The Jargon File by Eric S. Raymond (ebook reader android txt) π
The AI Lab culture had been hit hard in the late 1970s by funding cuts and the resulting administrative decision to use vendor-supported hardware and software instead of homebrew whenever possible. At MIT, most AI work had turned to dedicated LISP Machines. At the same time, the commercialization of AI technology lured some of the AI Lab's best and brightest away to startups along the Route 128 strip in Massachusetts and out West in Silicon Valley. The startups built LISP machines for MIT; the central MIT-AI computer became a [45]TWENEX system rather than a host for the AI hackers' beloved [46]ITS.
The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource until 1991. Stanford became a major [47]TWENEX site, at one point operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most of the interesting software work was being
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Common: hat; control; uparrow; caret; <circumflex>. Rare: xor sign, chevron; [shark (or shark-fin)]; to the (`to the power of'); fang; pointer (in Pascal). Common: <underline>; underscore; underbar; under. Rare: score; backarrow; skid; [flatworm].`
Common: backquote; left quote; left single quote; open quote; <grave accent>; grave. Rare: backprime; [backspark]; unapostrophe; birk; blugle; back tick; back glitch; push; <opening single quotation mark>; quasiquote.{ }
Common: o/c brace; l/r brace; l/r squiggly; l/r squiggly bracket/brace; l/r curly bracket/brace; <opening/closing brace>. Rare: brace/unbrace; curly/uncurly; leftit/rytit; l/r squirrelly; [embrace/bracelet].|
Common: bar; or; or-bar; v-bar; pipe; vertical bar. Rare: <vertical line>; gozinta; thru; pipesinta (last three from UNIX); [spike].~
Common: <tilde>; squiggle; [649]twiddle; not. Rare: approx; wiggle; swung dash; enyay; [sqiggle (sic)].The pronunciation of # as `pound' is common in the U.S. but a bad
idea; [650]Commonwealth Hackish has its own, rather more apposite use
of `pound sign' (confusingly, on British keyboards the pound graphic
happens to replace #; thus Britishers sometimes call # on a U.S.-ASCII
keyboard `pound', compounding the American error). The U.S. usage
derives from an old-fashioned commercial practice of using a # suffix
to tag pound weights on bills of lading. The character is usually
pronounced `hash' outside the U.S. There are more culture wars over
the correct pronunciation of this character than any other, which has
led to the [651]ha ha only serious suggestion that it be pronounced
`shibboleth' (see Judges 12:6 in an Old Testament or Tanakh).
The uparrow' name for circumflex andleftarrow' name for underline
are historical relics from archaic ASCII (the 1963 version), which had
these graphics in those character positions rather than the modern
punctuation characters.
The swung dash' orapproximation' sign is not quite the same as
tilde in typeset material but the ASCII tilde serves for both (compare
[652]angle brackets).
Some other common usages cause odd overlaps. The #, $, >, and &
characters, for example, are all pronounced "hex" in different
communities because various assemblers use them as a prefix tag for
hexadecimal constants (in particular, # in many assembler-programming
cultures, $ in the 6502 world, > at Texas Instruments, and & on the
BBC Micro, Sinclair, and some Z80 machines). See also [653]splat.
The inability of ASCII text to correctly represent any of the world's
other major languages makes the designers' choice of 7 bits look more
and more like a serious [654]misfeature as the use of international
networks continues to increase (see [655]software rot). Hardware and
software from the U.S. still tends to embody the assumption that ASCII
is the universal character set and that characters have 7 bits; this
is a major irritant to people who want to use a character set suited
to their own languages. Perversely, though, efforts to solve this
problem by proliferating `national' character sets produce an
evolutionary pressure to use a smaller subset common to all those in
use.
Node:ASCII art, Next:[656]ASCIIbetical order, Previous:[657]ASCII,
Up:[658]= A =
ASCII art n.
The fine art of drawing diagrams using the ASCII character set (mainly
|, -, /, , and +). Also known as character graphics' orASCII
graphics'; see also [659]boxology. Here is a serious example:
o----)||(--+--|<----+ +---------o + D O
L )||( | | | C U
A I )||( +-->|-+ | +-//-+--o - T
C N )||( | | | | P
E )||( +-->|-+--)---+--|(--+-o U
)||( | | | GND To----)||(--+--|<----+----------+
A power supply consisting of a full wave rectifier circuit
feeding a capacitor input filter circuit
And here are some very silly examples:
|///| ---/| --- |---/| ---
| | o.O| ACK! / --- |` '| ---/
| | =(---)= THPHTH! / / /
| (o)(o) U /
C ---) (---) /// --- ////
| ,---| (oo) / /
| / /------- U (---)
/--- || | /---V `v'- oo )
/ ||---W|| * * |--| || |`. |---/
//-o-\ ------=======------====--- /.. .. /---==== Klingons rule OK!
// ------O---/---
--- /---/
There is an important subgenre of ASCII art that puns on the standard
character names in the fashion of a rebus.
+--------------------------------------------------------+
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^ B ^^^^^^^^^ |
| ^^^^^^^^^ ^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ |
+--------------------------------------------------------+
" A Bee in the Carrot Patch "Within humorous ASCII art, there is for some reason an entire
flourishing subgenre of pictures of silly cows. Four of these are
reproduced in the examples above, here are three more:
(---) (---) (---) (/) ($$) (**)/-------/ /-------/ /-------/
/ | 666 || / |=====|| / | ||
||----|| * ||----|| * ||----||~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~ ~~
Satanic cow This cow is a Yuppie Cow in love
Finally, here's a magnificent example of ASCII art depicting an
Edwardian train station in Dunedin, New Zealand:
.-. /--- |---| |]---[| / I JL/ | JL.-. i () | () i .-.
|---| .^. /--- LJ=======LJ /--- .^. |---|
.---/---.---./------.---.---.---.---.L---J---/.-. .-.---L---J.---.---.---.---.---/---.---./---.---.---.---
., |-,-| ., L---J |---| [I] |---| L---J ., |-,-| ., .,
JL |-O-| JL L---J%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%L---J JL |-O-| JL JL
IIIIII---HH---'-'-'---HH---IIIIII|---|=======H=======|---|IIIIII---HH---'-'-'---HH---IIIIII---HH---
-------[]-------[]-------[---]----.=I=./----[---]-------[]-------[]--------[]-
---/--- ||---I---//|| ---/--- [---] []---/---L---J------[] [---] ---/--- ||---I---//|| ---/--- ||
|---| ||=/---|---=|| |---|---|---| ---L---L---J---J--- |---|---|---| ||=/---|---=|| |---| ||-
|---| |||---|---||| |---[---]--------===--------[---]---| |||---|---||| |---| |||
IIIIIII[---]IIIII[---]IIIIIL---J---II---|---|---II---L---JIIIII[---]IIIII[---]IIIIIIII[---]
---I---/ [---]---I---/[---] ---I---[---]II/[]---I/---/[]II/[---]---I---/ [---]---I---/[---] ---I---/ [---]
./ .L---J/ L---J./ L---JI I[]/ []I IL---J .L---J/ L---J./ .L---J
| |L---J| |L---J| L---J| |[]| |[]| |L---J |L---J| |L---J| |L---J
|---JL---JL---JL---JL---|-|| |[]| |[]| ||-|---JL---JL---JL---JL---JL---J
There is a newsgroup, alt.ascii-art, devoted to this genre; however,
see also [660]warlording.
Node:ASCIIbetical order, Next:[661]astroturfing, Previous:[662]ASCII
art, Up:[663]=
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