When DEC cancelled the Jupiter project in 1983, Systems Concepts should have made a bundle selling their machine into shops with a lot of software investment in PDP-10s, and in fact their spring 1984 announcement generated a great deal of excitement in the PDP-10 world. TOPS-10 was running on the Mars by the summer of 1984, and TOPS-20 by early fall. Unfortunately, the hackers running Systems Concepts were much better at designing machines than at mass producing or selling them; the company allowed itself to be sidetracked by a bout of perfectionism into continually improving the design, and lost credibility as delivery dates continued to slip. They also overpriced the product ridiculously; they believed they were competing with the KL10 and VAX 8600 and failed to reckon with the likes of Sun Microsystems and other hungry startups building workstations with power comparable to the KL10 at a fraction of the price. By the time SC shipped the first SC-30M to Stanford in late 1985, most customers had already made the traumatic decision to abandon the PDP-10, usually for VMS or Unix boxes. Most of the Mars computers built ended up being purchased by CompuServe.
This tale and the related saga of {Foonly} hold a lesson for hackers: if you want to play in the {Real World}, you need to learn Real World moves.
:martian: /n./ A packet sent on a TCP/IP network with a source
address of the test loopback interface [127.0.0.1]. This means
that it will come back labeled with a source address that is
clearly not of this earth. "The domain server is getting lots of
packets from Mars. Does that gateway have a martian filter?"
:massage: /vt./ Vague term used to describe `smooth'
transformations of a data set into a different form, esp.
transformations that do not lose information. Connotes less pain
than {munch} or {crunch}. "He wrote a program that massages
X bitmap files into GIF format." Compare {slurp}.
:math-out: /n./ [poss. from `white-out' (the blizzard variety)]
A paper or presentation so encrusted with mathematical or other
formal notation as to be incomprehensible. This may be a device
for concealing the fact that it is actually {content-free}. See
also {numbers}, {social science number}.
:Matrix: /n./ [FidoNet] 1. What the Opus BBS software and
sysops call {FidoNet}. 2. Fanciful term for a {cyberspace}
expected to emerge from current networking experiments (see
{network, the}). 3. The totality of present-day computer
networks.
:maximum Maytag mode: /n./ What a {washing machine} or, by
extension, any hard disk is in when it's being used so heavily that
it's shaking like an old Maytag with an unbalanced load. If
prolonged for any length of time, can lead to disks becoming
{walking drives}.
:Mbogo, Dr. Fred: /*m-boh'goh, dok'tr fred/ /n./ [Stanford] The archetypal man you don't want to see about a problem, esp. an incompetent professional; a shyster. "Do you know a good eye doctor?" "Sure, try Mbogo Eye Care and Professional Dry Cleaning." The name comes from synergy between {bogus} and the original Dr. Mbogo, a witch doctor who was Gomez Addams' physician on the old "Addams Family" TV show. Compare {Bloggs Family, the}, see also {fred}.
:meatware: /n./ Synonym for {wetware}. Less common.
:meeces: /mees'*z/ /n./ [TMRC] Occasional furry visitors who are not {urchin}s. [That is, mice. This may no longer be in live use; it clearly derives from the refrain of the early-1960s cartoon character Mr. Jinx: "I hate meeces to *pieces*!" —- ESR]