C:\>coldboot

C:\LEXICON> type JARGON.TXT

Lexicon

118 words, slang, and technical terms from computing, in the order they showed up. Each entry says where the word first turns up on the record, and says so plainly when the usual story is folklore or the origin is disputed.

Documented Likely Disputed

118 terms

  1. 1878 / 1947bugA flaw or defect in a machine or program that makes it misbehave.Documented

    Engineers were talking about bugs before computers existed. In a letter of 13 November 1878 Thomas Edison wrote that “Bugs” are what “such little faults and difficulties are called,” and an 1889 newspaper quoted him on a “bug” in his phonograph. In September 1947 operators of the Harvard Mark II taped a real moth into the logbook with the note “First actual case of bug being found.” The joke only works because the word already meant a defect. The Smithsonian says the entry was probably not in Grace Hopper’s hand.

    Watch out: The 1947 Harvard moth is often called the first computer bug, but the word was engineering slang decades earlier and Hopper did not find the moth.

    #bug

  2. 1894 / 1976Big O notationBig O notation is shorthand for how a program's work grows as its input grows, for large inputs and ignoring small constant factors. If the work is O(n), doubling the input roughly doubles the time (linear); if it is O(n^2), doubling the input roughly quadruples the time (quadratic). Other common cases are O(log n), where doubling the input adds only one more step, and O(2^n), where adding a single item doubles the work. Strictly, O gives an upper bound on growth.Documented

    The symbol O comes from the number theorist Paul Bachmann’s Die analytische Zahlentheorie, part 2 (Teubner, Leipzig, 1894). There he writes that by the sign O(n) he means a quantity whose ‘Ordnung’ (order) in n does not exceed the order of n, so the O stands for Ordnung. Edmund Landau took it up and added the little-o in 1909, hence the name Bachmann-Landau notation. Donald Knuth’s note ‘Big Omicron and big Omega and big Theta’ (SIGACT News, April-June 1976) is the usual reference for the Omega and Theta companions used in analysing algorithms.

    Watch out: Some say the O is a zero or the Greek letter omicron, but Bachmann's own text ties it to the German word Ordnung (order).

    See alsobubble sortbogosortNP-complete

    #big-o-notation

  3. 1940 / 1962glitchA sudden, usually brief malfunction or fault in a machine or system, originally an electrical blip.Documented

    The earliest printed use found is a 19 May 1940 newspaper column by Katharine Brush, saying radio announcers called a bad slip of the tongue a “glitch”. Radio kept the word through the 1940s, and television engineers used it for picture interference in the 1950s. In 1962, John Glenn’s section of the astronauts’ book Into Orbit defined it as a spike in voltage when a circuit takes a new load. By 1965 newspapers were applying it to spacecraft computers. The Oxford English Dictionary calls the etymology unknown; Yiddish glitsh (slippery) is the favored guess.

    Watch out: It did not start in the space program; radio people were saying it two decades before Glenn.

    #glitch

  4. 1834 / 1941pigeonholeThe pigeonhole principle says that if you put more items than there are boxes into the boxes, at least one box must hold two or more items (13 socks in 12 drawers). The everyday verb 'to pigeonhole' means to shelve something and forget it, or to file someone or something into a neat category. Pigeonhole sort is a sorting method that drops each item into a slot for its value.Likely

    A pigeonhole is a small compartment in a desk or wall for sorting papers and letters; the word is documented in the 1790s. The mathematical idea is credited to Dirichlet around 1834, under the German name Schubfachprinzip, meaning ‘drawer principle’, though a 1622 book by Jean Leurechon already contains it, and Jeff Miller notes that Dirichlet’s own 1863 lectures use the argument without a name. The earliest English ‘pigeonhole principle’ found is a footnote by Raphael M. Robinson, presented in November 1940 and published in 1941, which glosses Schubfachprinzip. The verb is documented from 1910 in the sense of shelving a proposal; no source ties it to the mathematics.

    Watch out: Despite the name, the principle has nothing to do with birds; the German original means 'drawer'.

    See alsohash

    #pigeonhole

  5. 1944?patchA change made to an existing program to fix or alter it, often without rewriting the whole thing.Disputed

    The name is usually traced to paper-tape and punched-card practice, where a mistake was covered over or a stretch of tape was cut out and a corrected piece spliced in. Several popular accounts link this to the Harvard Mark I (1944), which ran from paper tape, but no dated early use of the word “patch” itself in a manual or paper has been found, so the Mark I link is an educated guess. The practice is real; the first printed use of the word is unconfirmed.

    Watch out: Many tell it as a Harvard Mark I word, but no early document using "patch" for it has been found.

    #patch

  6. 1945 / 1952debugTo find and remove errors from a machine or a program.Documented

    The Oxford English Dictionary cites “debugging” in a 1945 issue of the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society, about testing aircraft engines, and Fred Shapiro suggests it was probably older in spoken engineering slang. For computing, Wikipedia notes the word is first found in three papers from the 1952 ACM National Meetings, two of them putting it in quotation marks as if it were still new. The 1947 Harvard moth is a good story about the noun, not the origin of the verb.

    Watch out: People say the Harvard moth of 1947 gave us "debugging," but the verb was already in use in aeronautics by 1945.

    #debug

  7. 1945-1960stackA pile of data where the last item put on is the first one taken off, like a spring-loaded stack of cafeteria plates. Programs use it to remember where to return after each nested call.Disputed

    The idea has several early, separate names. Alan Turing’s 1945 ACE report used ‘bury’ and ‘unbury’ for calling and returning from subroutines. In Germany, Klaus Samelson described such a store in 1955 without a special name, and he and Friedrich Bauer used the word ‘Keller’ (cellar) in a 1957 patent application. The English word has a named claimant: in 1987 Dijkstra recalled picking the Dutch noun ‘stapel’ and verb ‘stapelen’ while working out how to implement recursion (EWD6, around 1959-60), then translating them as ‘stack’ and ‘to stack’. Documents from that time have not been checked.

    Watch out: Wiktionary calls the computing sense a calque of Dutch 'stapel' introduced by Dijkstra, which rests only on his own 1987 memory.

    See alsorecursion

    #stack

  8. 1947 / 1948bitA single binary digit, 0 or 1; the smallest unit of information in computing.Documented

    John W. Tukey, working at Bell Labs, shortened “binary digit” to “bit” in a memo dated 9 January 1947. Claude Shannon used the word in his 1948 paper “A Mathematical Theory of Communication” and credited Tukey with the contraction, which is how it reached a wide audience.

    #bit

  9. 1947 / 1962kludgeA clumsy or improvised fix that works, but not elegantly, especially in hardware or software.Disputed

    The Oxford English Dictionary cites Jackson W. Granholm’s “How to Design a Kludge” (Datamation, February 1962) as its first use and calls it his jocular invention. But the spelling kluge is older: the Jargon File cites a 1947 New York Folklore Quarterly joke about “Murgatroyd the Kluge Maker” in the armed forces, and old-timers recall it around computers by the mid-1950s. Granholm’s own tale of a sixteenth-century word from German klug was a spoof. Navy and printing-press (Kluge feeder) stories remain unproven.

    Watch out: Granholm's story of a sixteenth-century word from German klug was a joke, not history.

    • Sources
    • Jargon File: kluge · Mid-1950s computer use, 1947 New York Folklore Quarterly story, Navy and Kluge paper feeder stories (Brandtjen denial), kludge spelling popularized by Datamation Feb 1962 pp. 30-31
    • Wikipedia: Kludge · OED entry text calling it Granholm's jocular invention, quotation of Granholm's fictional 'early fifteen-hundreds' etymology, 1947 article details; used as a lead

    #kludge

  10. 1953 / 1967hashTo squeeze a piece of data into a small, scrambled-looking number, so that you can use that number as an address to find the data again quickly. Like filing names by a code worked out from the letters, instead of searching the whole cabinet.Likely

    The technique is credited to Hans Peter Luhn of IBM, in an internal memo of January 1953 that used hashing with chaining. The word came later. Donald Knuth, as summarised by Wikipedia, found that ‘hash’ did not reach published literature until the late 1960s, in Herbert Hellerman’s ‘Digital Computer System Principles’ (McGraw-Hill, 1967), though it was already common jargon. By January 1968 it was in the titles of Communications of the ACM papers, such as Maurer’s ‘An improved hash code for scatter storage’. It borrows the everyday sense of chopping up and mixing a mess. Who first said it aloud is unknown.

    Watch out: Luhn is sometimes credited with the word as well as the technique, but nothing shows he used it; Knuth reports the word reached print only in the late 1960s.

    See alsopigeonholeBloom filter

    #hash

  11. 1954race conditionA bug or glitch that appears when the outcome depends on which of two things happens first, such as two programs saving the same file at the same moment and the slower one silently winning.Likely

    The phrase comes from switching-circuit design, not software, where signals in a circuit can ‘race’ to change its state first. Wikipedia dates ‘race condition’ to at least 1954, citing David Huffman’s MIT doctoral thesis on sequential switching circuits, though the thesis’s exact wording (‘race’, ‘critical race’ or ‘race condition’) has not been checked. When software writers borrowed the phrase is not documented. Dijkstra’s 1960s papers on concurrent processes (EWD35, EWD74, EWD123, EWD310) do not use it, and the earliest dated software citation found is from 2004.

    Watch out: It is often assumed to be a software term, but it began in hardware circuit design.

    See alsodeadlocksemaphore

    #race-condition

  12. 1955 / 1963hackerOriginally a clever, playful programmer or tinkerer; the word later also came to mean someone who breaks into systems.Documented

    The verb “hack” turns up in the Tech Model Railroad Club minutes of 5 April 1955: “Mr. Eccles requests that anyone working or hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing.” The club’s June 1959 dictionary defines a hack as “something done without constructive end” and a hacker as “one who hacks, or makes them,” still about trains and pranks. The computing sense came in the early 1960s: MIT’s student paper The Tech of 20 November 1963 wrote of hackers tying the PDP-1 to the phone system.

    See alsoHackers, by Steven LevyGNU Emacs

    #hacker

  13. 1956byteA group of bits handled as a unit; today almost always eight.Documented

    Werner Buchholz of IBM used “byte” in a memo dated 11 June 1956, during design of the Stretch computer, for a group of bits sent or processed in parallel (at first one to six). He respelled “bite” so it could not be mistaken for “bit” by accident. The eight-bit byte was considered in mid-1956, and IBM’s System/360 (1964) spread it. Louis Dooley has claimed independent use at MIT Lincoln Laboratory around the same time.

    #byte

  14. 1957GIGO (garbage in, garbage out)The principle that a computer fed bad input will give bad output, however good the program.Likely

    The earliest print use found so far is a syndicated newspaper piece in the Hammond Times of 10 November 1957 (page 65), in which Army Specialist William D. Mellin explained that sloppily programmed inputs give wrong results. George Fuechsel, an IBM instructor, said in a 2004 blog comment that he came up with the phrase around 1958 or 1959 while teaching the IBM 305 RAMAC, but he framed it as a question (“Did I?”). Charles Babbage voiced the idea, not the phrase, in 1864. By 1963 a newspaper was calling it “an adage of computer men.”

    Watch out: Fuechsel is often named as the inventor, but he is not the earliest known user, and he did not claim certainty himself.

