:mail storm: /n./ [from {broadcast storm}, influenced by `maelstrom'] What often happens when a machine with an Internet connection and active users re-connects after extended downtime —- a flood of incoming mail that brings the machine to its knees. See also {hairball}.
:mailbomb: (also mail bomb) [Usenet] 1. /v./ To send, or urge others to send, massive amounts of {email} to a single system or person, esp. with intent to crash or {spam} the recipient's system. Sometimes done in retaliation for a perceived serious offense. Mailbombing is itself widely regarded as a serious offense — it can disrupt email traffic or other facilities for innocent users on the victim's system, and in extreme cases, even at upstream sites. 2. /n./ An automatic procedure with a similar effect. 3. /n./ The mail sent. Compare {letterbomb}, {nastygram}, {BLOB} (sense 2), {list-bomb}.
:mailing list: /n./ (often shortened in context to `list') 1. An {email} address that is an alias (or {macro}, though that word is never used in this connection) for many other email addresses. Some mailing lists are simple `reflectors', redirecting mail sent to them to the list of recipients. Others are filtered by humans or programs of varying degrees of sophistication; lists filtered by humans are said to be `moderated'. 2. The people who receive your email when you send it to such an address.
Mailing lists are one of the primary forms of hacker interaction, along with {Usenet}. They predate Usenet, having originated with the first UUCP and ARPANET connections. They are often used for private information-sharing on topics that would be too specialized for or inappropriate to public Usenet groups. Though some of these maintain almost purely technical content (such as the Internet Engineering Task Force mailing list), others (like the `sf-lovers' list maintained for many years by Saul Jaffe) are recreational, and many are purely social. Perhaps the most infamous of the social lists was the eccentric bandykin distribution; its latter-day progeny, lectroids and tanstaafl, still include a number of the oddest and most interesting people in hackerdom.
Mailing lists are easy to create and (unlike Usenet) don't tie up a significant amount of machine resources (until they get very large, at which point they can become interesting torture tests for mail software). Thus, they are often created temporarily by working groups, the members of which can then collaborate on a project without ever needing to meet face-to-face. Much of the material in this lexicon was criticized and polished on just such a mailing list (called `jargon-friends'), which included all the co-authors of Steele-1983.
:main loop: /n./ The top-level control flow construct in an input- or event-driven program, the one which receives and acts or dispatches on the program's input. See also {driver}.
:mainframe: /n./ Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or `main frame' of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine. After the emergence of smaller `minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes. The term carries the connotation of a machine designed for batch rather than interactive use, though possibly with an interactive timesharing operating system retrofitted onto it; it is especially used of machines built by IBM, Unisys, and the other great {dinosaur}s surviving from computing's {Stone Age}.
It has been common wisdom among hackers since the late 1980s that the mainframe architectural tradition is essentially dead (outside of the tiny market for {number-crunching} supercomputers (see {cray})), having been swamped by the recent huge advances in IC technology and low-cost personal computing. As of 1993, corporate America is just beginning to figure this out — the wave of failures, takeovers, and mergers among traditional mainframe makers have certainly provided sufficient omens (see {dinosaurs mating} and {killer micro}).
:management: /n./ 1. Corporate power elites distinguished primarily by their distance from actual productive work and their chronic failure to manage (see also {suit}). Spoken derisively, as in "*Management* decided that …". 2. Mythically, a vast bureaucracy responsible for all the world's minor irritations. Hackers' satirical public notices are often signed `The Mgt'; this derives from the "Illuminatus" novels (see the {Bibliography} in Appendix C).
:mandelbug: /man'del-buhg/ /n./ [from the Mandelbrot set] A
bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make
its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic. This term
implies that the speaker thinks it is a {Bohr bug}, rather than
a {heisenbug}. See also {schroedinbug}.