BABBAGE, [Professor] CHARLES Professor of mathematics at Cambridge who designed the Analytical Engine, a huge, grinding, steam-driven machine to do mathematical calculations in the 1830s. _The Difference Engine_, by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, takes place in an alternate 1855 where the Analytical Engine was advanced nearly as far as our personal computers BABY (1) Any program that is less than full-blown. A baby word processor would be a program that does just the bare essentials. (Apple’s obsolete TeachText was a baby word processor.) (2) A hardware device that is smaller than normal. BANG (1) To lose your temper, usually in a very violent manner. In the extreme, actual destruction of hardware may result. [From banging something, or hitting it; also from the onomotopeotic word for a loud noise.] (2) Lots of exclamation points to add emphasis. Sometimes other weird characters are used as bangs. Also used to pronounce exclamation points; for instance, "Go to hell!!!!" would be pronounced "go to hell bang bang bang bang." BANK Cache memory; a section of memory not normally used that is utilized for high speed operations in certain programs. [From "databank;" I think this word has been replaced by the term "cache."] BARLOW, JOHN PERRY Grateful Dead lyricist from 1970 until the band broke up in 1995; ex-cattle rancher. Co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation; civil libertarian, "cognitive dissident," buddy of a lot of members of MOD. (After that little misunderstanding with Phiber when Barlow called Phiber a punk and compared him to a skateboarder, and Phiber ILFed Barlow’s TRW credit report. Good hack, that.) Also wrote the essay "Crime and Puzzlement," as well as a declaration of the independence of cyberspace and a _Time_ essay (notable for using the word "shit" for the first time in _Time_ without quotes around it. Barlow later said it felt like a revolutionary act.) Also, he's one of the few people I've met over the Net who I've also actually met in person, and the only real description I can give is that he looks exactly the way you'd think that he would knowing that he's a civil libertarian from Wyoming. Currently civil libertarian and contributing writer for _Wired_ BASE (1) Contraction for the word "database." (2) In most programming languages, (C, C++, Pascal, etc.) a pointer, a set of memory locations that point to the start of an array (another memory location); the pointer is the "base" from which the array starts. BASIC [Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] Early programming language for beginners. Used a lot in the 1980s BAUD [rate] Obsolete measurement of the speed of a modem; often erroneously used to refer to bits per second because at low rates they are equivalent. It really means "the number of signal events per second occuring on a communications channel." (That’s what my modem’s manual says.) [Named in honor of Emile Baudot, "telecommunications pioneer."] BBS [Bulletin Board System] A computer that is set up to act as a system where other people call in using phone lines to post messages; sometimes software is traded, and usually archives are kept of software on the board. The first board worthy of the name was Ward Christensen and Randy Suess’s board in 1978 BEDBUG A virus type program that another programmer inserts into an existing program, with the intention of causing havoc. Usually not serious-- it is coded so the results look like a software bug, not a true virus. May make copies of itself. See also BUG, VIRUS, TAPEWORM BEGINNER’S ALL-PURPOSE SYMBOLIC INSTRUCTION CODE see BASIC BELL, [Professor] ALEXANDER GRAHAM Guy who invented the telephone in 1876. The man who created cyberspace, in its early, pathetic stage when no one thought it would be anything BELLSOUTH Atlanta RBOC that was supposedly very easy to hack; some rumors claim they eventually spent two million dollars on security BERNIE S. Handle of Ed Cummings. Phreak recently released from an uncomfortable and unConstitutional imprisonment for possession of computer programs that "could be used for fraud." Can be emailed at bernies@2600.com BIG BLUE Slang for IBM. Comes from their blue logo BIG BROTHER Name for a police state government that spies on every aspect of a citizen’s life and commandeers their very thoughts. The NSA’s not so secret wish. [From the name of the insidious government in George Orwell’s _1984_.] BINARY DIGIT see BIT BIT [Binary Digit] Contraction of binary