    #gigo-garbage-in-garbage-out

  15. 1950sbootTo start a computer by loading its first program, which then loads the rest.Likely

    The idea of a computer pulling itself up by its bootstraps, from the phrase “to pull oneself up by one’s bootstraps,” appears in the 1950s as the “bootstrap technique” (FOLDOC ties it to Baron Munchhausen’s legendary feat). The IBM 701 (1950s) had a Load button that read a first word that then loaded more. Wikipedia reports “boot” in this sense in use since at least 1958, and “boot” as a verb alone dated to 1975; neither citation could be checked, so treat both dates as soft. IBM itself said “initial program load.”

    See alsosystemd

    • Sources
    • Booting - Wikipedia · Bootstrap technique 1950s; 'boot' since at least 1958; IBM 701 Load button; IPL term
    • FOLDOC: boot · origin in the bootstrap expression

    #boot

  16. 1958softwareThe programs and routines that run on a computer, as opposed to the physical machine.Documented

    The earliest print use of the computing sense found so far is by John W. Tukey in “The Teaching of Concrete Mathematics,” American Mathematical Monthly, vol. 65, January 1958: “Today the ‘software’ comprising the carefully planned interpretive routines, compilers, and other aspects of automative programming are at least as important to the modern electronic calculator as its ‘hardware’ of tubes, transistors, wires, tapes and the like.” The quotation marks suggest the word was fresh. The word itself is older in another sense: Wiktionary quotes an 1889 parliamentary debate listing “hardware, software, and agriculture” and a 1914 journal contrasting “hardware or software, of dry goods or wet goods”, apparently meaning soft goods.

    #software

  17. 1959cruftLeftover, redundant or useless stuff that builds up in a system, especially code or hardware.Documented

    The earliest dated source is the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club dictionary of June 1959, written by Peter Samson, which defines it as “that which magically amounds in the Clubroom just before you walk in to clean up. In other words, rubbage.” The origin is unknown. One popular guess is Harvard’s Cruft Laboratory, a physics building that held surplus wartime radar equipment; others suggest a blend of “crust” and “fluff” or influence from “crud.” None is documented.

    Watch out: The Cruft Hall story is charming, but nobody has shown the word came from Harvard.

    #cruft

  18. 1959 / 1972foo / foobarPlaceholder names for things whose real name does not matter, used in code and examples.Disputed

    The word has several roots and no agreed story. RFC 3092 traces “foo” to Bill Holman’s “Smokey Stover” comic strip (roughly 1930 to 1952), which used FOO everywhere. The MIT Tech Model Railroad Club’s June 1959 dictionary lists “foo” as “the sacred syllable (FOO MANI PADME HUM)”, not yet a placeholder. RFC 3092 says “foobar” probably spread through Digital Equipment Corporation manuals in the 1960s and early 1970s, with confirmed sightings from 1972. Whether it came from the WWII acronym FUBAR is unproven; the RFC says it may be the other way round.

    Watch out: Many say "foobar" comes from the military acronym FUBAR, but the RFC suggests the connection may run the other way or not exist.

    #foo-foobar

  19. 1959mung / mungeTo change data, usually messily or irreversibly; to mangle.Likely

    The MIT Tech Model Railroad Club dictionary of June 1959 has an entry “mung: mash until no good,” the likely ancestor of the computing word and later spelled as a recursive joke, “Mung Until No Good.” The link from the 1959 club word to the later computer verb “mung” and to “munge” is plausible but has not been traced step by step. Wiktionary calls the acronym explanation doubtful and says the computer sense is rumored to come from MIT groups of the 1970s or 1980s.

    Watch out: The "Mung Until No Good" acronym is a joke built after the fact, not a documented origin.

    #mung-munge

  20. ?frob / frobnicateTo fiddle with something, or a thing you fiddle with; a placeholder name for a gadget or knob.Disputed

    MIT hacker slang. Wiktionary says “frobnitz” was coined around 1958 by David R. Sawyer at the Tech Model Railroad Club, but that has not been verified elsewhere. The word does not appear in the 1959 TMRC dictionary (the entries were checked). Wiktionary says it is first listed in the Jargon File of 1981 and puts the year of origin anywhere from 1958 to 1981. The first dated print use of “frob” or “frobnicate” has not been found.

    #frob-frobnicate

  21. 1960garbage collectionAutomatic memory management that finds memory a program no longer uses and makes it available again.Likely

    John McCarthy’s Lisp paper, “Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine, Part I” (Communications of the ACM, April 1960), describes automatic reclamation: when free storage runs out, the system marks the registers still reachable and returns the rest to the free list. The paper never uses the words “garbage collection”. McCarthy later added a note that they already called it that, but he chickened out of the phrase in print. The earliest printed use found is the title of Marvin Minsky’s MIT memo of December 1963.

    Watch out: The paper itself does not use the phrase; McCarthy wrote later that he avoided it.

    #garbage-collection

  22. 1960recursionRecursion is when a function solves a problem by calling itself on a smaller piece of the same problem, such as adding up a list by taking the first item and adding the sum of the rest. It needs a stopping point (a base case), or it runs forever.Likely

    ‘Recursive’ began as mathematical-logic vocabulary, as in ‘recursive functions’. In computing, early printed uses include John McCarthy’s April 1960 paper ‘Recursive Functions of Symbolic Expressions and Their Computation by Machine’, which describes LISP, and the 1960 Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 60, which speaks of recursive evaluation. Earlier computing uses may exist; none has been documented. The joke entry ‘recursion: see recursion’ (in its first form ‘RECURSION n. See RECURSION, TAIL RECURSION.’) is in the Jargon File copy whose last edit is dated 14 November 1982; a copy recovered from a Fall 1981 tape does not have it. Its author is unknown.

    See alsostackmemoization

    #recursion

  23. 1961grokTo understand something fully and intuitively, as if it had become part of you.Documented

    Robert A. Heinlein introduced grok in his 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land as a Martian word, literally “to drink”, that stands for deep merging with and understanding of something. It appears in the hacker glossary now called the Jargon File in a version recovered from a Fall 1981 tape, defined as “to understand, usually in a global sense”. A 1984 InfoWorld column also uses it. It is not clear when hackers first adopted it; the early 1980s is just when it was written down.

    #grok

  24. 1962bubble sortBubble sort walks down a list comparing neighbouring items and swapping any pair that is out of order, over and over, until a full pass makes no swaps. The biggest items drift toward the end like bubbles rising, which is how it got its name; it is simple but slow, since doubling the list roughly quadruples the work.Likely

    Owen Astrachan’s survey ‘Bubble Sort: An Archaeological Algorithmic Analysis’ (SIGCSE 2003) found Kenneth Iverson using ‘bubble sort’ in A Programming Language (Wiley, 1962), which appears to be the first use in print, though he says this is not conclusive. Before that the method went by names such as ‘sorting by exchange’ or ‘exchange sorting’ (a 1956 paper by Friend, a 1959 programming book and others), and Algorithm 175 in CACM (June 1963) called it ‘Shuttle Sort’. Knuth, who gives no origin for the name, wrote in The Art of Computer Programming that ‘the bubble sort seems to have nothing to recommend it, except a catchy name and the fact that it leads to some interesting theoretical problems’.

    See alsoBig O notationbogosort

    #bubble-sort

  25. 1961-62semaphoreA shared counter that processes may only change through two safe operations, P (wait for it to be positive, then lower it) and V (raise it), so that programs can take turns using a resource without trampling each other. Think of a railway signal that is either open or closed for the next train.Likely

    Dijkstra’s Dutch notes call the shared variables ‘seinpalen’ (signal posts), a name he said was borrowed from the railways. In EWD35, which describes work from 1962 onward, P stands for ‘Passering’ (passing) and V for ‘Vrijgave’ (release). Later notes (EWD51, EWD74) call the operations ‘Prolaag’ and ‘verhoog’, and EWD51 glosses seinpaal as ‘semaphore’. Dijkstra recalled in 1987 introducing P and V around May 1961 in EWD31, which does not fit EWD35’s account. The English ‘semaphore’ appears with P and V in EWD123 (1965). The ‘proberen’/‘verhogen’ reading is a later gloss.

    Watch out: The tidy textbook gloss of P as 'proberen' (to try) is not what Dijkstra's earliest surviving notes say.

    See alsodeadlockdining philosophers

    #semaphore

  26. c. 1963daemonA program that runs in the background, waiting to handle requests or chores without a user starting it each time.Likely

    The word came out of MIT’s CTSS time-sharing work in the early 1960s. Fernando Corbató said his group began using it around 1963, inspired by Maxwell’s demon, an imaginary sorting agent that works tirelessly unseen. Jerome Saltzer recalled instead that Michael (Mick) Bailey of the CTSS staff suggested it, citing the Oxford English Dictionary, in a memo he guessed dated 1962 or 1963. The Jargon File says the first one was a program called DAEMON that made tape backups. Both accounts are recollections, not contemporary documents.

    Watch out: The claim that it stands for Disk And Execution MONitor is a backronym added later; Corbató had never heard of it.

    See alsosystemd

    #daemon

  27. 1963 / 1980forkTo fork is to split one thing into two that go on separately. In Unix, a running program forks by making a copy of itself; in software projects, a fork is a copy of the code that goes its own way, which on GitHub is as easy as pressing a button.Likely

    The word fork for a division into branches dates to the 14th century. The computing process sense is older than Unix: Melvin Conway’s paper ‘A multiprocessor system design’ (Fall Joint Computer Conference, 1963) is cited as an early source of the fork and join idea, and Wikipedia credits L. Peter Deutsch with a fork in the GENIE time-sharing system before Unix. Unix’s own fork is documented in the manual page ‘SYS FORK (II)’ dated 11/3/71, which calls it the only way new processes are created. For code, Eric Allman wrote in 1980 that creating a branch ‘forks off’ a version of the program, and the sense of a community split is recorded by 1995 (XEmacs).

    See alsoGit

    #fork

  28. 1963wetwareJargon for the human brain or nervous system, or for people in a computer system, as opposed to hardware and software.Likely

    The earliest quotation in Wiktionary is from 1963: in The Abolition of War, Walter Millis and James Real write of what the psychiatrist Kenneth Colby “calls the ‘wetware’”, meaning the human brain. In science fiction, Rudy Rucker says he first saw the word in Bruce Sterling’s Schismatrix, and that Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers came before his own novel Wetware (1988); Swanwick commented there that Sterling was first. The Jargon File’s guess that it comes from Rucker’s novels is thus off. An unsourced “mid-1950s” origin is repeated online, but no evidence was found.

    Watch out: Rudy Rucker is often credited with inventing the word, but he says he took it from Sterling, and a 1963 quotation exists.

    #wetware

  29. 1964bit bucketA joke destination for lost or discarded data, a data sink; later also the null device on Unix.Likely

    The earliest dated use found is Donald I. Cutler’s 1964 textbook Introduction to Computer Programming (p. 108, footnote): “The lost bits fall into a container called a bit bucket,” which supposedly gets emptied for wedding confetti. That is a joke, and it fits the other explanation: the chad box on a paper-tape punch or card punch was sometimes called a bit bucket. The Jargon File presents the tale of bits as misplaced objects as pure jest, and says it may be a mutation of the older “bit box”.

