I've long been a fan of The New Hacker's Dictionary, and indeed have a hard-copy sitting before me as I blog. ("Hacker", in this case, is used in its non-pejorative sense.)

The book is a mix of computer science, tech-speak, history, folklore and fun, and was originally compliled by Eric S. Raymond, (he of The Cathedral and the Bazaar fame), to "to help the general public to get a truer and more positive image of hackers than they seem to have".

Sound a bit ... well ... nerdish? Quite the contrary. Here's few examples;

magic smoke: n.
A substance trapped inside IC packages that enables them to function ... Its existence is demonstrated by what happens when a chip burns up — the magic smoke gets let out, so it doesn't work any more.

lots of MIPS but no I/O: adj.
Used to describe a person who is technically brilliant but can't seem to communicate with human beings effectively.

field circus: n.
[a derogatory pun on ‘field service’] The field service organization of any hardware manufacturer, but originally DEC. There is an entire genre of jokes about field circus engineers:

    Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer with a flat tire?
    A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

    Q: How can you recognize a field circus engineer who is out of gas?
    A: He's changing one tire at a time to see which one is flat.

    Q: How can you tell it's your field circus engineer?
    A: The spare is flat, too.

404: n.
[from the HTTP error ”file not found on server„] Extended to humans to convey that the subject has no idea or no clue -- sapience not found. May be used reflexively; ”Uh, I'm 404ing„ means ”I'm drawing a blank.„

FISH queue: n.
[acronym, by analogy with FIFO (First In, First Out)] ‘First In, Still Here’. A joking way of pointing out that processing of a particular sequence of events or requests has stopped dead.

heisenbug: n.
A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it.

washing machine: n.
Old-style 14-inch hard disks in floor-standing cabinets. So called because of the size of the cabinet and the ‘top-loading’ access to the media packs — and, of course, they were always set on ‘spin cycle’.

walking drives: n.
An occasional failure mode of magnetic-disk drives back in the days when they were huge, clunky washing machines. Those old dinosau parts carried terrific angular momentum; the combination of a misaligned spindle or worn bearings and stick-slip interactions with the floor could cause them to ‘walk’ across a room, lurching alternate corners forward a couple of millimeters at a time. There is a legend about a drive that walked over to the only door to the computer room and jammed it shut; the staff had to cut a hole in the wall in order to get at it!

Walking could also be induced by certain patterns of drive access (a fast seek across the whole width of the disk, followed by a slow seek in the other direction). Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.

wave a dead chicken: v.

To perform a ritual in the direction of crashed software or hardware that one believes to be futile but is nevertheless necessary so that others are satisfied that an appropriate degree of effort has been expended. ”I'll wave a dead chicken over the source code, but I really think we've run into an OS bug.„

like kicking dead whales down the beach: adj.

Describes a slow, difficult, and disgusting process. First popularized by a famous quote about the difficulty of getting work done under one of IBM's mainframe OSes. ”Well, you could write a C compiler in COBOL, but it would be like kicking dead whales down the beach.„

Microsloth Windows: n.

(Variants combine {Microshift, Macroshaft, Microsuck} with {Windoze, WinDOS}. Hackerism(s) for ‘Microsoft Windows’. A thirty-two bit extension and graphical shell to a sixteen-bit patch to an eight-bit operating system originally coded for a four-bit microprocessor which was written by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition. 

There's plenty of serious stuff in it too. But fun and quirkiness are never far away. For example, at the end of an erudite entry on quantifiers (kilo-, mega-, giga-, etc.) comes this...

Morgan Burke has proposed, to general approval on Usenet, the following additional prefixes:

We observe that this would leave the prefixes zeppo-, gummo-, and chico- available for future expansion.

TNHD is also available online, where it's called The Jargon File. You can browse it, download the latest version, check out recent changes, and even see what's been deleted over the years. There's even a dict version available so you can add it to your desktop dictionary server. Just search for "dict-jargon" in your package manager.


(All examples are taken from The Jargon File, version 4.4.8)