The New Hacker's Dictionary

I didn't change anything! // interj.

An aggrieved cry often heard as bugs manifest during a regression test. The canonical reply to this assertion is "Then it works just the same as it did before, doesn't it?" See also one-line fix. This is also heard from applications programmers trying to blame an obvious applications problem on an unrelated systems software change, for example a divide-by-0 fault after terminals were added to a network. Usually, their statement is found to be false. Upon close questioning, they will admit some major restructuring of the program that shouldn't have broken anything, in their opinion, but which actually hosed the code completely.

I see no X here. //

Hackers (and the interactive computer games they write) traditionally favor this slightly marked usage over other possible equivalents such as "There's no X here!" or "X is missing." or "Where's the X?". This goes back to the original PDP-10 ADVENT, which would respond in this wise if you asked it to do something involving an object not present at your location in the game.

IANAL //

[Usenet] Abbreviation, "I Am Not A Lawyer". Usually precedes legal advice.

IBM /I-B-M/

Inferior But Marketable; It's Better Manually; Insidious Black Magic; It's Been Malfunctioning; Incontinent Bowel Movement; and a near-infinite number of even less complimentary expansions, including 'International Business Machines'. See TLA. These abbreviations illustrate the considerable antipathy most hackers long felt toward the 'industry leader' (see fear and loathing).

What galled hackers about most IBM machines above the PC level wasn't so much that they were underpowered and overpriced (though that does count against them), but that the designs are incredibly archaic, crufty, and elephantine ... and you can't fix them -- source code is locked up tight, and programming tools are expensive, hard to find, and bletcherous to use once you've found them. For many years, before Microsoft, IBM was the company hackers loved to hate.

But everything changes. In the 1980s IBM had its own troubles with Microsoft. In the late 1990s IBM re-invented itself as a services company, began to release open-source software through its AlphaWorks group, and began shipping Linux systems and building ties to the Linux community. To the astonishment of all parties, IBM emerged as a friend of the hacker community.

This lexicon includes a number of entries attributed to 'IBM'; these derive from some rampantly unofficial jargon lists circulated within IBM's own beleaguered hacker underground.