    Watch out: Hackers joke that bits are real objects that merely get misplaced, with equal numbers of 0s and 1s in the bucket.

    #bit-bucket

  30. 1964syntactic sugarSyntax that adds no new power to a language but makes common things easier to write or read.Documented

    Peter J. Landin used the phrase in “The Mechanical Evaluation of Expressions” (The Computer Journal, vol. 6 no. 4, pp. 308-320, published in 1964). He describes his “where” notation as plausibly a mere “syntactic sugaring” of applicative expressions and says some languages can be considered “applicative expressions plus syntactic sugar”. That is the earliest use found, and Wikipedia credits him with coining it.

    #syntactic-sugar

  31. 1965dining philosophersA classic puzzle about sharing: five philosophers sit at a round table with one fork between each pair of neighbours, and each needs both neighbouring forks to eat. If everyone grabs the left fork at once, nobody can ever eat, which is how programmers learn about deadlock.Documented

    Edsger Dijkstra wrote in 1987 that the problem, which he called ‘The Dining Quintuple’, was the examination question at the end of his autumn 1965 course in Eindhoven, and that Tony Hoare later dubbed it ‘The Dining Philosophers’. The earliest text with the philosophers, the difficult spaghetti and the two forks per eater that has been found is Dijkstra’s ‘Hierarchical Ordering of Sequential Processes’ (EWD310, Acta Informatica, 1971). Dijkstra’s lecture notes of that term (EWD123) do not mention them. What the 1965 exam wording was, and where Hoare first used the name, remains undocumented.

    Watch out: It is sometimes said that Hoare invented the philosophers and their spaghetti, but Dijkstra's own text credits Hoare only with the name.

    See alsodeadlocksemaphore

    #dining-philosophers

  32. 1965mouseA handheld pointing device that moves a cursor on a screen as it is slid across a surface.Likely

    Douglas Engelbart’s team at the Stanford Research Institute built the first mouse in 1964; Engelbart had noted the idea in November 1963, calling it a “bug”. The earliest printed use of “mouse” for it is reported to be a July 1965 SRI report with Bill English as lead author. Engelbart himself said “no one can remember who started calling it a mouse”. The usual explanation is the tail-like cord; a second story, from engineer Roger Bates, says the on-screen cursor was called CAT, so the device that chased it became the mouse.

    Watch out: Neither the tail story nor the cat-and-mouse story is firmly documented; Engelbart said nobody remembered who named it.

    See alsoMicrosoft Word (1983)

    #mouse

  33. 1965 / 2009null referenceA reference or pointer that deliberately points at nothing, used to mean 'no object here'. Using it as if it did point somewhere is the source of the familiar 'null pointer' crash.Disputed

    Tony Hoare has said he introduced the null reference while designing references for ALGOL W. In his abstract for the 2009 QCon London talk ‘Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake’ (track ‘Historically bad ideas’) he writes ‘It was the invention of the null reference in 1965’ and that he ‘couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement’. The year is not settled: InfoQ’s summary of the talk also says 1965, but its timestamped show notes say 1964. The ALGOL W documents themselves have not been checked.

    Watch out: The 'billion dollars' is Hoare's rough guess, not a measured total; in the talk he says the real cost is not known.

    #null-reference

  34. 1968considered harmfulA title formula for essays that attack a practice or technology, as in "X Considered Harmful".Documented

    Edsger Dijkstra submitted a paper called “A Case against the GO TO Statement” to Communications of the ACM. The editor, Niklaus Wirth, turned it into a letter and gave it his own title, “Go To Statement Considered Harmful” (March 1968, vol. 11 no. 3, pp. 147-148). Dijkstra later said so himself. The phrase was not new: it was a newspaper headline cliche, with a 1949 New York Times example. Computer science then turned it into a template, answered in 1987 with “‘GOTO Considered Harmful’ Considered Harmful”.

    Watch out: Dijkstra did not choose the famous title; Wirth did.

    #considered-harmful

  35. 1965 / 1968deadlockA deadlock is a standstill where two or more processes each hold something the other needs and each waits for the other to let go, so none can ever move. Two people meeting in a narrow corridor, each insisting the other step back first, make the same trap.Likely

    Edsger Dijkstra’s lecture notes ‘Cooperating sequential processes’ (EWD 123, dated September 1965 in Wikipedia’s reference) named the computing problem ‘the Deadly Embrace’, defined as the situation where one process can continue only if the other is killed first. The word ‘deadlock’ does not appear in that text. ‘Deadlock’ was already an English word for a standstill. By 1968 James Havender’s IBM Systems Journal paper was titled ‘Avoiding deadlock in multitasking systems’, and Coffman, Elphick and Shoshani’s 1971 survey ‘System Deadlocks’ gave the four conditions: mutual exclusion, hold and wait, no preemption, and circular wait. Exactly when ‘deadlock’ became the standard computing term is not pinned down.

    See alsodining philosopherssemaphorerace condition

    #deadlock

  36. 1968memoizationMemoization means a function remembers the answers it has already worked out, so asking the same question twice costs a lookup instead of a recalculation. A classic case is computing Fibonacci numbers, where remembering earlier results turns a very slow method into a fast one.Likely

    Donald Michie of the University of Edinburgh introduced ‘memo functions’ in ‘Memo Functions and Machine Learning’, Nature 218 (1968), pp. 19-22: a function that keeps a table of its past results. FOLDOC credits Michie with inventing them. The noun ‘memoization’ is a later formation from ‘memo’ with the suffix -ization, and its first appearance has not been pinned down; Michie’s Nature article is credited with it on Wikipedia, but that claim is tagged as failing verification. The earliest use of ‘memoization’ itself found so far is in Abelson and Sussman’s textbook Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (second edition, 1996), exercise 3.27, which calls it ‘also called tabulation’.

    Watch out: It is not a typo of 'memorization'; it is built from 'memo'.

    See alsorecursion

    #memoization

  37. 1970 / 1982Bloom filterA compact way to ask 'have I seen this before?' that may sometimes say yes when the answer is no, but never says no when the answer is yes. It trades a small chance of false alarms for far less memory, like a bouncer with a rough memory of faces who never turns away someone on the list.Documented

    Burton H. Bloom of the Computer Usage Company in Newton Upper Falls, Massachusetts, described the technique in ‘Space/Time Trade-offs in Hash Coding with Allowable Errors’, Communications of the ACM, July 1970 (vol. 13, no. 7, pp. 422-426). His example was an automatic hyphenation program, where a small memory could screen out most words that need no special lookup. The paper never uses the word ‘filter’; it speaks of ‘hash coding methods’. The earliest use of the name found is L. L. Gremillion’s ‘Designing a Bloom filter for differential file access’ (CACM, September 1982), followed by J. K. Mullin’s ‘A second look at Bloom filters’ (CACM, August 1983). Who coined the name is unknown.

    See alsohash

    #bloom-filter

  38. 1967? / 1972curryingCurrying turns a function that takes several inputs at once into a chain of functions that each take one input. Instead of add(2, 3), you write add(2) to get a new function that adds 2, then give that function 3.Disputed

    The idea is older than the word. Moses Schönfinkel presented it in a lecture in December 1920 (printed in 1924), and Gottlob Frege had a similar device in 1893. The name honours the logician Haskell Curry, who used the idea extensively. Who coined ‘currying’ is not settled: David Turner says Christopher Strachey did in his 1967 Copenhagen lecture notes ‘Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages’, but those notes are reported to call it only ‘a device originated by Schönfinkel’, without the word. The earliest printed use found is John C. Reynolds’s 1972 paper on definitional interpreters, which calls it ‘a trick called Currying (after the logician H. Curry)’ and relays a referee’s view that ‘Schönfinkeling’ might be more accurate.

    Watch out: Curry did not invent it, and it is named after him by others, not by himself.

    #currying

  39. 1972hello, worldThe traditional first program: it prints the words "hello, world" and nothing else.Likely

    The earliest known version is in Brian Kernighan’s “A Tutorial Introduction to the Language B” (Bell Labs, commonly dated 1972). It builds the greeting from the string pieces ‘hell’, ‘o, w’ and ‘orld’ (B packed four characters per word), with no title or date on the copy examined. The now-famous one-liner printf(“hello, world”) appears in his 1974 memo “Programming in C: A Tutorial” and was popularized by the 1978 book The C Programming Language.

    Watch out: Some accounts say the phrase began in BCPL in 1967, but no BCPL source shows it.

    See alsoC++

    #hello-world

  40. 1972 / 1981spaghetti codeSource code whose control flow is tangled and hard to follow, often because of many jumps.Likely

    The earliest spaghetti comparison found is Martin Hopkins’s 1972 paper “A Case for the GOTO”, which hoped structured programs would not “look like a bowl of spaghetti” (as quoted by Wikipedia; the paper itself could not be checked). Richard Conway used a plate-of-spaghetti image in 1978, and the exact phrase “spaghetti code” appears in print in 1981 in a college magazine spoof. Richard Hamming later recalled early binary patches turning a program into a “can of spaghetti”, but that is a recollection. No coiner is known.

    Watch out: It is often tied to Dijkstra's 1968 goto letter, but that link is not documented.

    #spaghetti-code

  41. 1972Trojan horseA program that looks useful or harmless but secretly does something its user did not intend, such as stealing passwords.Documented

    The earliest computing use verified is in James P. Anderson’s “Computer Security Technology Planning Study” (Air Force report, October 1972). It describes a “Trojan Horse” attack and footnotes: “This attack was identified by D. J. Edwards”, a panel member from the NSA. The Unix Second Edition manual (June 1972) also warns that changing a file’s owner could “create Trojan Horses”. Ken Thompson’s 1984 “Reflections on Trusting Trust” says he first read of the idea in an Air Force critique of Multics, which he could not identify.

    See alsoThe Cuckoo's Egg

    #trojan-horse

  42. 1973/dev/nullA special Unix file that discards anything written to it and gives end-of-file when read.Documented

    The earliest mention found in a Unix manual is the Fourth Edition (1973, with the sh page dated 4/18/73). It says that background processes get their input from “the zero length file /dev/null”, used as a source of end-of-file. The Fifth Edition kernel source (1974) has a memory-driver device marked “EOF/RATHOLE”: reads give end-of-file and writes vanish, which is the behavior known today. Third Edition manual pages and the Second Edition manual do not mention it. The First Edition manual exists only as page images, so it could not be searched.

    #dev-null

  43. 1973grepgrep is a Unix program that prints every line of a file that matches a pattern you give it. The name now doubles as a verb meaning to search for something, even on paper.Likely

    Ken Thompson wrote grep at Bell Labs; Doug McIlroy’s annotated Unix reader says it was born when Thompson was asked how to search for patterns in a file too big for the editor, and that he took his regular expression recognizer out of ed and named it after the ed command g/re/p (globally search for a regular expression and print). The reader places grep in Fourth Edition Unix, usually dated November 1973; that edition’s manual page carries the header date 3/3/73, so exact timing is unclear. The Sixth Edition page is dated 15 May 1974. McIlroy adds that it soon entered the language as a verb.

    Watch out: A rumour says grep stands for 'General Regular Expression Parser'; Dennis Ritchie confirmed the g/re/p origin.