digit. Smallest unit of measurement in cyberspace. A 1 or 0; representing on or off, true or false to a computer BITS PER SECOND see BPS THE BLACK ANGELS see THE ELITE LEGION OF HACKERS THE BLACK BARON Handle of Christopher Pile. British virus author who was sentenced to a jail term under the Computer Misuse Act for writing the viruses Pathogen and Queeg, which included an engine called SMEG. Also apparently a fan of the science fiction/comedy series _Red Dwarf_ BLACK WIDOW A Java applet capable of sinister acts including uploading files to the victims hard drive and consuming RAM and CPU cycles _BLADE RUNNER_ 1982 Harrison Ford movie directed by Ridley Scott that many cyberpunks just love to death. It has a great re-creation of Los Angeles in 2019 that William Gibson has said mirrors his vision of the Sprawl in _Neuromancer_; just about every film using a dystopian urban environment has been inspired at least in part by the one in _Blade Runner_. The plot concerns a former bounty hunter/cop that hunts replicants, androids designed for off-world colonies. A sequel that I really didn't care for at all was also written (_Blade Runner 2: The Edge of Human_ by K.W. Jeter, followed by the sequel to that, _Replicant Night_) recently (don't waste your money on it), and Ridley Scott says he is going to make a follow-up film tentatively titled _Metropolis_. [Loosely based on Phillip K. Dick’s _Do Android’s Dream of Electric Sheep_; title comes from the name of a totally unrelated William S. Burroughs novel about black market surgeons, which was itself based on a story by Alan E. Nourse.] BLANKENSHIP, LOYD see THE MENTOR BLESSED FOLDER Slang for the System Folder on Macintosh computers. Comes from the fact that everything is run by that folder, and you mess with at your own risk BLIND FAITH see DREW, DALE BLUE BOX Infamous box that pretty much no longer works, but kicked ass in the 1960s, 1970s and early 1980s. It is a device that plays a sound at a frequency of 2600 hertz, which allows all kinds of cool things. See BOXES BOB HARDY see EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN AUTOMATED COIN TOLL SYSTEM see ACTS BOT Either a benevolent search bot such as an infobot or knowbot, or a Bot which hacks IRC. [Short for "robot."] BOX A hardware device that allows abnormal telephone operation, like free calls or anti-tracing, used by phreaks. The ultimate box is the rainbow box, which combines the blue box, red box, green box, and black box. There are also a lot of weird variant boxes. Boxes, though the most pure form of phreaking, are rarely used now because of the phone company’s changes to stop it, both on purpose and as a serendipitious result of the digitization of the phone system BPS [Bits Per Second] Measurement of the speed of a modem. Currently being replaced by kbps (kilobits per second.) See also BAUD BRAND, STEWART Editor of the _Whole Earth Catalog_ and contributing writer for _Wired_; one of the hippies that decided cyberspace was pretty cool. Described cyberpunk as "technology with an attitude." BRIDGE A hack into the phone company’s PBX. This is often used so that many phreaks can talk in a huge conference; this was a much more common practice in the 1980s, when massive party lines were held, people occasionally dropping out to go to work or school and someone else taking their place BRUTE FORCE ATTACK A classic hacking technique; guessing an exhaustive number of passwords to try and enter a system. This does not work as much anymore, probably because even idiot sysadmins don’t use quite so simple passwords. It was very successful about ten years ago, though BRZEZINSKI, DIRK-OTTO see DOB BUG A mistake in programming or hardware design that results in unfavorable and sometimes disastrous results. Microsoft Word 6.0 was notorious for this. See also BEDBUG BULLETIN BOARD SYSTEM see BBS BUM The act of rewriting a program or section of a program to run in a smaller memory area. May also mean changing the code to remove unused sections and try to improve on the running speed. [From an old MIT hacker term.] BURKE [, Carter J.] A total asshole who causes more trouble than he’s worth. [From the name of a treacherous company man in the film _Aliens_.] BYTE A sequence of adjacent bits operated on as a unit by a computer. Very small unit of virtual measurement. Usually, a byte is eight bits. (On the Internet, a byte is transferred as seven bits, which sort of fucks everything up.) [Comes from an alteration and blend of bit and bite.]