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Computer humour, also known as hacker humour, is humour on the subject of computers or their users. [1]
Examples of computer humour include:
The editor war is the rivalry between users of the Emacs and vi text editors. The rivalry has become an enduring part of hacker culture and the free software community.
Kremvax was originally a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, named like the then large number of Usenet VAXen with names of the form foovax. Kremvax was announced on April 1, 1984, in a posting ostensibly originated there by Soviet leader Konstantin Chernenko. The posting was actually forged by Piet Beertema of CWI as an April Fool's prank—"because the notion that Usenet might ever penetrate the Iron Curtain seemed so totally absurd at the time".
In computing, Xyzzy is sometimes used as a metasyntactic variable or as a video game cheat code. Xyzzy comes from the Colossal Cave Adventure computer game, where it is the first "magic string" that most players encounter.
A naming convention as a form of computer humour especially among playful programmers, yet another is often abbreviated ya, Ya, or YA in the prefix of an acronym or backronym.
An undocumented feature is an unintended or undocumented hardware operation, for example an undocumented instruction, or software feature found in computer hardware and software that is considered beneficial or useful. Sometimes the documentation is omitted through oversight, but undocumented features are sometimes not intended for use by end users, but left available for use by the vendor for software support and development. Also, some unintended operation of hardware or software that ends up being of utility to users is simply a bug, flaw or quirk.
Before the popularization of the Internet in the 1990s, Internet slang defined a luser as a painfully annoying, stupid, or irritating computer user. The word is a blend of "loser" and "user". Among hackers, the word luser takes on a broad meaning, referring to any normal user, with the implication the person is also a loser. The term is partially interchangeable with the hacker term lamer.
Originally, the word computing was synonymous with counting and calculating, and the science and technology of mathematical calculations. Today, "computing" means using computers and other computing machines. It includes their operation and usage, the electrical processes carried out within the computing hardware itself, and the theoretical concepts governing them.
The hacker culture is a subculture of individuals who enjoy—often in collective effort—the intellectual challenge of creatively overcoming the limitations of software systems or electronic hardware, to achieve novel and clever outcomes. The act of engaging in activities in a spirit of playfulness and exploration is termed hacking. However, the defining characteristic of a hacker is not the activities performed themselves, but how it is done and whether it is exciting and meaningful. Activities of playful cleverness can be said to have "hack value" and therefore the term "hacks" came about, with early examples including pranks at MIT done by students to demonstrate their technical aptitude and cleverness. The hacker culture originally emerged in academia in the 1960s around the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)'s Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) and MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Hacking originally involved entering restricted areas in a clever way without causing any major damage. Some famous hacks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were placing of a campus police cruiser on the roof of the Great Dome and converting the Great Dome into R2-D2.
An Easter egg is a message, image, or feature hidden in software, a video game, a film, or another — usually electronic — medium. The term used in this manner was coined around 1979 by Steve Wright, the then-Director of Software Development in the Atari Consumer Division, to describe a hidden message in the Atari video game Adventure, in reference to an Easter egg hunt.
In some operating systems, the null device is a device file that discards all data written to it but reports that the write operation succeeded. This device is called /dev/null on Unix and Unix-like systems, NUL: or NUL on CP/M and DOS, nul on OS/2 and newer Windows systems, NIL: on Amiga operating systems, and NL: on OpenVMS. In Windows Powershell, the equivalent is $null. It provides no data to any process that reads from it, yielding EOF immediately. In IBM operating systems DOS/360 and successors and also in OS/360 and successors such files would be assigned in JCL to DD DUMMY.
Eternal September or the September that never ended is Usenet slang for a period beginning around 1993 when Internet service providers began offering Usenet access to many new users. The flood of new users overwhelmed the existing culture for online forums and the ability to enforce existing norms. AOL followed with their Usenet gateway service in March 1994, leading to a constant stream of new users. Hence, from the early Usenet point of view, the influx of new users in September 1993 never ended.
Magic smoke is a humorous name for the caustic smoke produced by severe electrical over-stress of electronic circuits or components, causing overheating and an accompanying release of smoke. The smoke typically smells of burning plastic and other chemicals. The color of the smoke depends on which component is overheating, but it is commonly blue, grey, or white. Minor overstress eventually results in component failure, but without pyrotechnic display or release of smoke. A power transistor inside a power supply is a frequent culprit for the acrid smoke.
A typographical error, also called a misprint, is a mistake made in the typing of printed or electronic material. Historically, this referred to mistakes in manual typesetting. Technically, the term includes errors due to mechanical failure or slips of the hand or finger, but excludes errors of ignorance, such as spelling errors, or changing and misuse of words such as "than" and "then". Before the arrival of printing, the copyist's mistake or scribal error was the equivalent for manuscripts. Most typos involve simple duplication, omission, transposition, or substitution of a small number of characters.
"Real Programmers Don't Use Pascal" is an essay about computer programming written by Ed Post of Tektronix, Inc., and published in July 1983 as a letter to the editor in Datamation.
A user error is an error made by the human user of a complex system, usually a computer system, in interacting with it. Although the term is sometimes used by human–computer interaction practitioners, the more formal human error term is used in the context of human reliability.
A Usenet personality was a particular kind of Internet celebrity, being an individual who gained a certain level of notoriety from posting on Usenet, a global network of computer users with a vast array of topics for discussion. The platform is usually anonymous, although users can get celebrity status, usually by being deemed different from other posters in some way.
lp0 on fire is an outdated error message generated on some Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems in response to certain types of printer errors. lp0 is the Unix device handle for the first line printer, but the error can be displayed for any printer attached to a Unix or Linux system. It indicates a printer error that requires further investigation to diagnose, but not necessarily that it is on fire.
Computational humor is a branch of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence which uses computers in humor research. It is a relatively new area, with the first dedicated conference organized in 1996.
The Jargon File is a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers. The original Jargon File was a collection of terms from technical cultures such as the MIT AI Lab, the Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) and others of the old ARPANET AI/LISP/PDP-10 communities, including Bolt, Beranek and Newman, Carnegie Mellon University, and Worcester Polytechnic Institute. It was published in paperback form in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary, revised in 1991 as The New Hacker's Dictionary.
The history of humor on the Internet begins together with the Internet itself. Initially, the internet and its precursors, LANs and WANs, were used merely as another medium to disseminate jokes and other kinds of humor, in addition to the traditional ones. In lockstep with the progress of electronic communication technologies, jokers took advantage of the ARPANET, e-mail, Usenet newsgroups, bulletin board systems, etc, and finally the Whole World Wide Web. Gradually, new forms of humor evolved, based on the new possibilities delivered by electronic means of communication. A popular form of internet humour is found in the form of 'internet memes'. Reaction videos, where amusement is expressed through a person's response to something, are another prevalent form of humor unique to the internet.
