The New Hacker's Dictionary

ARMM's bug produced a recursive cascade of messages each of which mechanically added text to the ID and Subject and some other headers of its parent. This produced a flood of messages in which each header took up several screens and each message ID and subject line got longer and longer and longer.

Reactions varied from amusement to outrage. The pathological messages crashed at least one mail system, and upset people paying line charges for their Usenet feeds. One poster described the ARMM debacle as "instant Usenet history" (also establishing the term despew), and it has since been widely cited as a cautionary example of the havoc the combination of good intentions and incompetence can wreak on a network. Compare Great Worm; sorcerer's apprentice mode. See also software laser, network meltdown.

armor-plated // n.

syn. for bulletproof.

asbestos // adj.

[common] Used as a modifier to anything intended to protect one from flames; also in other highly flame-suggestive usages. See, for example, asbestos longjohns and asbestos cork award.

asbestos cork award // n.

Once, long ago at MIT, there was a flamer so consistently obnoxious that another hacker designed, had made, and distributed posters announcing that said flamer had been nominated for the 'asbestos cork award'. (Any reader in doubt as to the intended application of the cork should consult the etymology under flame.) Since then, it is agreed that only a select few have risen to the heights of bombast required to earn this dubious dignity -- but there is no agreement on which few.

asbestos longjohns // n.

Notional garments donned by Usenet posters just before emitting a remark they expect will elicit flamage. This is the most common of the asbestos coinages. Also 'asbestos underwear', 'asbestos overcoat', etc.

ASCII /as'kee/ n.

[originally an acronym (American Standard Code for Information Interchange) but now merely conventional] The predominant character set encoding of present-day computers. The standard version uses 7 bits for each character, whereas most earlier codes (including early drafts of of ASCII prior to June 1961) used fewer. This change allowed the inclusion of lowercase letters -- a major win -- but it did not provide for accented letters or any other letterforms not used in English (such as the German sharp-S or the ae-ligature which is a letter in, for example, Norwegian). It could be worse, though. It could be much worse. See EBCDIC to understand how. A history of ASCII and its ancestors is at http://www.wps.com/texts/codes/index.html.