The New Hacker's Dictionary
Great Renaming // n.
The flag day in 1987 on which all of the non-local groups on the Usenet had their names changed from the net.- format to the current multiple-hierarchies scheme. Used esp. in discussing the history of newsgroup names. "The oldest sources group is comp.sources.misc; before the Great Renaming, it was net.sources." There is a Great Renaming FAQ on the Web.
Great Runes // n.
Uppercase-only text or display messages. Some archaic operating systems still emit these. See also runes, smash case, fold case.
There is a widespread legend (repeated by earlier versions of this entry, though tagged as folklore) that the uppercase-only support of various old character codes and I/O equipment was chosen by a religious person in a position of power at the Teletype Company because supporting both upper and lower cases was too expensive and supporting lower case only would have made it impossible to spell 'God' correctly. Not true; the upper-case interpretation of teleprinter codes was well established by 1870, long before Teletype was even founded.
Great Worm // n.
The 1988 Internet worm perpetrated by RTM. This is a play on Tolkien (compare elvish, elder days). In the fantasy history of his Middle Earth books, there were dragons powerful enough to lay waste to entire regions; two of these (Scatha and Glaurung) were known as "the Great Worms". This usage expresses the connotation that the RTM crack was a sort of devastating watershed event in hacker history; certainly it did more to make non-hackers nervous about the Internet than anything before or since.
great-wall // vi.,n.
[from SF fandom] A mass expedition to an oriental restaurant, esp. one where food is served family-style and shared. There is a common heuristic about the amount of food to order, expressed as "Get N - 1 entrees"; the value of N, which is the number of people in the group, can be inferred from context (see N). See oriental food, ravs, stir-fried random.
Green Book // n.
1. One of the three standard PostScript references: "PostScript Language Program Design