    See alsoPerl

    #grep

  44. 1970skernel panicA fatal error detected by an operating system kernel that makes it stop rather than carry on.Likely

    Unix kernels have called a routine panic() since early on: it appears throughout the early-1973 “nsys” C kernel source and the Fifth Edition kernel (1974), which print a message and halt. Tom Van Vleck recalls Dennis Ritchie telling him over lunch in the early 1970s: “If there’s an error, we have this routine called panic(), and when it is called, the machine crashes, and you holler down the hall, ‘Hey, reboot it.’” When the two-word phrase “kernel panic” first appeared is not known.

    See alsoLinux

    #kernel-panic

  45. 1970szombie processA Unix process that has finished running but is still listed in the process table until its parent collects its exit status.Likely

    Early Unix kernel source already has the state: an early-1973 C kernel (the “nsys” tape) and the Fifth Edition (1974) both define SZOMB for a process that has exited but not been waited for. The word “zombie” itself shows up in comments in the Seventh Edition kernel (1979), such as “Enter zombie state”. No source says who chose the name or when it was first spoken.

    #zombie-process

  46. 1971 / 1974NP-completeA problem is NP-complete if a proposed answer can be checked quickly, yet every other problem with quickly checkable answers can be turned into it, so a fast way to solve it would solve them all. Sudoku-style puzzles, route planning with many stops and packing problems are typical examples, and nobody has found a fast general method for any of them.Likely

    NP stands for ‘nondeterministic polynomial time’, the class of problems whose answers can be checked in polynomial time. Stephen Cook’s 1971 paper ‘The complexity of theorem-proving procedures’ and Richard Karp’s 1972 ‘Reducibility Among Combinatorial Problems’ came before the name was settled. In January 1974 Donald Knuth published ‘A terminological proposal’ in SIGACT News, asking theorists to choose a name; suggestions included ‘Herculean’, ‘formidable’, ‘hard-boiled’ (Ken Steiglitz), ‘PET’ (probably exponential time, Shen Lin) and Knuth’s own ‘Ulyssean’. Aho, Hopcroft and Ullman then replaced ‘polynomially-complete’ with ‘NP-complete’ in their algorithms textbook, even after galley proofs were printed, following a poll of the field.

    See alsoBig O notation

    #np-complete

  47. 1975 / 1980wormA self-copying program that spreads from machine to machine over a network by itself.Documented

    John Brunner’s 1975 novel The Shockwave Rider has a character release a network-crawling program called a worm, and speaks of a tapeworm. John Shoch and Jon Hupp at Xerox PARC borrowed the name for their own experiments, writing them up in the May 1980 report “Notes on the ‘Worm’ programs” (IEN 159) and a 1982 article in Communications of the ACM. Their worms were meant for useful distributed computing, spreading to idle machines. Creeper (1971) is often called the first worm in hindsight, but it predates the word.

    Watch out: Creeper in 1971 is often called the first worm, but nobody used that word for it then.

    See alsoThe Cuckoo's Egg

    #worm

  48. 1976 / 1990smeme (internet)Originally, a unit of cultural transmission; online, an image, joke or catchphrase that spreads quickly between people.Likely

    Richard Dawkins coined “meme” in his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, as a cultural counterpart to the gene. The word’s online sense is usually traced to Mike Godwin, who used it for ideas spreading on Usenet and other early networks. Sources disagree on the date: Wikipedia places his “Internet meme” in Wired in June 1993, while Know Your Meme cites his Wired piece “Meme, counter-meme” from 1994 as one of the first such uses. In 2013 Dawkins called internet memes a hijacking of his idea.

    Watch out: Internet memes are not a digital invention; the word was coined in 1976 for ideas, not pictures.

    #meme-internet

  49. 1979 / 1980Easter eggA hidden feature, message or joke tucked into software or a game for curious users to find.Likely

    Warren Robinett hid his name in a secret room in Atari’s Adventure for the Atari 2600, because Atari did not credit programmers. He says Atari published the game in 1979; other accounts put the release in March 1980. Players had to carry a one-pixel “gray dot” to a particular spot to reach the room. Robinett left the company before a teenager found it and wrote to Atari. The term “Easter egg” is credited to Atari’s Steve Wright, who reportedly suggested keeping the room and encouraging more like it.

    Watch out: Adventure's hidden room is often called the first video game Easter egg, but the name was applied later.

    See alsoMasters of Doom

    #easter-egg

  50. 1979 / 1990starballA tarball is a single file that bundles many files together, made by the Unix tar program and often compressed afterward. Think of it as shrink-wrapping a whole folder into one parcel for storing or sending.Likely

    The program name tar is short for ‘tape archiver’, as the Seventh Edition Unix manual (1979) titles it. ‘Tarball’ is the informal word for a file tar reads and writes. No dated first use has been found. The Jargon File says tarballs were the standard way to ship source code from the mid-1980s, but that the word itself did not enter common usage until the late 1990s, and guesses it is based on the tar baby of the Uncle Remus tales. Wikipedia instead reads it as a ball that collects objects sticking to it. Both are guesses. Unrelated lumps of oil on a beach were called tarballs by 1969.

    See alsoLinux

    #tarball

  51. 1980sleet / 1337A style of spelling that swaps letters for look-alike numbers and symbols, so that "elite" becomes "l33t" or "1337".Likely

    Wikipedia says leet began on 1980s bulletin board systems, where “elite” status unlocked restricted file areas and chat rooms, and that the odd spelling may have helped users slip past word filters on forbidden topics like cracking. The claim that the Cult of the Dead Cow coined it rests on a Wikipedia footnote that points to an unrelated article, so it is unproven. No dated early example of the spelling itself has been found.

    Watch out: The Cult of the Dead Cow is often credited with inventing leetspeak, but that claim has no solid source.

    • Sources
    • Leet (Wikipedia) · 1980s BBS origin; cDc attribution (weakly cited); filter-evasion theory
    • Wiktionary: leet · Leet as apheretic form of 'elite', respelled; no dated citation

    #leet-1337

  52. c. 1980sudosudo lets a permitted user run a single command with the powers of another user, usually the all-powerful administrator, without staying logged in as that user. Typing it before a command is a way of saying 'yes, I really mean it'.Likely

    The sudo project’s own history says the program was first conceived and implemented by Bob Coggeshall and Cliff Spencer around 1980 in the computer science department at SUNY Buffalo, on a VAX-11/750 running 4.1BSD. An updated version was posted to the net.sources newsgroup in December 1985, and Todd C. Miller made the first public ‘CU sudo’ release in 1994. The name was originally read as ‘superuser do’; the project’s site now writes it as su ‘do’, and su is described in current Linux manuals as ‘substitute user’. The comic xkcd #149, ‘Sandwich’, published on 28 August 2006, carried the joke ‘Sudo make me a sandwich’ to a wide audience.

    See alsoLinux

    • Sources
    • A Brief History of Sudo · Coggeshall and Spencer around 1980 at SUNY/Buffalo on a VAX-11/750 with 4.1BSD; December 1985 net.sources; Miller's 1994 release
    • Sudo home page · Project writes the name as Sudo (su 'do')
    • Sudo (Wikipedia) · Originally 'superuser do'; project now lists 'su do'; Linux manuals define su as substitute user
    • xkcd #149: Sandwich · Comic dialogue; xkcd's JSON metadata for comic 149 gives 28 August 2006

    #sudo

  53. 1981Ctrl-Alt-DeleteCtrl-Alt-Delete is the three-key combination that restarted the original IBM PC without switching it off. On later Windows systems it opens a security screen or the Task Manager instead.Likely

    David Bradley, an engineer on the original IBM PC team, made the keyboard reset in 1981 in Boca Raton, Florida, to spare programmers the slow memory tests of a cold start. He picked the keys by position, with Delete across the keyboard from the other two. It was meant for developers, not customers, and became widely known only with Windows in the early 1990s. Wikipedia adds that an earlier Ctrl-Alt-Esc was dropped as too easy to bump. At the PC’s 20th anniversary in 2001 Bradley said: ‘I may have invented it, but I think Bill made it famous.’

    See alsoMS-DOS

    #ctrl-alt-delete

  54. 1981dongleA small hardware key that plugs into a computer port and must be present for protected software to run; later stretched to mean almost any small plug-in adapter.Likely

    Where “dongle” comes from is unknown. The earliest print use found is New Scientist, 1 October 1981, describing an extra piece of plug-in memory without which a program refuses to run. The OED’s earliest quotation is from January 1982, and Merriam-Webster dates it 1981 and guesses an alteration of “dangle”. The OED calls the formation arbitrary. The story of an inventor named “Don Gall” came from Rainbow Technologies advertising in 1992.

    Watch out: The tale of an inventor called "Don Gall" was invented for a 1992 advertisement.

    • Sources
    • The Jargon File: dongle · Don Gall claim in 1992 Rainbow Technologies ad copy called a myth; 1984 PaperClip sighting
    • Wordorigins.org: dongle · New Scientist, 1 October 1981 as earliest print citation; OED calls formation arbitrary
    • Language Log: Dongle · OED first citation, MicroComputer Printout, 19 Jan 1982; Merriam-Webster date 1981 and 'perhaps alteration of dangle'
    • Wikipedia: Dongle · Don Gall story traced to 1992 Byte advertisement (lead only)

    #dongle

  55. 1982cyberspaceThe imagined space of computer networks, where people meet and data lives; now loosely used for the internet.Documented

    William Gibson is credited with the computing sense in his story “Burning Chrome” (Omni, July 1982), and made it famous in Neuromancer (1984), which defines it as “a consensual hallucination”. Gibson later said that when he coined it he knew only that it seemed “an effective buzzword”, “evocative and essentially meaningless”. He was not the first to use the word: Danish artist Susanne Ussing and architect Carsten Hoff worked as “Atelier Cyberspace” around 1968 to 1970, though with no link to computer networks.

    Watch out: Gibson is often said to have defined cyberspace as a "consensual hallucination" in his 1982 story, but that line is from Neuromancer (1984).

    See alsoWhere Wizards Stay Up Late

    #cyberspace

  56. 1982emoticon :-)A face made from keyboard characters, such as :-), used to show tone in text.Documented

    At 11:44 on 19 September 1982, Carnegie Mellon computer scientist Scott Fahlman posted to a CMU online bulletin board proposing :-) to mark jokes and :-( to mark things that are not jokes. The discussion had begun on 16 September, with a thread about a falling elevator. The post was lost until 2002, when Jeff Baird found it on an old backup tape on 10 September 2002, after an effort that Mike Jones started that February. The word “emoticon” is not in Fahlman’s post and came later; the earliest print use found is 1992.

    See alsoWhere Wizards Stay Up Late

    #emoticon

  57. 1982Turing tar-pitA language or system that can compute anything in principle but makes nothing of interest easy; the word is spelled "tarpit" or "tar-pit".Documented

    The earliest use found is Alan Perlis’s “Epigrams on Programming” in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, September 1982 (vol. 17, no. 9). Epigram 54 reads: “Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy.” Perlis, a Yale computer scientist who helped specify ALGOL, gave no further explanation. “Turing” refers to Turing completeness: a very simple machine can compute anything, but programming it directly is miserable. The term later became associated with esoteric languages built to be complete and awkward on purpose.

