This file is dumped from two HTML documents.
You can view them using a WWW browser on the URL given below.
ABOUT THE JARGON FILE
Here comes everything you always wanted to know about access to the
Jargon File and its book version, The New Hacker's Dictionary. And, at
the bottom, a small peroration about why you want the book to sell
many, many copies...
ACCESS TO THE FILE
World Wide Web: The Jargon File is available for World Wide Web access
at http://www.ccil.org/jargon. This site has won awards; see the
trophy page.
FTP: The File can also be downloaded from www.ccil.org, but as the
machine has a relatively slow Internet link, we would prefer that you
fetch it from the GNU archive site at prep.ai.mit.edu; the file is
pub/gnu/jarg400.txt.gz. An info version (same name with `.info.gz'
rather than `.txt.gz' suffix) is also available.
Electronic mail: Unfortunately, the Jargon File is far too big to
email.
Note: The Info version is being phased out and may not be offered past
3.3.0. The reason for this is that I expect to be switching to a
different markup system (either Linuxdoc-SGML or straight HTML) soon.
WHY THERE ARE NO DIFF FILES
Many people have asked why I don't release diff files for new
versions, so people can avoid having to FTP or uucp-fetch the whole
thing each time. It's because diffs tend to lose the actual semantic
changes in a lot of noise resulting from very low-level tweaks (typo
fixes, re-justifications, etc.). This bulks the diffs up to the point
where I don't think they're enough smaller than the File itself to
justify the hassle costs of issuing or using them.
THE BOOK
In fall 1991, the 2.9.6 version of the File was published as "The New
Hacker's Dictionary". Version 3.0.0, with over 250 new entries and
numerous changes, was published in August 1993 as TNHD's second
edition (ISBN 0-262-68079-3). There will be a third edition in Fall
1996. If you are viewing this through a graphics-capable browser,
here's the Second Edition cover art. But, apparently you aren't.
Here's a sales breakdown for the First and Second editions. The First
Edition sold 23,409 paperbacks and 871 hardcover copies; the Second
Edition, up to 25 January 1996, had sold 14,367 paperback and 741
hardcover copies.
WHY YOU SHOULD BUY THE BOOK
The ftpable version is flat ASCII. The original is marked up in
Texinfo; an info version is also available. The Texinfo source
involves sufficient custom hackery for things like schwa and Palatino
fonts that it wouldn't do anybody but the author much good even if
publishing it weren't in violation of the book contract. There is no
nroff, Scribe or Postscript version.
Besides nice typography, the book gives you prefaces by Guy Steele and
Eric Raymond, a cover by Duane Bibby (he of the TeX lion and the
Metafont kitty), and the infamous Crunchly cartoons by Guy Steele as
interior illos.
No one can stop you from adding your own markup to the flat-ASCII
version and laser-printing the result, and the coauthors have legally
relinquished the right to even try in order to respect hackish
traditions of information sharing. We do _ask_ you not to do this;
widespread `pirating' of a typeset version would ruin anyone else's
future chances of cooperating with a publisher on a project involving
both free and commercial distribution.
You should buy this book because, if it does well, it will encourage
future projects that combine free and commercial distribution
channels. This would be a Good Thing, because it would both promote
free electronic access to information and reward people in the
marketplace for putting it together and making it accessible.
HOW TO FIND IT IN BOOKSTORES
The nice typeset book version is being carried by all major U.S. book
chains --- B. Dalton's, Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, Brentano's, etc.
(The D.C.-area Crown chain is an exception; they don't like the
Press's discount structure.)
It will also be in many college bookstores and the more cerebral sort
of independent bookseller (especially SF and technical bookstores).
Many stores will feature a big cardboard pop-up display featuring art
by Duane Bibby.
If you don't see it at your favorite bookstore, ask for it by name.
Sometimes lesser branches of the chains won't actually order copies in
from the chain's warehouses until they have someone order it. The good
side of this is that your single request may cause them to order ten
or more copies, which would be good for reasons I go into below.
DIRECT ORDERING INFORMATION
Check out MIT Press's on-line catalog at http://www-mitpress.mit.edu
The book can be ordered now in the U.S. directly through MIT Press.
The mailing address is:
The MIT Press
55 Hayward Street
Cambridge, MA 02142
You may also order through MIT Press's FAX number (617)-258-6779 or by
toll-free voice phone from within the U.S. at (800)-356-0343. If
you're outside the U.S., use the customer service line:
(617)-625-8481.
