The New Hacker's Dictionary
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LPMUD). Many of these had associated bulletin-board systems for social interaction. Because these had an image as `research' they often survived administrative hostility to BBSs in general. This, together with the fact that Usenet feeds were often spotty and difficult to get in the U.K., made the MUDs major foci of hackish social interaction there.
AberMUD and other variants crossed the Atlantic around 1988 and quickly gained popularity in the U.S.; they became nuclei for large hacker communities with only loose ties to traditional hackerdom (some observers see parallels with the growth of Usenet in the early 1980s). The second wave of MUDs (TinyMUD and variants) tended to emphasize social interaction, puzzles, and cooperative world-building as opposed to combat and competition (in writing, these social MUDs are sometimes referred to as `MU*', with `MUD' implicitly reserved for the more game-oriented ones). By 1991, over 50% of MUD sites were of a third major variety, LPMUD, which synthesizes the combat/puzzle aspects of AberMUD and older systems with the extensibility of TinyMud. In 1996 the cutting edge of the technology is Pavel Curtis's MOO, even more extensible using a built-in object-oriented language. The trend toward greater programmability and flexibility will doubtless continue.
The state of the art in MUD design is still moving very rapidly, with new simulation designs appearing (seemingly) every month. Around 1991 there was an unsuccessful movement to deprecate the term [8957]MUD itself, as newer designs exhibit an exploding variety of names corresponding to the different simulation styles being explored. It survived. See also [8958]bonk/oif, [8959]FOD, [8960]link-dead, [8961]mudhead, [8962]talk mode.
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muddie n.
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Syn. [8966]mudhead. More common in Great Britain, possibly because system administrators there like to mutter "bloody muddies" when annoyed at the species.
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mudhead n.
Commonly used to refer to a [8970]MUD player who eats, sleeps, and breathes MUD. Mudheads have been known to fail their degrees, drop out, etc., with the consolation, however, that they made wizard level. When encountered in person, on a MUD, or in a chat system, all a mudhead will talk about is three topics: the tactic, character, or wizard that is supposedly always unfairly stopping him/her from becoming a wizard or beating a favorite MUD; why the specific game he/she has experience with is so much better than any other; and the MUD he or she is writing or going to write because his/her design ideas are so much better than in any existing MUD. See also [8971]wannabee.
To the anthropologically literate, this term may recall the Zuni/Hopi legend of the mudheads or `koyemshi', mythical half-formed children of an unnatural union. Figures representing them act as clowns in Zuni sacred ceremonies. Others may recall the `High School Madness' sequence from the Firesign Theatre album "Don't Crush That Dwarf, Hand Me the Pliers", in which there is a character named "Mudhead".
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muggle
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[from J.K. Rowling's `Harry Potter' books, 1998] A non-[8975]wizard. Not as disparaging as [8976]luser; implies vague pity rather than contempt. In the universe of Rowling's enormously (and deservedly) popular children's series, muggles and wizards inhabit the same modern world, but each group is ignorant of the commonplaces of the others' existence - most muggles are unaware that wizards exist, and wizards (used to magical ways of doing everything) are perplexed and fascinated by muggle artifacts.
In retrospect it seems completely inevitable that hackers would adopt this metaphor, and in hacker usage it readily forms compounds such as `muggle-friendly'. Compare [8977]luser, [8978]mundane.
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multician /muhl-ti'shn/ n.
[coined at Honeywell, ca. 1970] Competent user of [8982]Multics. Perhaps oddly, no one has ever promoted the analogous `Unician'.
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Multics /muhl'tiks/ n.
[from "MULTiplexed Information and Computing Service"] An early time-sharing [8986]operating system co-designed by a consortium including MIT, GE, and Bell Laboratories as a successor to [8987]CTSS. The design was first presented in 1965, planned for operation in 1967, first operational in 1969, and took several more years to achieve respectable performance and stability.
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Multics was very innovative for its time -- among other things, it provided a hierarchical file system with access control on individual files and introduced the idea of treating all devices uniformly as special files. It was also the first OS to run on a symmetric multiprocessor, and the only general-purpose system to be awarded a B2 security rating by the NSA (see [8988]Orange Book).