    #turing-tar-pit

  58. 1980sbit rotA joke explanation, half believed, for why unused software stops working over time even though nothing seems to have changed.Likely

    The Jargon File defines bit rot as a hypothetical disease deduced from the way unused programs or features stop working after a while “even if nothing has changed”, as if bits decayed like radioactive material. Its older MIT-AI ancestor lists the same idea as “software rot”, also known as “bit decay”. That older copy is undated, and no dated printed use of the exact phrase “bit rot” has been found.

    Watch out: Bit rot is not a single real mechanism; the Jargon File notes that cosmic rays as a cause is a myth, though a few physical effects can flip bits.

    #bit-rot

  59. 1983cyberpunkA science fiction genre of hackers, megacorporations and high-tech low-life futures; also the attitude that goes with it.Documented

    Bruce Bethke says he wrote the short story “Cyberpunk” in early spring 1980 and chose the title deliberately to join punk attitudes with high technology; he mixed roots such as “cyber” and “techno” with words for troublesome youth until one “sounded right”. Amazing Stories accepted it in July 1982 and published it in fall 1983. Gardner Dozois, editor of Asimov’s, used the word in a Washington Post article of 30 December 1984. Bethke himself credits Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) as the defining work, not his story.

    Watch out: Gibson did not coin the word; Bethke's story title did, though Neuromancer made the genre famous.

    #cyberpunk

  60. 1983FAQA list of frequently asked questions and their answers; the practice of posting one periodically to stop the same questions recurring.Likely

    Eugene Miya of NASA Ames, by his own later account, grew tired of repeated questions on the gatewayed SPACE Digest and net.space in 1982 and began monthly information posts in 1983. A widely repeated FAQ-history text says he is usually credited with the first FAQ but that he told its author, “I didn’t do the very first FAQ, but I probably did the first one of an informational nature”. It also notes Mark Horton’s earlier 18-question periodic post. The same text mentions a one-page printed FAQ in a December 1980 modem manual. The acronym’s first use is not pinned down.

    Watch out: Eugene Miya is often said to have invented FAQs, but he himself points to earlier question lists, and the first use of the acronym has not been traced.

    #faq

  61. early 1980sflameTo send an angry or insulting message online, or the message itself; also to rant at length on a dull subject.Disputed

    The Jargon File, tracing back to the MIT-AI hacker dictionary, lists “flame” as hacker slang, possibly from the phrase “flaming asshole”, and notes “FLAME ON” as a pun on Marvel’s Human Torch. Its editors report the word independently arising at MIT, Carleton College and RPI as early as 1969, and at the University of Virginia in the early 1960s. Those are recollections, not dated documents. Wikipedia cites The Hacker’s Dictionary (1983) for an early printed definition. Usenet then made it famous.

    #flame

  62. 1983HeisenbugA software bug that seems to vanish or change when you try to observe it, for example by running a debugger.Likely

    The earliest use cited is the proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT/SIGPLAN symposium on high-level debugging (March 1983), which Wikipedia quotes as saying one participant called such a bug a “Heisenbug”; that text could not be checked. Jim Gray used the word in his June 1985 Tandem report “Why Do Computers Stop”, calling Heisenbugs “well known to systems programmers”, so he did not coin it. IBM’s Bruce Lindsay said in 2004 that the word was originally defined “and I was there when it happened”, without giving a date. The pun is on Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle.

    Watch out: Jim Gray is sometimes credited with the word, but his 1985 paper treats it as already well known.

    #heisenbug

  63. 1983off-by-one errorA counting bug where a program is wrong by exactly one, such as looping once too often or too little. A fence 10 sections long needs 11 posts, not 10.Likely

    The earliest dated text found is a draft of Guy Steele’s Hacker’s Dictionary, marked ‘DRAFT (c) 1983’, which defines FENCEPOST ERROR as ‘An off-by-one error’ and explains it with a puzzle: how many posts does a 100-foot fence with posts ten feet apart need? That copy survives only in a 1990 email from Steele, who called it several revisions older than the printed book. The term ‘fencepost error’ alone is older, in a copy from a Fall 1981 tape. A stand-alone OFF-BY-ONE ERROR entry first appears in version 2.1.5 (28 November 1990). Vitruvius described the fence-post problem, but that is the idea, not the term.

    #off-by-one-error

  64. 1983pingPing is a small network tool that sends a short message to another computer and times how long the reply takes, showing whether the machine is reachable and how far away it is in network terms. In everyday talk, to 'ping' someone has come to mean to send them a quick message to get their attention.Documented

    Mike Muuss wrote the program at the Ballistic Research Laboratory in December 1983 for 4.2a BSD Unix. He says the impetus was an offhand remark by Dave Mills in July 1983, at a DARPA meeting in Norway, about measuring path latency with timed ICMP Echo packets. Muuss writes that he named it after the sound of a sonar, inspired by echo-location, and that it is not an acronym for ‘Packet InterNet Groper’; he had heard second-hand that Mills offered that expansion. The Jargon File lists the person-nudging sense (‘to get the attention of’). One dated example is William Safire in the New York Times, 25 November 2001: ‘don’t ping me; I’ll ping you.’

    Watch out: 'Packet InterNet Groper' is a backronym, not the origin; Muuss says the name came from sonar.

    • Sources
    • The Story of the PING Program (Mike Muuss) · Named for sonar sound; written December 1983 for 4.2a BSD; July 1983 Mills remark; not an acronym; Mills expansion heard second-hand
    • ping (Jargon File) · Sonar origin; author denies the Packet INternet Groper etymology; senses including 'to get the attention of'
    • ping (Wiktionary) · Sense 'send a message to elicit a response' with Safire 25 November 2001 quotation

    #ping

  65. 1983RTFMShort for "read the fucking manual": a blunt reply to a question the manual already answers.Likely

    Dictionary.com dates it to 1975-80 but shows no document. The earliest dated use checked is a Usenet post of 1983 (message 1129@utcsstat) that says “The VMS people have a cute little piece of advice for people who are too slug-headed to read the manuals: RTFM.” The wording suggests the acronym was already common among VMS users. Later the Jargon File recorded it, with a polite sense too: reporting that you did read the manual.

    Watch out: The claim that it began as 'Read The Field Manual' in the military is repeated but no source has been found.

    #rtfm

  66. 1983vaporwareSoftware or hardware that is announced and promoted but late, unfinished, or never delivered.Likely

    The earliest print use found is Esther Dyson’s newsletter RELease 1.0, 28 November 1983, which describes products shown at Comdex as “vaporware — good ideas incompletely implemented”. A separate story, told later by software executive Ann Winblad, says the word came from a Microsoft engineer in 1982, asked about the future of Xenix: “Basically, it’s vaporware.” That account rests on her memory and is not documented in Dyson’s article. Stewart Alsop and InfoWorld helped popularize the word, notably with a “Golden Vaporware” award to Bill Gates for Windows in 1985.

    Watch out: The tidy story that a Microsoft engineer coined it in 1982 about Xenix comes from one person's later recollection.

    #vaporware

  67. 1983virusA computer program that copies itself by attaching to other programs; in everyday use, any malicious software.Documented

    Fred Cohen’s own paper says that on 3 November 1983 he introduced the idea at a weekly security seminar at the University of Southern California, that his adviser Len Adleman thought of the name “virus”, and that a working demonstration took eight hours on a VAX 11/750 running Unix, shown on 10 November. Adleman later recalled telling Los Angeles Times reporter Lee Dembart about “computer viruses”, spreading the term. Cohen’s was not the first self-copying program: Creeper (1971) and Elk Cloner (1981 to 1982) predate it, but they were not called viruses then. Fiction used the idea earlier.

    Watch out: Cohen's 1983 program is often called the first computer virus, but self-copying programs such as Creeper (1971) and Elk Cloner came earlier.

    See alsoThe Cuckoo's Egg

    #virus

  68. 1987Abort, Retry, Fail?The error prompt DOS showed after a critical error such as an open drive door, asking the user to press A, R or F (in early versions, A, R or I).Likely

    The prompt began as “Abort, Retry, Ignore?”; that text is in the MS-DOS 1.25 source code (copyright IBM 1981, 1982) released by the Computer History Museum. “Fail” arrived with DOS 3.3, announced by IBM on 2 April 1987. It returned an error code to the program instead of lying that a read had worked. A November 1982 PC Magazine comparison of CP/M-86 and MS-DOS credits the prompt with improving on CP/M, which simply hung on an open drive door. Microsoft’s Dave Plummer later described the options as a critical error handler in COMMAND.COM.

    Watch out: The exact phrase "Abort, Retry, Fail?" did not exist in the original 1981 DOS, which asked "Abort, Retry, Ignore?"

    See alsoMS-DOS

    #abort-retry-fail

  69. 1987 (disk)spin upTo start something running and bring it up to working speed: first a disk drive reaching full rotation, and now also a server, virtual machine or test environment that is launched on demand.Likely

    The oldest dated use found is physical: a 1987 issue of PC: The Independent Guide to IBM Personal Computers speaks of a hard drive ‘spinning up or down’, meaning accelerating to or from reading speed. The server sense, launching a machine or process on demand, is documented later: Linux Journal (March 2010) writes of ‘spinning up your own personal cloud servers’ on Amazon EC2, and a chapter in The Architecture of Open Source Applications, Volume 2 (2012) says Twisted makes it easy to ‘spin up a server’. These are dated examples, not first uses; the sense plainly extends the disk picture, but no earlier server use has been found.

    See alsoDocker

    #spin-up

  70. 1988dogfoodingUsing your own product internally before, or while, selling it to others; short for "eating your own dog food".Likely

    Microsoft’s Paul Maritz sent Brian Valentine, test manager for LAN Manager, an email titled “Eating our own Dogfood” in 1988, challenging him to get more internal use of the product, and the phrase spread through the company. That account comes from Microsoft’s 2000 book Inside Out and a 2009 Maritz interview, as cited by Wikipedia; neither source could be checked. IEEE Software’s editor Warren Harrison later recalled earlier ancestors: 1970s Alpo ads with Lorne Greene feeding Alpo to his own dogs, and a Kal Kan president said to eat his firm’s dog food at shareholder meetings.

    Watch out: The Alpo ads are sometimes called the origin of the tech term, but they are at most a distant ancestor of the 1988 Microsoft usage.

    See alsoShowstopper!

    #dogfooding

  71. 1989AFKShort for 'away from keyboard': a note in chat that you are stepping away and will not answer for a while.Documented

    The earliest dated use found is in FidoNews 6-19 (8 May 1989), the FidoNet newsletter. A reader named L. Edel (node 151/2), not the editor, contributed a piece on chat ‘icons’ that lists AFK as ‘Away From Keys’ next to BRB and BAK (back at keys). Wiktionary also cites a rec.humor post of 17 January 1990 that spells it ‘Away From Keyboard’. The Jargon File (2.1.1, June 1990) lists AFK among abbreviations reported from GEnie and CompuServe chat. A separate entry labelled [MUD], with a monster-hunt example, appears by version 4.3.0 (2001). Which community coined it is not shown.

    Watch out: It is often assumed to come from online games, but the earliest dated use found is from BBS and chat culture.

