2. [after the name of an earlier window system called `W'] An over-sized and over-complicated window system developed at MIT and widely used on Unix systems.

xref /X'ref/ /v.,n./ Hackish standard abbreviation for `cross-reference'.

XXX /X-X-X/ /n./ A marker that attention is needed. Commonly used in program comments to indicate areas that are kluged up or need to be.

Appendix

Poe Revisited, Computer Style

Once upon a midnight dreary, fingers cramped and vision bleary,

System manuals piled high and wasted paper on the floor

Longing for the warmth of bed sheets,

Still I sat there, doing spreadsheets;

Having reached the bottom line,

I took a floppy from the drawer.

Typing with a steady hand, then invoked the SAVE command

But I got a reprimand: it read "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

Was this some occult illusion? Some maniacal intrusion?

These were choices Solomon himself had never faced before.

Carefully, I weighed my options.

These three seemed to be the top ones.

Clearly I must now adopt one:

Choose "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

With my fingers pale and trembling,

Slowly toward the keyboard bending,

Longing for a happy ending, hoping all would be restored,

Praying for some guarantee

Finally I pressed a key--

But on the screen what did I see?

Again: "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

I tried to catch the chips off-guard--

I pressed again, but twice as hard.

Luck was just not in the cards.

I saw what I had seen before.

Now I typed in desperation

Trying random combinations

Still there came the incantation:

Choose: "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

There I sat, distraught, exhausted, by my own machine accosted

Getting up I turned away and paced across the office floor.

And then I saw an awful sight:

A bold and blinding flash of light--

A lightning bolt had cut the night and shook me to my very core.

I saw the screen collapse and die

"Oh no--my data base," I cried

I thought I heard a voice reply,

"You'll see your data Nevermore!"

To this day I do not know

The place to which lost data goes

I bet it goes to heaven where the angels have it stored

But as for productivity, well

I fear that IT goes straight to hell

And that's the tale I have to tell

Your choice: "Abort, Retry, Ignore."

TV Typewriters A Tale of Hackish Ingenuity

Here is a true story: One day an MIT hacker was in a motorcycle accident and broke his leg. He had to stay in the hospital quite a while, and got restless because he couldn't hack. Two of his friends therefore took a terminal and a modem for it to the hospital, so that he could use the computer by telephone from his hospital bed.

Now this happened some years before the spread of home сomputers, and computer terminals were not a familiar sight to the average person. When the two friends got to the hospital, a guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying.

They explained that they wanted to take a computer terminal to their friend who was a patient. The guard took out his list of things that patients were permitted to have in their rooms: TV, radio, electric razor, typewriter, tape player, ... no computer terminals. Computer terminals weren't on the list, so the guard wouldn't let it in. Rules are rules, you know.

Fair enough, said the two friends, and they left again. They were frustrated, of course, because they knew that the terminal was as harmless as a TV or anything else on the list which gave them an idea. The next day they returned, and the same thing happened: a guard stopped them and asked what they were carrying. They said: "This is a TV typewriter!" The guard was skeptical, so they plugged it in and demonstrated it. "See? You just type on the keyboard and what you type shows up on the TV screen." Now the guard didn't stop to think about how utterly useless a typewriter would be that didn't produce any paper copies of what you typed; but this was clearly a TV typewriter, no doubt about it. So he checked his list: "A TV is all right, a typewriter is all right ... okay, take it on in!"

Historical note: Many years ago, "Popular Electronics" published solder-it-yourself plans for a TV typewriter. Despite the essential uselessness of the device, it was an enormously popular project. Steve Ciarcia, the man behind "Byte" magazine's "Circuit Cellar" feature, resurrected this ghost in one of his books of the early 1980s. He ascribed its popularity (no doubt correctly) to the feeling of power the builder could achieve by being able to decide himself what would be shown on the TV.

Antihistorical note: On September 23rd, 1992, the L.A. Times ran the following bit of filler: Solomon Waters of Altadena, a 6-year-old first-grader, came home from his first day of school and excitedly told his mother how he had written on "a machine that looks like a computer -- but without