Bell Labs left the development effort in 1969 after judging that [8989]second-system effect had bloated Multics to the point of practical unusability. Honeywell commercialized Multics in 1972 after buying out GE's computer group, but it was never very successful: at its peak in the 1980s, there were between 75 and 100 Multics sites, each a multi-million dollar mainframe.
One of the former Multics developers from Bell Labs was Ken Thompson, and [8990]Unix deliberately carried through and extended many of Multics' design ideas; indeed, Thompson described the very name `Unix' as `a weak pun on Multics'. For this and other reasons, aspects of the Multics design remain a topic of occasional debate among hackers. See also [8991]brain-damaged and [8992]GCOS.
MIT ended its development association with Multics in 1977. Honeywell sold its computer business to Bull in the mid 80s, and development on Multics was stopped in 1988. Four Multics sites were known to be still in use as late as 1998. There is a Multics page at [8993]http://www.stratus.com/pub/vos/multics/tvv/multics.html.
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multitask n.
Often used of humans in the same meaning it has for computers, to describe a person doing several things at once (but see [8997]thrash). The term
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`multiplex', from communications technology (meaning to handle more than one channel at the same time), is used similarly.
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mumblage /muhm'bl*j/ n.
The topic of one's mumbling (see [9001]mumble). "All that mumblage" is used like "all that stuff" when it is not quite clear how the subject of discussion works, or like "all that crap" when `mumble' is being used as an implicit replacement for pejoratives.
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mumble interj.
1. Said when the correct response is too complicated to enunciate, or the speaker has not thought it out. Often prefaces a longer answer, or indicates a general reluctance to get into a long discussion. "Don't you think that we could improve LISP performance by using a hybrid reference-count transaction garbage collector, if the cache is big enough and there are some extra cache bits for the microcode to use?" "Well, mumble ... I'll have to think about it." 2. [MIT] Expression of not-quite-articulated agreement, often used as an informal vote of consensus in a meeting: "So, shall we dike out the COBOL emulation?" "Mumble!" 3. Sometimes used as an expression of disagreement (distinguished from sense 2 by tone of voice and other cues). "I think we should buy a [9005]VAX." "Mumble!" Common variant: `mumble frotz' (see [9006]frotz; interestingly, one does not say `mumble frobnitz' even though `frotz' is short for `frobnitz'). 4. Yet another [9007]metasyntactic variable, like [9008]foo. 5. When used as a
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question ("Mumble?") means "I didn't understand you". 6. Sometimes used in `public' contexts on-line as a placefiller for things one is barred from giving details about. For example, a poster with pre-released hardware in his machine might say "Yup, my machine now has an extra 16M of memory, thanks to the card I'm testing for Mumbleco." 7. A conversational wild card used to designate something one doesn't want to bother spelling out, but which can be [9009]glarked from context. Compare [9010]blurgle. 8. [XEROX PARC] A colloquialism used to suggest that further discussion would be fruitless.
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munch vt.
[often confused with [9014]mung, q.v.] To transform information in a serial fashion, often requiring large amounts of computation. To trace down a data structure. Related to [9015]crunch and nearly synonymous with [9016]grovel, but connotes less pain.
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munching n.
Exploration of security holes of someone else's computer for thrills, notoriety, or to annoy the system manager. Compare [9020]cracker. See also [9021]hacked off.
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munching squares n.
A [9025]display hack dating back to the PDP-1 (ca. 1962, reportedly discovered by Jackson Wright), which employs a trivial computation (repeatedly plotting the graph Y = X XOR T for successive values of T -- see [9026]HAKMEM items 146-148) to produce an impressive display of moving and growing squares that devour the screen. The initial value of T is treated as a parameter, which, when well-chosen, can produce amazing effects. Some of these, later (re)discovered on the LISP machine, have been christened `munching triangles' (try AND for XOR and toggling points instead of plotting them), `munching w's', and `munching mazes'. More generally, suppose a graphics program produces an impressive and ever-changing display of some basic form, foo, on a display terminal, and does it using a relatively simple program; then the program (or the resulting display) is likely to be referred to as `munching foos'. [This is a good example of the use of the word [9027]foo as a [9028]metasyntactic variable.]
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munchkin /muhnch'kin/ n.