    #afk

  72. 1989LOLShort for "laughing out loud" (or "laugh out loud"), typed to show amusement.Documented

    The earliest citation linguist Ben Zimmer found for the laughter sense is the 8 May 1989 issue of FidoNews, page 10, in a list of online abbreviations under “MO_ICONS_PLEASE”. The Oxford English Dictionary’s own citation was a 1990 Jargon File version. Wayne Pearson of Calgary says he coined it in the early-to-mid 1980s on a BBS called Viewline, but no record exists and he says he kept none. Separately, “LOL” meant “little old lady” in the 1960s, per the OED.

    Watch out: Wayne Pearson's story of inventing LOL on a Calgary BBS in the 1980s is popular but has no surviving record.

    #lol

  73. c. 19900xDEADBEEFA hexadecimal "magic number" that reads as the words "dead beef", used as a recognisable fill pattern for uninitialised or freed memory and as a debugging marker.Likely

    The Jargon File and FOLDOC describe DEADBEEF as the pattern used to fill freshly allocated memory under several IBM environments, including the RS/6000 (announced February 1990). It later turned up as a debug value elsewhere, including classic Mac OS, the Amiga and Solaris. No dated first use has been found. Memorable fill patterns are older than any one system; the Jargon File recounts an Algol 68-R compiler that filled storage with F00LF00L. A sibling, 0xCAFEBABE, has its own competing origin stories.

    Watch out: Some tell of a specific IBM release or a Texas pun behind the choice, but neither is documented.

    #0xdeadbeef

  74. 1990bandwidth (figurative)In engineering, bandwidth is the width of a range of frequencies, or how much information a channel can carry per second. Figuratively, 'I don't have the bandwidth' means you lack the spare attention or time.Likely

    In engineering, bandwidth is the width of a frequency band, usually in hertz. The hacker Jargon File first has a BANDWIDTH entry in version 2.2.1 (15 December 1990): the volume of information per unit time that a computer, person or transmission medium can handle, with a second sense, ‘attention span’. Version 2.1.1 (June 1990) already mentioned Usenet users calling long signatures a waste of bandwidth, and quoted the station-wagon-full-of-magtape line, but had no entry; versions up to 1.5.0 never use the word. The file later says the generalized usage went mainstream after the Internet boom of 1993-1994. The earliest figurative use is not pinned down.

    #bandwidth-figurative

  75. by 1990scrapeTo scrape is to have a program read information that was meant for human eyes, such as the text on a screen or a web page, and pull it out as data. A scraper might copy every price from a shop's pages into a spreadsheet.Likely

    Screen scraping first meant reading the text off a computer terminal’s screen, either through the terminal’s auxiliary port or by wiring one machine’s terminal output into another’s input; it was a way to reach old systems with no other interface. The earliest dated source offered for it is a 2 November 1990 FX Week article, cited by Wikipedia for financial firms capturing Reuters, Telerate and Quotron market data this way; that article has not been read directly, so 1990 marks documented use, not coinage. No earlier use of ‘screen scraping’ and no dated first use of ‘web scraping’ has been found. The first web robots appeared in 1993.

    • Sources
    • Data scraping (Wikipedia) · Original meaning of screen scraping; cites FX Week, 2 November 1990, for financial data capture
    • Web scraping (Wikipedia) · World Wide Web Wanderer (June 1993) as the first web robot; no dating of the term itself
    • screen scraping (Wiktionary) · Current definition as a form of web scraping; Wiktionary has no citations pages for scrape, screen scraping or web scraping

    #scrape

  76. 1990take it offlineTo move a discussion out of the meeting or thread and continue it privately, later or elsewhere.Documented

    The earliest dated use found is the Jargon File, version 2.1.1 (a draft dated 12 June 1990). It defines OFFLINE as ‘Not now or not here’ and gives the example ‘Let’s take this discussion offline.’ The word is absent from every earlier file version checked (1.1.0 through 1.5.0, the last a 1983 draft), and the same entry carries into 2.1.5 and 2.2.1. Offline presumably comes from the computing sense of not connected, stretched to mean not in this conversation. Nothing earlier than 1990 has been found for the figurative phrase, though spoken use may be older.

    #take-it-offline

  77. 1990szero-dayTwo related senses: newly released or pre-release pirated software (0-day warez), and a security flaw the vendor has had zero days to fix.Likely

    The older sense comes from the warez scene, where pirated software was sorted by days since release and ‘zero day’ meant cracked and shared on the day of release or before. Wikipedia says the vulnerability sense followed later, from the number of days a vendor had to fix a flaw. The scene sense is mostly documented by participants’ memories, such as Mark Maunder’s 2014 recollection of the late 1980s to early 1990s. The earliest dated vulnerability quotation found is from 2010, and no dated warez citation before 2004 has been found.

    Watch out: Many assume 'zero-day' began as security jargon, but the warez sense is the older one.

    #zero-day

  78. 1991 / 2001All your base are belong to usA garbled English line from the intro of the European Mega Drive version of the shooter Zero Wing, which became an early internet meme.Documented

    Zero Wing was a Toaplan arcade shooter from 1989; Wikipedia gives October 1989, though its meme article cites a 1 July 1989 US copyright record. The Mega Drive port came out in Japan on 31 May 1991 and in Europe in July 1991, and the clumsy English intro text is from the European version. Programmer Tatsuya Uemura said the translation was done by a Toaplan export staffer whose English was poor. Animated GIFs of the screen spread on forums around 2000, and a Newgrounds video set to a remix went up on 16 February 2001.

    Watch out: People assume the line was in the 1989 arcade game, but it comes from the 1991 European Mega Drive port.

    #all-your-base-are-belong-to-us

  79. 1991bogosortBogosort sorts a list by shuffling it at random and checking whether it happens to be in order, repeating until it is. It works, but for a list of just ten items it needs several million shuffles on average, so it is mostly used as an example of what not to do.Likely

    ‘Bogo-sort’ appears in the Jargon File in version 2.4.1, dated 14 January 1991, and is absent from version 2.3.1 of 3 January 1991. That entry calls it ‘the generic bad algorithm’ and says the origin is a fictitious contest at CMU to design the worst-running sort, an account that is unverified. It likens it to throwing a deck of cards in the air and testing whether they landed in order. The current entry calls it the archetypal perversely awful algorithm, with variant ‘stupid-sort’. ‘Bogo’ is generally taken as from ‘bogus’. An earlier use may exist in unarchived talk. The 2007 paper ‘Sorting the Slow Way’ (Gruber, Holzer, Ruepp) analysed bogosort and similar algorithms.

    See alsobubble sortBig O notation

    #bogosort

  80. 1992surf the webTo browse from page to page online, following whatever catches your interest.Likely

    Librarian Jean Armour Polly popularized “surfing” for network use with “Surfing the INTERNET,” which first appeared, shorter, in the June 1992 Wilson Library Bulletin; an expanded version (2.0.2, 15 December 1992) circulated online and is on Project Gutenberg. Press accounts say a mousepad showing a surfer and “information surfer” gave her the image, and that the phrase was already floating around. It was about the Internet; the web barely existed yet, so “surf the web” came later. Earlier uses of “surf” in this sense have not been ruled out.

    Watch out: Polly is often credited as the inventor of "surfing the net," but she herself drew on an "information surfer" mousepad slogan.

    See alsoNCSA Mosaic

    #surf-the-web

  81. 1992technical debtThe future cost of rework created by choosing a quick, expedient solution now instead of a better one that would take longer.Likely

    Ward Cunningham’s OOPSLA ‘92 experience report, “The WyCash Portfolio Management System,” gave the metaphor: “Shipping first time code is like going into debt. A little debt speeds development so long as it is paid back promptly with a rewrite.” Unpaid, “every minute spent on not-quite-right code counts as interest on that debt.” The report says “debt”, not “technical debt”; the two-word phrase appears to be a later shorthand, and its earliest print use was not found. Cunningham later explained the idea in a 2009 video.

    Watch out: Cunningham did not write the words "technical debt" in his 1992 paper; he wrote about debt.

    See alsoDreaming in Code

    #technical-debt

  82. 1992trollTo post something deliberately provocative or misleading online to bait others into reacting; also, a person who does this habitually.Likely

    In Usenet’s alt.folklore.urban, “trolling for newbies” meant posting an overdone old topic to see which newcomers would take it seriously. Wikipedia cites two October 1992 posts from that group: David Esan (2 October) wrote that “when someone goes newbie trolling how many people he catches”; Terry Chan followed on 8 October. It says the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest attestation is 1992. The Jargon File traces the term to the fishing sense of trolling. Some claim late-1980s use, but no dated example was found.

    Watch out: The mythical creature is not the source; the word comes from the fishing sense of trolling.

    #troll

  83. 1993BSoD (blue screen of death)Slang for the blue error screen Windows shows after a fatal system error, and for any such crash.Likely

    The earliest use of the phrase found is a Usenet post dated 10 October 1993 in comp.os.ms-windows.nt.setup: “I don’t get the blue screen of death—NT just freezes.” Wikipedia says the first Windows blue screen reporting a critical system error appeared in Windows NT 3.1 in 1993. Earlier dated uses may exist; the abbreviation “BSOD” has not been dated here. Bill Gates’s Windows 98 beta demo crashed with a BSoD at COMDEX on 20 April 1998, a famous public moment.

    #bsod-blue-screen-of-death

  84. 1993fragTo kill another player's character in a multiplayer game; earlier, to kill a fellow soldier, usually a superior, with a fragmentation grenade.Likely

    ‘Fragging’ is Vietnam-era U.S. Army slang for deliberately killing a fellow soldier, usually with a fragmentation grenade. The Jargon File derives the gaming sense from that slang ‘via the games Doom and Quake’. Wikipedia’s account of Doom’s development says that after multiplayer was coded in late 1993, the team called the mode ‘deathmatch’ and one developer, Cloud, called killing another player ‘fragging’. Wiktionary’s earliest gaming quotation is a 1996 Usenet post. No earlier game that used the word has been found.

    Watch out: The word was not invented for Doom; the games borrowed it from Vietnam-era slang.

    See alsoDoomMasters of Doom

    #frag

  85. 1993meatspaceThe physical world of bodies and places, as opposed to cyberspace.Likely

    Meatspace is a joke built on ‘cyberspace’: the world where the meat lives. It shows up on Usenet in 1993, according to Wikipedia’s account, and was in newspapers by 1995, when The Seattle Times used it in a piece about John Perry Barlow. Wiktionary’s earliest quotation is from 1998. The Jargon File notes that hackers prefer it to ‘cyberspace’ because ‘we already have a running meatspace implementation (the universe)’. Who first said it is not known.

    Watch out: It is sometimes credited to William Gibson, who coined 'cyberspace', but there is no evidence he used 'meatspace'.

    #meatspace

  86. 1993spamUnwanted messages sent in bulk, first on Usenet and later by email.Documented

    The Monty Python “Spam” sketch (1970) supplied the joke: the word repeated until it drowns everything else. By the late 1980s, MUD players were using “spam” for flooding a session with text. On 31 March 1993 Richard Depew’s ARMM moderation software malfunctioned and posted about 200 messages to news.admin.policy. Joel Furr is reported to have been first to call that a “spam” on Usenet. The meaning later widened to bulk commercial junk, notably after the April 1994 Canter and Siegel “green card” ads.

    Watch out: Spam is not an acronym; the word comes from the 1970 Monty Python sketch, not from any abbreviation.

