:tube: 1. n. A CRT terminal. Never used in the mainstream sense of TV; real hackers don't watch TV, except for Loony Toons, Rocky & Bullwinkle, Trek Classic, the Simpsons, and the occasional cheesy old swashbuckler movie (see {appendix B}). 2. [IBM] To send a copy of something to someone else's terminal. "Tube me that note?"
:tube time: n. Time spent at a terminal or console. More inclusive than hacking time; commonly used in discussions of what parts of one's environment one uses most heavily. "I find I'm spending too much of my tube time reading mail since I started this revision."
:tunafish: n. In hackish lore, refers to the mutated punchline of an age-old joke to be found at the bottom of the manual pages of `tunefs(8)' in the original {BSD} 4.2 distribution. The joke was removed in later releases once commercial sites started using 4.2. Tunefs relates to the `tuning' of file-system parameters for optimum performance, and at the bottom of a few pages of wizardly inscriptions was a `BUGS' section consisting of the line "You can tune a file system, but you can't tunafish". Variants of this can be seen in other BSD versions, though it has been excised from some versions by humorless management {droid}s. The [nt]roff source for SunOS 4.1.1 contains a comment apparently designed to prevent this: "Take this out and a Unix Demon will dog your steps from now until the `time_t''s wrap around."
:tune: [from automotive or musical usage] vt. To optimize a program or system for a particular environment, esp. by adjusting numerical parameters designed as {hook}s for tuning, e.g., by changing `#define' lines in C. One may `tune for time' (fastest execution), `tune for space' (least memory use), or `tune for configuration' (most efficient use of hardware). See {bum}, {hot spot}, {hand-hacking}.
:turbo nerd: n. See {computer geek}.
:Turing tar-pit: n. 1. A place where anything is possible but nothing of interest is practical. Alan Turing helped lay the foundations of computer science by showing that all machines and languages capable of expressing a certain very primitive set of operations are logically equivalent in the kinds of computations they can carry out, and in principle have capabilities that differ only in speed from those of the most powerful and elegantly-designed computers. However, no machine or language exactly matching Turing's primitive set has ever been built (other than possibly as a classroom exercise), because it would be horribly slow and far too painful to use. A `Turing tar-pit' is any computer language or other tool which shares this property. That is, it's theoretically universal —- but in practice, the harder you struggle to get any real work done, the deeper its inadequacies suck you in. Compare {bondage-and-discipline language}. 2. The perennial {holy wars} over whether language A or B is the "most powerful".
:turist: /too'rist/ n. Var. sp. of {tourist}, q.v. Also in adjectival form, `turistic'. Poss. influenced by {luser} and `Turing'.
:tweak: vt. 1. To change slightly, usually in reference to a value. Also used synonymously with {twiddle}. If a program is almost correct, rather than figure out the precise problem you might just keep tweaking it until it works. See {frobnicate} and {fudge factor}; also see {shotgun debugging}. 2. To {tune} or {bum} a program; preferred usage in the U.K.
:tweeter: [University of Waterloo] n. Syn. {perf}, {chad} (sense 1). This term (like {woofer}) has been in use at Waterloo since 1972, but is elsewhere unknown. In audio jargon, the word refers to the treble speaker(s) on a hi-fi.
:TWENEX:: /twe'neks/ n. The TOPS-20 operating system by DEC —- the second proprietary OS for the PDP-10 —- preferred by most PDP-10 hackers over TOPS-10 (that is, by those who were not {{ITS}} or {{WAITS}} partisans). TOPS-20 began in 1969 as Bolt, Beranek & Newman's TENEX operating system using special paging hardware. By the early 1970s, almost all of the systems on the ARPANET ran TENEX. DEC purchased the rights to TENEX from BBN and began work to make it their own. The first in-house code name for the operating system was VIROS (VIRtual memory Operating System); when customers started asking questions, the name was changed to SNARK so DEC could truthfully deny that there was any project called VIROS. When the name SNARK became known, the name was briefly reversed to become KRANS; this was quickly abandoned when it was discovered that `krans' meant `funeral wreath' in Swedish. Ultimately DEC picked TOPS-20 as the name of the operating system, and it was as TOPS-20 that it was marketed. The hacker community, mindful of its origins, quickly dubbed it {{TWENEX}} (a contraction of `twenty TENEX'), even though by this point very little of the original TENEX code remained (analogously to the differences between AT&T V6 UNIX and BSD). DEC people cringed when they heard "TWENEX", but the term caught on nevertheless (the written abbreviation `20x' was also used). TWENEX was successful and very popular; in fact, there was a period in the early 1980s when it commanded as fervent a culture of partisans as UNIX or ITS —- but DEC's decision to scrap all the internal rivals to the VAX architecture and its relatively stodgy VMS OS killed the DEC-20 and put a sad end to TWENEX's brief day in the sun. DEC attempted to convince TOPS-20 hackers to convert to {VMS}, but instead, by the late 1980s, most of the TOPS-20 hackers had migrated to UNIX.