The most extreme and dangerous form of vadding is `elevator rodeo', a.k.a. `elevator surfing', a sport played by wrasslin' down a thousand-pound elevator car with a 3-foot piece of string, and then exploiting this mastery in various stimulating ways (such as elevator hopping, shaft exploration, rat-racing, and the ever-popular drop experiments). Kids, don't try this at home! See also {hobbit} (sense 2).
:vanilla: /adj./ [from the default flavor of ice cream in the U.S.] Ordinary {flavor}, standard. When used of food, very often does not mean that the food is flavored with vanilla extract! For example, `vanilla wonton soup' means ordinary wonton soup, as opposed to hot-and-sour wonton soup. Applied to hardware and software, as in "Vanilla Version 7 Unix can't run on a vanilla 11/34." Also used to orthogonalize chip nomenclature; for instance, a 74V00 means what TI calls a 7400, as distinct from a 74LS00, etc. This word differs from {canonical} in that the latter means `default', whereas vanilla simply means `ordinary'. For example, when hackers go on a {great-wall}, hot-and-sour soup is the {canonical} soup to get (because that is what most of them usually order) even though it isn't the vanilla (wonton) soup.
:vannevar: /van'*-var/ /n./ A bogus technological prediction or a foredoomed engineering concept, esp. one that fails by implicitly assuming that technologies develop linearly, incrementally, and in isolation from one another when in fact the learning curve tends to be highly nonlinear, revolutions are common, and competition is the rule. The prototype was Vannevar Bush's prediction of `electronic brains' the size of the Empire State Building with a Niagara-Falls-equivalent cooling system for their tubes and relays, a prediction made at a time when the semiconductor effect had already been demonstrated. Other famous vannevars have included magnetic-bubble memory, LISP machines, {videotex}, and a paper from the late 1970s that computed a purported ultimate limit on areal density for ICs that was in fact less than the routine densities of 5 years later.
:vaporware: /vay'pr-weir/ /n./ Products announced far in advance of any release (which may or may not actually take place). See also {brochureware}.
:var: /veir/ or /var/ /n./ Short for `variable'. Compare {arg}, {param}.
:VAX: /vaks/ /n./ 1. [from Virtual Address eXtension] The most successful minicomputer design in industry history, possibly excepting its immediate ancestor, the PDP-11. Between its release in 1978 and its eclipse by {killer micro}s after about 1986, the VAX was probably the hacker's favorite machine of them all, esp. after the 1982 release of 4.2 BSD Unix (see {BSD}). Esp. noted for its large, assembler-programmer-friendly instruction set — an asset that became a liability after the RISC revolution. 2. A major brand of vacuum cleaner in Britain. Cited here because its sales pitch, "Nothing sucks like a VAX!" became a sort of battle-cry of RISC partisans. It is even sometimes claimed that DEC actually entered a cross-licensing deal with the vacuum-Vax people that allowed them to market VAX computers in the U.K. in return for not challenging the vacuum cleaner trademark in the U.S.
A rival brand actually pioneered the slogan: its original form was
"Nothing sucks like Electrolux". It has apparently become a
classic
example (used in advertising textbooks) of the perils of not
knowing
the local idiom. But in 1996, the press manager of Electrolux AB,
while confirming that the company used this slogan in the late
1960s,
also tells us that their marketing people were fully aware of the
possible double entendre and intended it to gain attention.
And gain attention it did — the VAX-vacuum-cleaner people thought the slogan a sufficiently good idea to copy it. Several British hackers report that VAX's promotions used it in 1986—1987, and we have one report from a New Zealander that the infamous slogan surfaced there in TV ads for the product in 1992.
:VAXectomy: /vak-sek't*-mee/ /n./ [by analogy with `vasectomy'] A VAX removal. DEC's Microvaxen, especially, are much slower than newer RISC-based workstations such as the SPARC. Thus, if one knows one has a replacement coming, VAX removal can be cause for celebration.
:VAXen: /vak'sn/ /n./ [from `oxen', perhaps influenced by `vixen'] (alt. `vaxen') The plural canonically used among hackers for the DEC VAX computers. "Our installation has four PDP-10s and twenty vaxen." See {boxen}.