    See alsoWhere Wizards Stay Up Late

    #spam

  87. c. 1993w00tAn exclamation of joy or triumph, often typed with zeros as w00t.Disputed

    Lexicographer Grant Barrett found no printed ‘woot’ before 1993 and thinks the likeliest source is the 1993 dance hits ‘Whoot, There It Is’ (95 South) and ‘Whoomp! (There It Is)’ (Tag Team), though he cautions memories of such origins are unreliable. He found earlier hoots in print, such as a 1988 Atlantic City tabloid called The Whoot!. Barrett calls ‘wow, loot’ from Dungeons & Dragons unlikely, and dismisses the Unix ‘root’ story as having no evidence. The ‘We owned the other team’ backronym appears in Usenet only from March 2003. No support for a Warcraft origin has been found.

    Watch out: Stories that it began as 'wow, loot!' in Dungeons & Dragons, as Unix 'root', or in a game like Warcraft have no documentation behind them.

    #w00t

  88. 1995phishingFraud in which the attacker poses as a trusted party, usually by email or message, to trick people into giving up passwords, card numbers or other secrets.Likely

    Koceilah Rekouche, who wrote the AOL hacking program AOHell as a teenager (using the name Da Chronic), says the word began there. In a 2011 paper he says a friend first called the trick “fishing,” and that he used the term, spelled “phishing,” in AOHell’s interface and documentation in 1995 (it uses both spellings). That is a first-hand account rather than a dated print example. Wikipedia says the term appeared in print by March 1997. The “ph” is usually linked to “phreaking” and “phat”-style hacker respellings, but Rekouche does not say why he chose it.

    #phishing

  89. 1995wikiA website whose pages anyone with access can edit directly in a browser, with pages linked by simple markup.Documented

    Ward Cunningham put the first wiki, WikiWikiWeb, online at c2.com on 25 March 1995 as a companion to the Portland Pattern Repository. On that site he wrote that he chose “wiki-wiki as an alliterative substitute for quick” to avoid calling it “quick-web.” The usual story is that he borrowed it from the Wiki Wiki Shuttle at Honolulu International Airport, after an airport employee told him to take it; “wiki” is Hawaiian for “quick.” Wikipedia gives the shuttle account without a first-hand quotation, so treat that detail as widely told.

    See alsoWikipedia

    #wiki

  90. 1995Y2KShorthand for the Year 2000 problem, in which software that stored years as two digits might misread 2000 as 1900.Documented

    David Eddy, a Massachusetts programmer, is credited with the abbreviation in an email posted to a discussion group on 12 June 1995. The Baltimore Sun reported in 1999 that he said: “People were calling it Year 2000, CDC (Century Date Change)… There were other contenders. Y2K just came off my fingertips.” It reported that his authorship was only traced about a year earlier by searching the group’s archives. The two-digit-year problem itself was written about much earlier.

    #y2k

  91. 1996ClippyNickname of Clippit, the animated paperclip that was the default Office Assistant in Microsoft Office 97 and later; famous for unwanted offers of help.Likely

    Microsoft announced Office 97 as released to manufacturing on 19 November 1996, with retail availability scheduled for 16 January 1997 and a new Office Assistant. The default assistant was a paperclip named Clippit, illustrated by Kevan J. Atteberry. “Clippy” is the public’s nickname; its first use is undated. Microsoft turned the assistant off by default in Office XP (2001) and removed it in Office 2007 (released 30 January 2007).

    #clippy

  92. 1996 / 2006the cloudInformal name for remote computing and storage reached over a network, usually the internet.Likely

    Two things are often blurred. The cloud shape was drawn in telephone and network diagrams to stand for a network whose insides did not matter; accounts place this in the 1970s and 1980s, though no dated example has been found. The phrase “cloud computing” appears at Compaq in 1996, in a planner entry of 29 October and a strategy paper of 14 November. It reached wide use after Eric Schmidt of Google said “cloud” at a conference on 9 August 2006, and Amazon announced an EC2 beta on 25 August 2006.

    Watch out: The cloud is often called a 2006 invention, but both the diagram symbol and the phrase "cloud computing" are older.

    See alsoAmazon S3

    #the-cloud

  93. 1997 / 1999blog / weblogA website of dated entries shown newest first, usually a personal or topical log with commentary and links.Documented

    Rebecca Blood’s history says “weblog” was named by Jorn Barger in December 1997 (Wikipedia gives 17 December, for his site Robot Wisdom). “Blog” followed in 1999. Peter Merholz wrote that in April or May 1999 he put a note in his site’s sidebar saying he would pronounce “weblog” as “wee’-blog. Or ‘blog’ for short.” The common retelling is “we blog.” Blogger launched in August 1999 and spread the short form.

    See alsoWordPress

    #blog-weblog

  94. 1998Google (as a verb)To search for information online, usually with Google; now also any web search.Documented

    The earliest recorded use verified is Larry Page’s announcement to the Google-Friends mailing list on 8 July 1998, which ends “Have fun and keep googling!” That is a casual intransitive use. Wikipedia says the earliest known explicitly transitive use was in 2000. In January 2003 the American Dialect Society named “google (verb)” the “most useful” word of 2002. Merriam-Webster added it in July 2006, and Wikipedia reports the OED added it on 15 June 2006.

    #google-as-a-verb

  95. late 1990snerfIn games, to make something weaker through a patch or rule change, as when a sword is cut back so far it might as well be foam. The opposite is 'buff'.Likely

    The word comes from Nerf, the soft foam toy line from Parker Brothers; inventor Reyn Guyer dates the original ball’s box to 1969, while Wikipedia says the ball was introduced in 1970. For the gaming verb, the account usually cited is Raph Koster’s: in an online post (page updated 2014) he says the term entered online gaming through Ultima Online, after sword damage was cut and players complained of ‘nerf swords’. That is an undated recollection, and no dated citation from the game or an earlier MUD has been found. A separate 1953 novel uses ‘nerf’ for bumping another car. The origin of ‘buff’ is undocumented; bodybuilding is a guess.

    Watch out: The Ultima Online story rests on one undated recollection, not on a dated citation.

    #nerf

  96. 1998Slashdot effectA sudden flood of visitors to a small website after a large site links to it, often slowing or knocking over the smaller site.Likely

    Named after Slashdot, the tech news site that Wikipedia says was founded in October 1997 by Rob Malda and Jeff Bates. FOLDOC has an entry, last updated 24 October 1998, that says “the term was coined by readers of the Unix advocacy web site slashdot.org.” The Jargon File also lists it, noting it is better described as a “flash crowd,” the term from Larry Niven’s 1973 story. No individual coiner was found, and no earlier date than 1998.

    #slashdot-effect

  97. 1999bikesheddingSpending disproportionate time arguing about a trivial matter because everyone can have an opinion on it.Documented

    C. Northcote Parkinson’s ‘Parkinson’s Law’ (1957) described the idea, with a committee that rushes a nuclear reactor but argues for ages over a bicycle shed. On 2 October 1999 Poul-Henning Kamp emailed FreeBSD committers and hackers with the subject ‘A bike shed (any colour will do) on greener grass…’, prompted by a long thread about making sleep(1) accept fractional seconds. He wrote of ‘bike shed discussions’, and the phrase spread from FreeBSD outward. Who first said the verb ‘bikeshedding’ is not known.

    Watch out: Kamp did not invent the idea; Parkinson did, and Kamp himself misdates the book to the 'early 1960'ies'.

    #bikeshedding

  98. 1999emojiSmall pictures used in text messages and web pages, from the Japanese for picture character.Documented

    Shigetaka Kurita designed a set of 176 pictograms on a 12 by 12 pixel grid for NTT DoCoMo’s i-mode in 1999, and MoMA acquired them in 2016. They were not the first: Wikipedia notes an earlier 1997 SoftBank set, and Sharp and NEC had earlier ones. The word is Japanese: e (picture) plus moji (character), and is a coincidence rather than a form of ‘emotion’ or ‘emoticon’. Unicode accepted a proposal from Google and Apple in 2010, and Unicode 6.0 added 722 emoji that October.

    Watch out: Kurita is often called the inventor of emoji, but he designed one influential early set, and others existed before it.

    #emoji

  99. 1999hackathonA short, intense event where programmers gather to build software together.Documented

    Niels Provos, an OpenBSD developer, recalls that ‘in June of 1999, OpenBSD held the first hackathon’ in Calgary, spelling it as one word, and says either Theo de Raadt or he coined the name. Wikipedia gives the date as June 4 and says the gathering was a cryptography effort set up around U.S. export restrictions. Wikipedia also records a Sun Microsystems hackathon at JavaOne on 15 to 19 June 1999, where John Gage challenged attendees to write a Java program for the Palm V. The word blends ‘hack’ and ‘marathon’.

    See alsoHackers, by Steven Levy

    #hackathon

  100. 1999pwnTo dominate or defeat someone, especially in online games; a deliberate misspelling of "own" (as in "owned").Disputed

    The earliest citation found is a Usenet post of 5 August 1999 in rec.games.computer.ultima.online: “I PWNED YO @zz!” Later Usenet uses appear in 2001, 2003 and 2004. Most explanations treat it as a typo of “owned”, since O and P sit side by side on a QWERTY keyboard. Nobody has shown who made the first slip, or whether it began as an accident or a joke. A tale about a Warcraft map reading “has been pwned” is widely told but has no contemporary evidence behind it.

    Watch out: The tale that a Warcraft level designer mistyped "owned" in a victory message is popular but unproven.

    • Sources
    • Wiktionary: pwn · Dated Usenet citations from 5 August 1999 onward, and the O/P keyboard-adjacency etymology
    • Wikipedia: Pwn · the O and P keyboard-typo explanation

    #pwn

  101. 1999rubber duck debuggingExplaining your code line by line to an inanimate object, such as a rubber duck, to spot the bug yourself.Likely

    Wikipedia says the name comes from an anecdote in ‘The Pragmatic Programmer’ (1999) by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas, in which a research assistant named Greg Pugh carried a rubber duck for the purpose. The book’s point is that explaining step by step what the code should do often makes the problem ‘leap off the screen’. The Rubber Duck Debugging website likewise says it paraphrases a story from the book. Teddy bears and other objects work as well. No printed use of the technique under this name before the book has been found, and older claims such as a Cambridge origin are unverified.

    Watch out: Some retellings place the habit at Cambridge or give it to a teddy bear before 1999, and no source for those has been found.

    #rubber-duck-debugging

  102. 1999 / 2004Web 2.0A label for the web as a platform for user participation, shared content and web-based applications, rather than static pages.Documented

    Information architect Darcy DiNucci used “Web 2.0” in her article “Fragmented Future” in Print magazine in 1999, writing that the web was “only an embryo of the Web to come” and would be understood as “a transport mechanism, the ether through which interactivity happens.” Her meaning was about devices and interactivity. The phrase took off in 2004 with the first Web 2.0 Conference run by O’Reilly Media and MediaLive, where Tim O’Reilly, Dale Dougherty and John Battelle framed it as “the web as platform.”

    Watch out: The term is often credited solely to Tim O'Reilly, who popularized and reshaped it rather than first using it.

