This file is dumped from two HTML documents.
You can view them using a WWW browser on the URL given below.


                              Jargon File History

   We make the newest version of the Jargon File available here:
     * jarg433.txt.gz -- The 4.3.3 version, September 2002.
     * jargon-upd.lst  --  All  new and changed entries since 4.0.0 (TNHD
       III).

   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:
     * jarg430.txt.gz  --  The  4.3.0  version,  April 2001. Honoring the
       first RFC1149 implementation.
     * jarg423.txt.gz -- The 4.2.3 version, November 2000. Special "chad"
       update for the U.S. presidential cliffhanger.
     * jarg422.txt.gz -- The 4.2.2 version, Summer 2000.
     * jarg421.txt.gz -- The 4.2.1 version, March 2000.
     * jarg420.txt.gz  --  The  4.2.0  version, January (we survived Y2K)
       2000.
     * jarg410.txt.gz -- The 4.1.2 version, Spring 1999.
     * jarg412.txt.gz -- The 4.1.0 version, Spring 1999.
     * jarg400.txt.gz  --  The  4.0.0 version, corresponding to the third
       paper edition from MIT. Summer 1996.
     * 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.
     * [1]jargon-2.1.1.txt  --  from 1990, one of the early stages in the
       expansion of the new file.
     * [2]jargon-82.txt  --  An  early  (1982)  version of the MIT Jargon
       File.
     * [3]jargon-81.txt  --  An  even  earlier  (1981) version of the MIT
       Jargon File.

   You  can  also  look at the entries that have been [4]deleted from the
   File.
     _________________________________________________________________


    Eric S. Raymond [5]<esr@snark.thyrsus.com>

References

   1. file://localhost/home/esr/WWW/jargon/oldversions/jargon-2.1.1.txt
   2. file://localhost/home/esr/WWW/jargon/oldversions/jargon-82.txt
   3. file://localhost/home/esr/WWW/jargon/oldversions/jargon-81.txt
   4. file://localhost/home/esr/WWW/jargon/chaff.tex
   5. mailto:esr@thyrsus.com

                             The Book on the File

                                   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). Version 4.0.0, with 114 new entries and
   235  changed  entries, was published in September 1996 as TNHD's third
   edition (ISBN 0-262-68092-0).

   If  you  are  viewing  this  through a PNG-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   downloadable  version  is  HTML.  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 laser-printing the HTML, and the coauthors
   have  legally  relinquished  the right to even try in order to respect
   hacker-community  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,  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
   [1]http://www-mitpress.mit.edu.  You  can order the book on-line using
   Netscape.

   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$16.50 (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.
     6 Fitzroy House
     London WC1A 7ET
     U.K.
     Tel: +44 0171 306 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 [2]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.

   TNHD  III  triggered  a  similar wave of interest, including interview
   articles in the August 1996 Wired and the October 21st 1996 People.

   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 free-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 [3]<esr@snark.thyrsus.com>

References

   1. http://www-mitpress.mit.edu/
   2. file://localhost/home/esr/WWW/jargon/jargbook.html#sales
   3. mailto:esr@thyrsus.com
