Redazione RHC : 5 July 2025 09:53
Jargon File version 4.4.7
Today I would like to talk to you about a very old computer document, containing a piece of everyone’s hacker and computer culture times, of which many computer scientists do not even know its existence.
It is a collection of technical culture terms, some of these dating back to the 50s, some coined at the Tech Model Railroad Club of MIT, and then updated over the years and arrived to us today.
Winlosehackcrashdeamondeadlock
These are just some of the terms present in the jargon file, terms that have become common jargon that we all know. The Jargon file is in fact a living cultural relic that has codified not only the text and expressions, but the spirit of the culture of the programmer and the hacker, capturing their humor, ethics and extravagant vision of the world.
Think that in its long history, it has even become the object of controversy on many fronts, from alarmed professors in American schools to massive requests for the maintainer to resign for bad conduct.
But let’s go in order.
Raphael Finkel
It was the summer of 1976 when Raphael Finkel, a graduate student at Stanford University, postponed writing his thesis. He decides to take a snapshot of the AI Lab’s vocabulary and creates a fun collection of terms in a file called “AIWORD.DOC” and then solicits members of SAIL (The Stafford AI Lab), to provide suggestions, observations, and explanations.
Soon, Mark Crispin, a systems programmer at SAIL saw a notice pointing to the file, downloaded it, and FTPed a copy to the MIT AI Lab. By duplicating it he renamed the file to “SAIL JARGON”, since he determined that the content was broader than artificial intelligence and that it was a generic lexicon for the culture of programmers at Stanford.
In fact, little by little, the MIT artificial intelligence laboratory, BBN Technology, a very important company at the time, founded in 1948 by two MIT professors who took part in the implementation of ARPANET, as well as Carnegie Mellon University and Worcester Polytechnic Institute, joined the editorial team of the first jargon file.
The oldest terms in the Jargon File are said to have originated in the late 1950s or early 1960s at the Tech MIT Model Railroad Club, that legendary club where the hacker culture was born that we talked about so much in the previous videos.
Richard Stallman
Richard Stallman, mythological figure and founder of the GNU project and the Free Software Foundation, was one of the most active members of the jargon file and contributed prolifically to the growing list of acronyms, terms and jokes and then to the vocabulary and wisdom of programmers and hackers of that historical period.
By the mid-80s, the content of the File was quite dated, but the legend that had grown around it did not die out completely, in fact it was published in paperback format in 1983 with the title “the hacker’s dictionary” edited by Guy Steele and many copies of the software were distributed via the ARPANET network.
Guy Steele
The file was in fact circulating in cultures far removed from the academic world of MIT; the content has had a strong and continuing influence on the jargon and humor of hackers.
In the meantime, microcomputers were around the corner and all these new technologies fueled a huge expansion of the hacker domain, where some points of the jargon file were seen as a sort of “sacred work”, in the hacker culture, like all “hacker Koans”, or rather Zen teaching riddles, small computer science stories, which always lead to an “enlightenment” and important food for thought.
I’ll bring you a beautiful one entitled “Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine”.
A beginner was trying to repair a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on again. Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You can’t fix a machine by just turning it on and off without understanding what’s going wrong.” Knight turned the machine off and on again, and the machine worked.
Eric Steven Raymond
In 1978, software developer and author Eric S. Raymond, a controversial open source evangelist and author of the famous book, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, compiled and published a printed version of the Jargon File called “The New Hacker’s Dictionary.”
Eric Raymond maintained the new file with the assistance of Guy Steele and was also the credited editor of the printed version, published by MIT Press in 1991. Some of the changes made under his watch were controversial; Early critics accused Raymond of unfairly changing the focus of the file to Unix hacker culture rather than the older hacker cultures from which the Jargon File had originated.
Raymond argued that the nature of hacking had changed and the Jargon File should refer to hacker culture, not attempt to sanction it. After the second edition, Raymond was accused of adding terms that reflected his politics and vocabulary, in short, he and the community did not get along very well.
The third edition was published in 1996 and then other subsequent versions up to the small updates of 2016, inserting phrases on general internet slang.
The jargon file also contains other juicy terms such as “rubber duck debugging” orfinding out the source of the problem by reading the code out loud, or “waving a dead chicken”, orwaving a dead duck, which means doing something useless to make someone understand third person that you have really tried everything to overcome a problem, until you get to “One banana problem”, or a problem so simple that it can be solved by a monkey with a compensation of a banana.
In short, the jargon file today is a mine of history and customs and terms of the Hacker culture where, apart from the many known words, we find refined collections of the famous fatalistic hacker humor, highly tasty, which always hits the mark, young, old and children.
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