    See alsoAjax

    #web-20

  103. 2000yak shavingA chain of small, seemingly pointless tasks that each have to be done before the next, until you reach the one you actually set out to do.Likely

    The earliest document found is an email of 11 February 2000 to the MIT AI Lab’s mailing list, in which Jeremy H. Brown wrote that “our very own Carlin Vieri invented the term, and yet it has not caught on within the lab.” The Jargon File labels it “MIT AI Lab, after 2000” and says it probably came from a Ren & Stimpy episode. Wiktionary links it to “Yak Shaving Day” in “The Boy Who Cried Rat!” (aired 8 September 1991). That link comes from secondary sources; no statement from Vieri turned up.

    Watch out: The story that the phrase was coined in 1991 by the cartoon is wrong: the cartoon only supplies a possible source for the image.

    #yak-shaving

  104. 2000sbrickedOf an electronic device, left unusable by a failed update, bad flash or similar fault, so it is as useful as a brick.Likely

    The metaphor is plain: a dead device is a brick. Documented use is later than often assumed. The earliest citation found is a Usenet post of 15 October 2002 about Windows CE: “bricking the device”. Another early citation, in the Double-Tongued Dictionary, is a Usenet post of 6 February 2004 about users who “bricked their routers”. Claims that the word dates to the 1980s or 1990s are common, but no citations for them have been found.

    See alsoThe iPhone SDK

    #bricked

  105. 2002 (dox)doxxingPublishing someone's private details, such as a home address or phone number, online without their consent. Also spelled doxing, and the short form is 'dox'.Likely

    ‘Dox’ is a respelling of ‘docs’, short for documents. Mat Honan wrote in Wired in 2014 that it comes from ‘dropping dox’, a revenge tactic of 1990s hacker culture, but gave no dated example. The Atlantic, also in 2014, traced the word to hackers’ shorthand for documents and the practice to 1990s Usenet, citing Know Your Meme rather than a dated post. The earliest dated Usenet uses found, via Wiktionary, are 1995 (plain software documentation) and 2002 (someone’s address and numbers, ‘how many people have his dox’). Wiktionary’s earliest quotation for ‘doxing’ itself is from 2018.

    • Sources
    • Wired: 'What Is Doxing?' (Mat Honan, 6 March 2014) · 'dox' as the abbreviated form of 'dropping dox', an old-school revenge tactic from 1990s hacker culture; example uses IRC; no dated instance.
    • The Atlantic: 'Doxing: An Etymology' (March 2014) · Derives the word from 'docs' and says 1990s Usenet users posted personal information as retaliation, sourcing the etymology to Know Your Meme.
    • Wiktionary: dox · Respelling of 'docs'; Usenet quotations from 1995 (documentation), 2002 and 2004 (personal information); 'doxing' quotations are from 2018 onward.
    • Wikipedia: Doxing · Etymology as respelling of 'docs'; early cases on Usenet in the late 1990s.

    #doxxing

  106. 2004podcastA series of audio episodes distributed over the internet for download or subscription.Documented

    The earliest known use is by Ben Hammersley in The Guardian on 12 February 2004, listing candidate names for the new amateur audio-broadcast scene: “Audioblogging? Podcasting? GuerillaMedia?” The word blends “iPod” and “broadcast”. On 15 September 2004, Dannie Gregoire used “podcaster” in a Yahoo Groups post, and Adam Curry and Dave Winer’s circle later spread it. Both Curry and Winer have been credited with coining it, but the Guardian piece predates their involvement.

    Watch out: Adam Curry is often called the inventor of the word, but a Guardian article used it months before his show.

    See alsoiTunes 4

    • Sources
    • Word Origins: podcast · Hammersley, Guardian, 12 Feb 2004, with the quoted line; Gregoire's 15 Sept 2004 post; Curry/Winer coinage claims questioned
    • Wiktionary: podcast · Hammersley, The Guardian, 12 Feb 2004

    #podcast

  107. 2007jailbreakTo remove a manufacturer's software restrictions on a device, most famously the iPhone, so that unapproved software can run.Likely

    The word is much older: “jailbreak” means a prison escape, an Americanism dating to around 1905-10. Its use for iPhones comes from 2007, soon after the phone launched in June. Wikipedia reports that early tools appeared that summer, and “JailbreakMe 1.0” (AppSnapp) arrived in October 2007 for iPhone OS 1.1.1. George Hotz’s August 2007 feat was a carrier SIM unlock, not a jailbreak. No dated source shows who first applied the word to iPhones, or whether other devices used it earlier.

    Watch out: George Hotz's famous 2007 iPhone hack is often called the first jailbreak, but it was a SIM unlock.

    See alsoThe iPhone SDK

    #jailbreak

  108. Before 2007PEBKACAn acronym for 'Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair', used in tech support to say the fault lies with the user rather than the machine.Likely

    PEBKAC (also spelled PEBCAK) is help-desk humor for user error. The Jargon File lists it as ‘used by support people, particularly at call centers and help desks’ and ‘very derogatory’, and FOLDOC lists the PEBCAK spelling. The earliest dated quotations found are from 2007 (Wiktionary), although the term is clearly older than that. Nobody has shown who coined it or when. Stories placing it at IBM in the 1970s, or at Hewlett-Packard, are repeated online but no source behind either has been found.

    Watch out: The popular claim that IBM technicians coined it in the 1970s has no known source.

    • Sources
    • Jargon File: PEBKAC · Expansion, help-desk usage and 'very derogatory' tone; lists ID10T as related
    • FOLDOC: PEBCAK · Definition as helpdesk acronym; PEBCAK spelling; PICNIC variant
    • Wiktionary: PEBCAK · Earliest dated quotation shown is 2007; no etymology given

    #pebkac

  109. 2007RickrollA bait-and-switch prank in which a link promising something else leads to Rick Astley's 1987 video for "Never Gonna Give You Up".Likely

    The song was released in 1987. The prank grew out of “duckrolling”, an older 4chan bait-and-switch. A video titled “Rickroll’d” was uploaded to YouTube by Shawn Cotter (cotter548) on 15 May 2007, and Wiktionary and Wikipedia credit him with the coinage. 4chan’s founder has dated the start of the trend to around May 2007, linked in place of a Grand Theft Auto IV trailer. A separate claim of an earlier prank in August 2006 exists. Rick Astley lip-synced at the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade in November 2008.

    Watch out: The song itself is from 1987; the prank is a 2007 invention.

    • Sources
    • Rickrolling - Wikipedia · Duckrolling precursor, Cotter 15 May 2007, 1987 release, Macy's parade Nov 2008
    • Know Your Meme: Rickroll · m00t's account of May 2007 on /v/; 'Rickroll'D' upload 15 May 2007; an earlier-prank claim from Aug 2006
    • Wiktionary: rickroll · Blend of Rick + duckroll; first press citation (Guardian, 5 Dec 2008)

    #rickroll

  110. 2007tweetA short post on Twitter (now X), or to post one.Documented

    Twitter’s first message came in March 2006, but nobody called it a tweet yet. Developers at The Iconfactory, building the Twitterrific app, wanted a short name for “Post a Twitter Update” and first used “twit”. On 11 January 2007, Twitter engineer Blaine Cook emailed Craig Hockenberry: “how about changing ‘twit’ to ‘tweet’”. Hockenberry made the change in Twitterrific on 12 January. Twitter’s own blog did not use the word without quote marks until June 2008. The participants did not mention birds.

    Watch out: Many assume Twitter itself invented the word on day one; it first appeared in a third-party app a year later.

    #tweet

  111. 2010dark patternA user-interface design that tricks or pressures people into actions they did not intend, such as hidden costs or hard-to-find cancel buttons.Documented

    UX designer Harry Brignull coined “dark patterns” in 2010. Wikipedia dates his registration of darkpatterns.org, a library for naming and shaming deceptive interfaces, to 28 July 2010. His conference talk “Dark Patterns: User Interfaces Designed to Trick People” followed on 13 September 2010 (he describes the video as the original presentation). Brignull later moved the site to deceptive.design and favors “deceptive patterns”, on advice from the World Wide Web Foundation’s Tech Policy Design Lab.

    #dark-pattern

  112. 2013HODLCrypto slang for holding an asset rather than selling, born as a misspelling of "hold".Documented

    On 18 December 2013, a BitcoinTalk user called GameKyuubi started a thread titled “I AM HODLING” (forum time stamp 10:03:03 AM). The post opens: “I type d that tyitle twice because I knew it was wrong the first time. Still wrong. w/e.” He argued that he would hold through the price drop rather than sell, and mentioned having had whiskey. Other posters adopted the typo. Later readings of HODL as an acronym for “hold on for dear life” are after-the-fact.

    Watch out: HODL is often said to stand for "hold on for dear life", but it began as a misspelling.

    #hodl

  113. 2014HeartbleedThe nickname of CVE-2014-0160, a flaw in OpenSSL's TLS heartbeat feature that let attackers read chunks of a server's memory.Documented

    Heartbleed was disclosed on 7 April 2014. Google’s Neel Mehta reported it to OpenSSL (Wikipedia gives 1 April), and Codenomicon, a Finnish security company, found it independently around 3 April. The flawed code entered OpenSSL in December 2011 and shipped in version 1.0.1 in March 2012. Codenomicon gave the bug a name, a pun on “heartbeat”, plus a bleeding-heart logo and the site heartbleed.com.

    • Sources
    • Heartbleed.com · Discovery by Codenomicon and Neel Mehta; 7 April 2014 disclosure; heartbeat extension; CC0 logo
    • Heartbleed - Wikipedia · Mehta 1 April, Codenomicon 3 April; code introduced 31 Dec 2011; logo by Leena Kurjenniska; named by an engineer at the Finnish firm

    #heartbleed

  114. 2017deepfakeVideo, audio or images made or altered with machine learning so that a person seems to say or do something they did not.Documented

    The word began as a Reddit username. In late 2017, a user called “deepfakes” posted face-swapped videos made with open-source machine-learning tools, and a subreddit named for them followed. Journalist Samantha Cole wrote about the user for Vice’s Motherboard on 11 December 2017, and again on 24 January 2018, by which time “deepfakes” was being used as a general name for the technique. The New York Times used it by 5 March 2018. The “deep learning” plus “fake” reading is the obvious origin of the name.

    #deepfake

  115. 2018doomscrollingCompulsively scrolling through bad news online, often at the cost of your mood and sleep.Likely

    The word appears on Twitter in October 2018. Wikipedia names @Callamitys on 7 October 2018 as the earliest known use. Wordorigins.org instead cites a hyphenated “doom-scrolling” post from 8 October 2018. It stayed rare until a tweet from classics professor Ellen Muehlberger on 14 March 2020, after which it spread across the media. Dictionary.com picked it as August 2020’s top trend, Macquarie named it a 2020 word of the year, and Merriam-Webster added it in September 2023.

    Watch out: Many people assume doomscrolling was coined during the pandemic, but it appeared in 2018.

    #doomscrolling

  116. 2025vibe codingBuilding software by describing what you want to an AI model in plain language and accepting the code it produces, often without reading it closely.Documented

    Andrej Karpathy, a computer scientist and former Tesla AI director who co-founded OpenAI, introduced the term in a post on X on 2 February 2025. He described a style of working where you “fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists.” Merriam-Webster listed it as slang and trending in March 2025, and Collins English Dictionary named it Word of the Year on 6 November 2025.

    #vibe-coding