:tera-: /te'r*/ /pref./ [SI] See {{quantifiers}}.
:teraflop club: /te'r*-flop kluhb/ /n./ [FLOP = Floating Point Operation] A mythical association of people who consume outrageous amounts of computer time in order to produce a few simple pictures of glass balls with intricate ray-tracing techniques. Caltech professor James Kajiya is said to have been the founder. Compare {Knights of the Lambda Calculus}.
:terminak: /ter'mi-nak`/ /n./ [Caltech, ca. 1979] Any malfunctioning computer terminal. A common failure mode of Lear-Siegler ADM 3a terminals caused the `L' key to produce the `K' code instead; complaints about this tended to look like "Terminak #3 has a bad keyboard. Pkease fix." Compare {dread high-bit disease}, {frogging}; see also {AIDX}, {Nominal Semidestructor}, {Open DeathTrap}, {ScumOS}, {sun-stools}, {Telerat}, {HP-SUX}.
:terminal brain death: /n./ The extreme form of {terminal
illness} (sense 1). What someone who has obviously been hacking
continuously for far too long is said to be suffering from.
:terminal illness: /n./ 1. Syn. {raster burn}. 2. The
`burn-in' condition your CRT tends to get if you don't have a
screen saver.
:terminal junkie: /n./ [UK] A {wannabee} or early {larval stage} hacker who spends most of his or her time wandering the directory tree and writing {noddy} programs just to get a fix of computer time. Variants include `terminal jockey', `console junkie', and {console jockey}. The term `console jockey' seems to imply more expertise than the other three (possibly because of the exalted status of the {{console}} relative to an ordinary terminal). See also {twink}, {read-only user}.
:terpri: /ter'pree/ /vi./ [from LISP 1.5 (and later,
MacLISP)] To output a {newline}. Now rare as jargon, though
still used as techspeak in Common LISP. It is a contraction of
`TERminate PRInt line', named for the fact that, on some early OSes
and hardware, no characters would be printed until a complete line
was formed, so this operation terminated the line and emitted the
output.
:test: /n./ 1. Real users bashing on a prototype long enough to
get thoroughly acquainted with it, with careful monitoring and
followup of the results. 2. Some bored random user trying a couple
of the simpler features with a developer looking over his or her
shoulder, ready to pounce on mistakes. Judging by the quality of
most software, the second definition is far more prevalent. See
also {demo}.
:TeX:: /tekh/ /n./
An extremely powerful {macro}-based text formatter written by
Donald E. {Knuth}, very popular in the computer-science
community (it is good enough to have displaced Unix {{troff}}, the
other favored formatter, even at many Unix installations). TeX
fans insist on the correct (guttural) pronunciation, and the
correct spelling (all caps, squished together, with the E depressed
below the baseline; the mixed-case `TeX' is considered an
acceptable kluge on ASCII-only devices). Fans like to proliferate
names from the word `TeX' — such as TeXnician (TeX
user), TeXhacker (TeX programmer), TeXmaster (competent
TeX programmer), TeXhax, and TeXnique. See also
{CrApTeX}.
Knuth began TeX because he had become annoyed at the declining quality of the typesetting in volumes I—III of his monumental "Art of Computer Programming" (see {Knuth}, also {bible}). In a manifestation of the typical hackish urge to solve the problem at hand once and for all, he began to design his own typesetting language. He thought he would finish it on his sabbatical in 1978; he was wrong by only about 8 years. The language was finally frozen around 1985, but volume IV of "The Art of Computer Programming" is not expected to appear until 2002. The impact and influence of TeX's design has been such that nobody minds this very much. Many grand hackish projects have started as a bit of {toolsmith}ing on the way to something else; Knuth's diversion was simply on a grander scale than most.