Price: US$14.95 (Canadians add 7% g.s.t.) plus postage and handling
as follows:
U.S./Canada Book Rate: $2.75
International priority airmail: $8.00
International airmail printed matter: $5.00
International surface book rate: $3.00
The Press will accept VISA, MasterCard, a bank or postal money order,
or a dollar-denominated check drawn on a U.S. bank.
IN THE BRITISH ISLES AND EUROPE
Copies should be available through MIT Press's London office:
The MIT Press, Ltd.
14 Bloomsbury Square
London WC1A 2LP
U.K.
Tel: +44 171 404 0603
But anyone anywhere in the world can order through our domestic office
here in Cambridge. Fax: 617/258.6779.
WHAT THE PUBLIC AND REVIEWERS ARE SAYING
Sales have been brisk: see the sales figures.
Internet hackerdom has taken this book to its collective heart.
William Safire's December 8th 1991 "On Language" column in the New
York Times mentioned TNHD as one of his picks for gift-giving that
Christmas. _Byte_ ran an unabashed rave in their January 1992 issue.
Laudatory reviews have also appeared in _PC Magazine_, _IEEE
Spectrum_, _PC World_ and _Wired_. The December 1991 issue of
_Computing Reviews_ ran TNHD's definition of `creationism' on its
cover. More recently, the British journal _New Scientist_, _Sciences_,
and _Mondo 2000_ have all praised the book. In mid-October 1992 it
made "On Language" again and was cited by name on the front page of
the _Wall Street Journal_. MTV has based segments of the "CyberStuff"
feature of "This Week in Rock" on excerpts from the File.
As TNHD II hit the street, _Newsweek_ magazine ran a major article on
the Internet and its history, using the Jargon File as a primary
source and quoting several File entries in a prominent sidebar. And in
November 1995, Time Magazine used TNHD as the basis for an entire
article on network culture in its first-ever "Time Digital" section.
For scholars, the Oxford English Dictionary now uses TNHD as a major
source for computing neologisms.
We have continued to collect raves whenever the book has been
reviewed, except for one or two reviewers who just didn't get it and
went away puzzled.
WHY YOU WANT THIS BOOK TO SELL 1E6 COPIES
A word from your humble compiler...
One of my major objectives in seeing the Jargon File published on
paper is to help the general public to get a truer and more positive
image of hackers than they seem to have now.
Right now, our society is in a phase of reforming its attitudes and
laws about information privacy, intellectual property, hacking, and
First Amendment issues in electronic networking. It is not a good
thing for this process that many in the public think of hackers as a
potential conspiracy of dangerous nerds, that the very term "hacker"
is now considered by many ignorant people to be a synonym for
"computer criminal". We must reclaim the word "hacker" for our own!
There is a real danger to hackers that restrictive, wrong-headed
information laws and strict licensing requirements for "software
professionals" might kill our open, free-spirited culture. This would
be a tragedy not just for us but for the whole world that benefits
from our creativity.
Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been formed to
fight for hackerdom on the legal and political level. To support that,
though, the public needs to be educated about all the positive aspects
of hackerdom. We need them to see our sense of humor, our dedication,
our playfulness, our idealism; we need to communicate the excitement,
challenge and promise of the new worlds we're exploring. We need the
man in the street to see us as allies, not as a threat.
I think this book can be a big help with that. If it sells a million
copies, that's a million people who will learn something of our
traditions, and our dreams, and (perhaps most importantly) how to
laugh with us. That's a million friends. I think we need those
friends, and I think we're going to need them a lot more before
society completes its adaptation to the new computing technologies.
Since I wrote the preceding in 1991 (five years ago), positive changes
in the mainstream culture have made some of these issues perhaps a bit
less pressing. The battle to reclaim the term `hacker' hasn't been
definitively won, but at least Time Magazine and its ilk routinely
mention the hacker vs. cracker distinction in major stories.
Despite the occasional cyberporn flap, the public seems to generally
side with hackers and civil libertarians on information-freedom
issues. The Clipper-chip power-grab of '92 was foiled by
Internet-centered agitation, and the obscenely repressive
"Communications Decency Act" was thoroughly nuked by a federal court
following a high-profile campaign by freee-speech rights groups. And
the public is voting with their dollars for more freedom, turning away
from video-on-demand and filtered commercial BBSes like Prodigy
towards the Internet. Positive buzz about the Internet is everywhere.
