Jargon File

The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary (edited by Guy Steele), revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary (ed. Eric S. Raymond; third edition published 1996). The concept of the file began with the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) that came out of early TX-0 and PDP-1 hackers in the 1950s, where the term hacker emerged and the ethic, philosophies and some of the nomenclature emerged. The Jargon File (referred to here as "Jargon-1" or "the File") was made by Raphael Finkel at Stanford in 1975. From that time until the plug was finally pulled on the SAIL computer in 1991, the File was named "AIWORD.RF[UP,DOC]" ("[UP,DOC]" was a system directory for "User Program DOCumentation" on the WAITS operating system). Some terms, such as frob, foo and mung are believed to date back to the early 1950s from the Tech Model Railroad Club at MIT and documented in the 1959 Dictionary of the TMRC Language compiled by Peter Samson. The revisions of Jargon-1 were all unnumbered and may be collectively considered "version 1". Note that it was always called "AIWORD" or "the Jargon file", never "the File"; the last term was coined by Eric Raymond. In 1976, Mark Crispin, having seen an announcement about the File on the SAIL computer, ed a copy of the File to the MIT AI Lab. He noticed that it was hardly restricted to "AI words" and so stored the file on his directory, named as "AI:MRC;SAIL JARGON" ("AI" lab computer, directory "MRC", file "SAIL JARGON"). Raphael Finkel dropped out of active participation shortly thereafter and Don Woods became the SAIL contact for the File (which was subsequently kept in duplicate at SAIL and MIT, with periodic resynchronizations).