The New Hacker's Dictionary

The New Hacker's Dictionary, available online as well as in book form, provides a guide to the hacker subculture. Currently compiled and maintained by Eric Raymond, it originated as an online document called the Jargon File, and is still found online under that name. In addition to its status as a definitive collection of computer-related slang, The New Hacker's Dictionary provides a compendium of hacker lore and history.

The Jargon File was begun by Raphael Finkel at Stanford University in 1975. Until the early 1980s, it circulated within a relatively small community of computer programmers, primarily at universities such as Stanford, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Carnegie Mellon. Many of these programmers were involved in the early operation of ARPANET, the precursor to the Internet. The shared slang contained in the Jargon File reflected the fact that many of these programmers used similar operating systems and hardware. It also reflected shared norms and attitudes among this growing new subculture.

In 1981, a portion of the Jargon File was published in CoEvolution Quarterly, edited by Stewart Brand, who also later founded The WELL (Whole Earth ‘Lectronic Link). Meanwhile, the Jargon File continued to be updated, maintained, and circulated through ARPANET, and later through the Internet. Guy L. Steele, Jr., who with Mark Crispin was responsible for many of the early revisions to the Jargon File, compiled the first book version, published in 1983 as The Hacker's Dictionary.

The online version continued to circulate but was not updated again until Eric Raymond took over maintenance of it in 1990. Raymond took the original file, which primarily reflected the earlier 1970s hacker culture (which focused in particular around programming strategies for the PDP-10, a computer in use at that time), and added slang from other hacker and computer subcultures, such as USENET newsgroups. USENET is a bulletin board system (BBS) that began on ARPANET. It allows people to post messages in topically divided “newsgroups,” which can then be read and responded to by others via the Internet. Raymond's revision also included slang from MOOs and MUDs, computer programs that allow multiple users to connect from remote locations and to interact with the program and communicate with each other through text-based “chat.” Both USENET and MUDs began in 1979, and by the time that Raymond began revising the Jargon File, both had generated rich subcultures. Raymond compiled and published The New Hacker's Dictionary in 1991, with subsequent updated editions coming out in 1993 and 1996.

The Hacker's Dictionary and The New Hacker's Dictionary sought to celebrate hacker culture, provide a repository of hacker history for younger and future hackers, and perhaps most importantly, to represent hacker culture in a positive light to the general public. In the early 1990s in particular, many news stories emerged portraying hackers as law-breakers with no respect for the personal privacy or property of others. Raymond wanted to show some of the positive values of hacker culture, particularly the hacker sense of humor. Because love of humorous wordplay is a strong element of hacker culture, a slang dictionary works quite well for such purposes.

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