[from the squeaky-voiced little people in L. Frank Baum's "The Wizard of Oz"] A teenage-or-younger micro enthusiast hacking BASIC or something else equally constricted. A term of mild derision -- munchkins are annoying but some grow up to be hackers after passing through a [9032]larval stage. The term [9033]urchin is also used. See also [9034]wannabee, [9035]bitty box.
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mundane n.
[from SF fandom] 1. A person who is not in science fiction fandom. 2. A person who is not in the computer industry. In this sense, most often an adjectival modifier as in "in my mundane life...." See also [9039]Real World, [9040]muggle.
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mung /muhng/ vt.
[in 1960 at MIT, `Mash Until No Good'; sometime after that the derivation from the [9044]recursive acronym `Mung Until No Good' became standard; but see [9045]munge] 1. To make changes to a file, esp. large-scale and irrevocable changes. See [9046]BLT. 2. To destroy, usually accidentally, occasionally maliciously. The system only mungs things maliciously; this is a consequence of [9047]Finagle's Law. See [9048]scribble, [9049]mangle, [9050]trash, [9051]nuke. Reports from [9052]Usenet suggest that the pronunciation /muhnj/ is now usual in speech, but the spelling `mung' is still common in program comments (compare the widespread confusion over the proper spelling of [9053]kluge). 3. The kind of beans the sprouts of which are used in Chinese food. (That's their real name! Mung beans! Really!)
Like many early hacker terms, this one seems to have originated at [9054]TMRC; it was already in use there in 1958. Peter Samson (compiler of the original TMRC lexicon) thinks it may originally have been onomatopoeic for the sound of a relay spring (contact) being twanged. However, it is known that during the World Wars, `mung' was U.S. army slang for the ersatz creamed chipped beef better known as `SOS', and it
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seems quite likely that the word in fact goes back to Scots-dialect [9055]munge.
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munge /muhnj/ vt.
1. [derogatory] To imperfectly transform information. 2. A comprehensive rewrite of a routine, data structure or the whole program. 3. To modify data in some way the speaker doesn't need to go into right now or cannot describe succinctly (compare [9059]mumble). 4. To add [9060]spamblock to an email address.
This term is often confused with [9061]mung, which probably was derived from it. However, it also appears the word `munge' was in common use in Scotland in the 1940s, and in Yorkshire in the 1950s, as a verb, meaning to munch up into a masticated mess, and as a noun, meaning the result of munging something up (the parallel with the [9062]kluge/[9063]kludge pair is amusing). The OED reports `munge' as an archaic verb nmeaning "to wipe (a person's nose)".
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Murphy's Law prov.
The correct, original Murphy's Law reads: "If there are two or more ways to do something, and one of those ways can result in a catastrophe, then someone will do it." This is a principle of defensive design, cited here because it is usually given in mutant forms less descriptive of the challenges of design for [9067]lusers. For example, you don't make a
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two-pin plug symmetrical and then label it `THIS WAY UP'; if it matters which way it is plugged in, then you make the design asymmetrical (see also the anecdote under [9068]magic smoke).
Edward A. Murphy, Jr. was one of the engineers on the rocket-sled experiments that were done by the U.S. Air Force in 1949 to test human acceleration tolerances (USAF project MX981). One experiment involved a set of 16 accelerometers mounted to different parts of the subject's body. There were two ways each sensor could be glued to its mount, and somebody methodically installed all 16 the wrong way around. Murphy then made the original form of his pronouncement, which the test subject (Major John Paul Stapp) quoted at a news conference a few days later.
Within months `Murphy's Law' had spread to various technical cultures connected to aerospace engineering. Before too many years had gone by variants had passed into the popular imagination, changing as they went. Most of these are variants on "Anything that can go wrong, will"; this is correctly referred to as [9069]Finagle's Law. The memetic drift apparent in these mutants clearly demonstrates Murphy's Law acting on itself!
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music n.
A common extracurricular interest of hackers (compare [9073]science-fiction fandom, [9074]oriental food; see also [9075]filk). Hackish folklore has long claimed that musical and programming abilities are closely related, and there has been at least one large-scale statistical study that supports this. Hackers, as a rule, like music and often develop musical appreciation in unusual and interesting directions. Folk music is very big in hacker circles; so is electronic music, and the sort of elaborate instrumental jazz/rock that used to be called `progressive' and isn't recorded much any more. The hacker's musical range tends to be wide; many can