Even IBM now advertises its hardware and software on the strength of
its Internet-access capabilities. And perhaps most remarkably, there
are studies suggesting the the Internet is even pulling mainstream
Americans away from their TV sets!
We're still a tiny minority, but our stock in the pop culture has
definitely risen since TNHD I. Movies like "Sneakers", "The Net", and
"Independence Day", silly though they are, feature hacker heroes. The
kinds of teenage techno-nerds that sometimes mature into hackers have
become admired role models rather than automatic objects of contempt.
Despite the tiresomeness of much `information superhighway' rhetoric,
it has focused a lot of attention and approval on the infrastructure
hackers have been quietly helping to build for decades.
In short, hackerdom seems to be winning its culture war. Now we have
to cope with success.
The explosion of public interest in the Internet since 1994 has, if
anything, made TNHD's role more important. While it's kind of fun to
have everybody want to play our game after thirty years of being
marginalized as dreamers and geeks, there's now another real danger;
that the culture and shared values that make the Internet work could
get lost in the noise made by millions of newbies. To counter this, we
need to tell our story and transmit our culture in a way that's
accessible to those hordes of new users. While TNHD can't do that all
by itself (because it takes long-term person-to-person contact to do
acculturation really right), it's far from the least effective vector
we have. And TNHD plus Internet exposure is effective.
This is why I hope you will want The New Hacker's Dictionary to sell a
million copies. I think there's a significant chance for it to make a
significant impact on the public's consciousness, by becoming
everybody's idea of the perfect gift book for the budding Internet
user.
Soooo...tell your friends about this book. I used to say "the freedom
you help save may be your own". That's still an issue, but I can now
ask you to plug TNHD for less fearful reasons. Help out the poor
bewildered Internet newbies in their teeming millions! Our hacker
heritage is just what they need to make moral and mythic sense of the
infant cyberspace struggling to be born out of the Net. This is our
time. This is our book. Share, and enjoy!
_________________________________________________________________
Eric S. Raymond
JARGON FILE HISTORY
We make at least the newest and oldest versions of the Jargon File
available here.
* jarg400.txt.gz -- The 4.0.0 release in flat-ASCII form, 25 Jul
1996. This was the TNHD III manuscript after final copy-edit.
* jarg400.info.gz -- Version of the above suitable for info
browsing.
* jargon-upd.lst -- All new and changed entries since 3.0.0 (TNHD
II).
* jargon.text.z -- the original MIT/Stanford AI jargon file.
Entries with only trivial changes (spelling, punctuation, references,
minor changes of phrasing) have been omitted from the change list.
Some archive sites will also include the following, depending on free
space available and the sysadmin's whim:
* jarg333.txt.gz -- The 3.3.3 version, Spring 1996.
* jarg330.txt.gz -- The 3.3.0 version, Winter 1995-1996.
* jarg320.txt.gz -- The 3.2.0 version, Spring 1995.
* jarg310.txt.gz -- The 3.1.0 version, Fall 1994.
* jarg300.txt.gz -- The 3.0.0 version, corresponding to the second
paper edition from MIT Press. 1961 entries.
* jargon2912.txt.gz -- May 10 1993 update. Last revision before the
3.0 freeze for TNHD's second edition. A few terms have been
deleted, mostly game-specific slang from the MUD community. 1946
entries
* jargon2911.ascii.gz -- Jan 01 1993 update. 1922 entries.
* jargon2910.ascii.gz -- Jul 01 1992 update, with new entries and
much additional historical material. 1891 entries.
* jargon299.ascii.gz -- Apr 01 1992 update, with new entries from
XEROX PARC and elsewhere. 1821 entries.
* jargon298.ascii.gz -- Jan 01 1992 update, with corrections and new
entries. 1760 entries.
* jargon296.ascii.gz -- the sixfold-expanded version published in
1991 as "The New Hacker's Dictionary" by MIT Press. This is the
entire text, except for Guy Steele's and Eric Raymond's
introductions and the "vietnam wall" credits list at the end (and
of course no fancy fonts and cartoons). 1702 entries.
_________________________________________________________________
Eric S. Raymond