[Gutenberg 817] • The Jargon File, Version 4.0.0, 24 Jul 1996

Excerpt: ...as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe. This tale and the related saga of Foonly hold a lesson for hackers: if you want to play in the Real World, you need to learn Real World moves.: martian: /n./ A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source address of the test loopback interface 127.0.0.1. This means that it will come back labeled with a source address that is clearly not of this earth. "The domain server is getting lots of packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a martian filter?" massage: /vt./ Vague term used to describe smooth' transformations of a data set into a different form, esp. transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain than munch or crunch. "He wrote a program that massages X bitmap files into GIF format." Compare slurp.: math-out: /n./ poss. from white-out' (the blizzard variety) A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device for concealing the fact that it is actually content-free. See also numbers, social science number.: Matrix: /n./ FidoNet 1. What the Opus BBS software and sysops call FidoNet. 2. Fanciful term for a cyberspace expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see network, the). 3. The totality of present-day computer networks.: maximum Maytag mode: /n./ What a washing machine or, by...