code: What someone claims to have when he sneezes and has a massive headache. program: The crumpled piece of paper in your pocket after you come back from a play. software: Is that, like, pillows and things? --A nurse in the Hawaii State Health Department when they were planning to computerize their records computer: One who computes --According to the 1914 Webster's Unabridged Dictionary perl: what you do between knits C: n. A big liquid blue object intended to make people {C sick}. interj. An exclamation used to get people to notice something, e.g. C shell. C shell run. Run, shell, Run! net: A trap intended to catch other fishermen when they try to take your catch that is lying in it. character: The guy who's always making jokes, e.g. Eat your burnt meat. It builds character. char: What some restaurants do to perfectly good meat. See {character}. Xterm: A sequence of letters that used to be a word. mouse: A small, gray, thing with a tail, nowadays featuring buttons. serial port: A place in the harbor that people ship Rice Krispies from. See {parallel port}. parallel port: A ship design where the left and right sides of a ship do not touch. See {serial port}. bug: n. A small but irritating creature, like a mosquito, that you might want to smash. v. Acting like one. diskette: A small, feminine version of a {disk}, just as a rockette is to a rock. disk: A frisbee, sometimes thrown into the water, kept in high and low temperatures, and gets lots of fingerprints. See {diskette}. serial processor: The machine that makes that part of a complete breakfast. postscript: The thing at the end of a letter that you planned to put there all along, but decided to make it look like you just thought of it just now. float: 1. Fancy ice cream and soda. In general, it doesn't. 2. What most {computers} aren't intended to do. motherboard: A lucky mother. See {motherhectic}. printer: Benjamin Franklin. Pascal: The guy that won the Big Screw in 1991. Pull-down menu: A convenient way for restaurants to keep their lists of food. hard drive: A good thing to do in golf when you're far away from the hole. binary tree: Plants that you pick binaries from. terminal: Where you wait a long time in one place, wishing things would move faster. Like buses and trains. RS-232: What Sesame Street is brought to you by. (the letter R, the letter S, and the number 232) Not gate: Something that's not a gate, i.e. a piece of solid wall. It makes people turn around, hence its common name, the "inverter". Exclusive or: A piece of rock that won't stand for cheap metals like zinc or lead. Carrier signal: What a big boat uses to talk to a plane that wants to land on it. Bitmap: A torn-off corner of a Rand McNally's. Exabyte: The price you might pay for a snack if the shopkeeper wants your divorcee. Capacitance: The ability to drink other things before you yourself get drunk. Also, resistance. Not inductance, however. Current: What you hope doesn't catch you in the water. Either kind of current. Console: A box that comforts you after you give up those thousand dollars or so to get your {computer}. Windows: Where some people throw machines that don't have them. Regular expression: The way {computers} express themselves most of the time. See also {dq#! 00xafe020:?? QFA Nonremappable string} Syntax error: What tells a linguist he should never have tried to deal with a computer (other people take much longer to realize this). Raw mode: freshly caught, or uncooked, mode. This dish inspired bakers to fashion a dessert that looked like it, which they called "pie a la mode". Foobar: 1. A ban against all foos. 2. A candy manufactured by Foo(TM) consisting of a slab of sugar, fat, artificial colors, and artificial flavors. Login: The state of having a large, cylindrical, wooden chunk in the house: Get that login here and shut the door! Logfile: a large wood rasp used for rough, cylindrical wood a few feet in diameter. Filesystem: A method used by professional beauticians to file their fingernails and toenails. While...do loop: A trap many married people find themselves in, when their spouse says, "While you're up, honey, could you do X?" followed by, "While you're doing X, honey, could you do Y?", and so on. Unix: The plural of Eunuch. Tape drive: A cruise down the highway stopping at all the music stores to buy the latest hits on cassette. Core: 1. The part of the apple that you throw out. Similarly, the part that Apple throws out, or at least doesn't think you should see. 2. pertaining to ground or land. e.g. "Marine corps" refers to forces used on water and on land. Field service: 1. What gets applied when the grass gets broken. 2. In hotels, like room service, but also applies if you're lounging on the grass. Memory leak: When you finally remember to fix the roof despite the fact that it's not raining. Internal fan: The guy who, deep down inside, really loves Twin Peaks. RAM: A mammal with brute force but not much efficiency. WORM: The bug that was eating laser discs in the 80s. Screensaver: The one who thinks up the right scheme to turn a terrible movie into a box office hit. Algorithm: Fat Albert, rapping. Command line: What the general does when his army is marching in single file. Function argument: The struggle between two conventions at the same hotel over who gets to use which rooms for their meetings. GIGO: What an experienced computer person does when he sees a novice frustrated at the results when what he asked was obviously not what he wanted. Of course, the experienced computer person makes similar mistakes, but no one GIGOs. Mount point: A difficult trick in horseback riding, where one mounts a horse of infinitessimal size. Fstab: What an angry student does at his report card when the grades deserve it. Termcap: A protective helmet worn by students when the academic period begins, similar to the protective headgear used by construction workers to safeguard against unexpected burdens damaging the brain.