Internet Exploder
[very common] Pejorative hackerism for Microsoft's "Internet Explorer" web browser (also "Internet Exploiter"). Compare [7271]HP-SUX, [7272]AIDX, [7273]buglix, [7274]Macintrash, [7275]Telerat, [7276]ScumOS, [7277]sun-stools, [7278]Slowlaris.
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Internet Exploiter n.
Another common name-of-insult for Internet Explorer, Microsoft's overweight Web Browser; more hostile than [7282]Internet Exploder. Reflects widespread hostility to Microsoft and a sense that it is seeking to hijack, monopolize, and corrupt the Internet. Compare [7283]Exploder and the less pejorative [7284]Netscrape.
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interrupt
1. [techspeak] n. On a computer, an event that interrupts normal processing and temporarily diverts flow-of-control through an "interrupt handler" routine. See also [7288]trap. 2. interj. A request for attention from a hacker. Often explicitly spoken. "Interrupt -- have you seen Joe recently?" See [7289]priority interrupt. 3. Under MS-DOS, nearly synonymous with `system call', because the OS and BIOS routines are both called using the
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INT instruction (see [7290]interrupt list) and because programmers so often have to bypass the OS (going directly to a BIOS interrupt) to get reasonable performance.
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interrupt list n.
[MS-DOS] The list of all known software interrupt calls (both documented and undocumented) for IBM PCs and compatibles, maintained and made available for free redistribution by Ralf Brown [7294]<ralf@cs.cmu.edu>. As of late 1992, it had grown to approximately two megabytes in length.
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interrupts locked out adj.
When someone is ignoring you. In a restaurant, after several fruitless attempts to get the waitress's attention, a hacker might well observe "She must have interrupts locked out". The synonym `interrupts disabled' is also common. Variations abound; "to have one's interrupt mask bit set" and "interrupts masked out" are also heard. See also [7298]spl.
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intro n.
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[[7302]demoscene] Introductory [7303]screen of some production. 2. A short [7304]demo, usually showing just one or two [7305]screens. 3. Small, usually 64k, 40k or 4k [7306]demo. Sizes are generally dictated by [7307]compo rules. See also [7308]dentro, [7309]demo.
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IRC /I-R-C/ n.
[Internet Relay Chat] A worldwide "party line" network that allows one to converse with others in real time. IRC is structured as a network of Internet servers, each of which accepts connections from client programs, one per user. The IRC community and the [7313]Usenet and [7314]MUD communities overlap to some extent, including both hackers and regular folks who have discovered the wonders of computer networks. Some Usenet jargon has been adopted on IRC, as have some conventions such as [7315]emoticons. There is also a vigorous native jargon, represented in this lexicon by entries marked `[IRC]'. See also [7316]talk mode.
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iron n.
Hardware, especially older and larger hardware of [7320]mainframe class with big metal cabinets housing relatively low-density electronics (but the term is also used of modern supercomputers). Often in the phrase [7321]big iron. Oppose [7322]silicon. See also [7323]dinosaur.
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Iron Age n.
In the history of computing, 1961-1971 -- the formative era of commercial [7327]mainframe technology, when ferrite-core [7328]dinosaurs ruled the earth. The Iron Age began, ironically enough, with the delivery of the first minicomputer (the PDP-1) and ended with the introduction of the first commercial microprocessor (the Intel 4004) in 1971. See also [7329]Stone Age; compare [7330]elder days.
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iron box n.
[Unix/Internet] A special environment set up to trap a [7334]cracker logging in over remote connections long enough to be traced. May include a modified [7335]shell restricting the cracker's movements in unobvious ways, and `bait' files designed to keep him interested and logged on. See also [7336]back door, [7337]firewall machine, [7338]Venus flytrap, and Clifford Stoll's account in "[7339]The Cuckoo's Egg" of how he made and used one (see the [7340]Bibliography in Appendix C). Compare [7341]padded cell, [7342]honey pot.
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ironmonger n.
[IBM] A hardware specialist (derogatory). Compare [7346]sandbender, [7347]polygon pusher.
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ISO standard cup of tea n.
[South Africa] A cup of tea with milk and one teaspoon of sugar, where the milk is poured into the cup before the tea. Variations are ISO 0, with no sugar; ISO 2, with two spoons of sugar; and so on. This may derive from the "NATO standard" cup of coffee and tea (milk and two sugars), military slang going back to the late 1950s and parodying NATO's relentless bureacratic drive to standardize parts across European and U.S. militaries.
Like many ISO standards, this one has a faintly alien ring in North America, where hackers generally shun the decadent British practice of adulterating perfectly good tea with dairy products and prefer instead to add a wedge of lemon, if anything. If one were feeling extremely silly, one might hypothesize an analogous `ANSI standard cup of tea' and wind up with a political situation distressingly similar to several that arise in much more serious technical contexts. (Milk and lemon don't mix very well.)
[2000 update: There is now, in fact, a `British Standard BS6008: How to make a standard cup of tea.' - ESR]
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ISP /I-S-P/
Common abbreviation for Internet Service Provider, a kind of company that barely existed before 1993. ISPs sell Internet access to the mass market. While the big nationwide commercial BBSs with Internet access (like America Online, CompuServe, GEnie, Netcom, etc.) are technically ISPs, the term is usually reserved for local or regional small providers (often run by hackers turned entrepreneurs) who resell Internet access cheaply without
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themselves being information providers or selling advertising. Compare [7354]NSP.
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ITS /I-T-S/ n.
1. Incompatible Time-sharing System, an influential though highly idiosyncratic operating system written for PDP-6s and PDP-10s at MIT and long used at the MIT AI Lab. Much AI-hacker jargon derives from ITS folklore, and to have been `an ITS hacker' qualifies one instantly as an old-timer of the most venerable sort. ITS pioneered many important innovations, including transparent file sharing between machines and terminal-independent I/O. After about 1982, most actual work was shifted to newer machines, with the remaining ITS boxes run essentially as a hobby and service to the hacker community. The shutdown of the lab's last ITS machine in May 1990 marked the end of an era and sent old-time hackers into mourning nationwide (see [7358]high moby). 2. A mythical image of operating-system perfection worshiped by a bizarre, fervent retro-cult of old-time hackers and ex-users (see [7359]troglodyte, sense 2). ITS worshipers manage somehow to continue believing that an OS maintained by assembly-language hand-hacking that supported only monocase 6-character filenames in one directory per account remains superior to today's state of commercial art (their venom against [7360]Unix is particularly intense). See also [7361]holy wars, [7362]Weenix.
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IWBNI //
Abbreviation for `It Would Be Nice If'. Compare [7366]WIBNI.
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IYFEG //
[Usenet] Abbreviation for `Insert Your Favorite Ethnic Group'. Used as a meta-name when telling ethnic jokes on the net to avoid offending anyone. See [7370]JEDR.
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Node:= J =, Next:[7371]= K =, Previous:[7372]= I =, Up:[7373]The Jargon Lexicon
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*[7374]J. Random:
*[7375]J. Random Hacker:
*[7376]jack in:
*[7377]jaggies:
*[7378]Java:
*[7379]JCL:
*[7380]JEDR:
*[7381]Jeff K.:
* [7382]jello: