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                             ABOUT THE JARGON FILE
                                       
   Here comes everything you always wanted to know about access to the
   Jargon File and its book version, The New Hacker's Dictionary. And, at
   the bottom, a small peroration about why you want the book to sell
   many, many copies...
   
                              ACCESS TO THE FILE
                                       
   World Wide Web: The Jargon File is available for World Wide Web access
   at http://www.ccil.org/jargon. This site has won awards; see the
   trophy page.
   
   FTP: The File can also be downloaded from www.ccil.org, but as the
   machine has a relatively slow Internet link, we would prefer that you
   fetch it from the GNU archive site at prep.ai.mit.edu; the file is
   pub/gnu/jarg400.txt.gz. An info version (same name with `.info.gz'
   rather than `.txt.gz' suffix) is also available.
   
   Electronic mail: Unfortunately, the Jargon File is far too big to
   email.
   
   Note: The Info version is being phased out and may not be offered past
   3.3.0. The reason for this is that I expect to be switching to a
   different markup system (either Linuxdoc-SGML or straight HTML) soon.
   
                          WHY THERE ARE NO DIFF FILES
                                       
   Many people have asked why I don't release diff files for new
   versions, so people can avoid having to FTP or uucp-fetch the whole
   thing each time. It's because diffs tend to lose the actual semantic
   changes in a lot of noise resulting from very low-level tweaks (typo
   fixes, re-justifications, etc.). This bulks the diffs up to the point
   where I don't think they're enough smaller than the File itself to
   justify the hassle costs of issuing or using them.
   
                                   THE BOOK
                                       
   In fall 1991, the 2.9.6 version of the File was published as "The New
   Hacker's Dictionary". Version 3.0.0, with over 250 new entries and
   numerous changes, was published in August 1993 as TNHD's second
   edition (ISBN 0-262-68079-3). There will be a third edition in Fall
   1996. If you are viewing this through a graphics-capable browser,
   here's the Second Edition cover art. But, apparently you aren't.
   
   Here's a sales breakdown for the First and Second editions. The First
   Edition sold 23,409 paperbacks and 871 hardcover copies; the Second
   Edition, up to 25 January 1996, had sold 14,367 paperback and 741
   hardcover copies.
   
                          WHY YOU SHOULD BUY THE BOOK
                                       
   The ftpable version is flat ASCII. The original is marked up in
   Texinfo; an info version is also available. The Texinfo source
   involves sufficient custom hackery for things like schwa and Palatino
   fonts that it wouldn't do anybody but the author much good even if
   publishing it weren't in violation of the book contract. There is no
   nroff, Scribe or Postscript version.
   
   Besides nice typography, the book gives you prefaces by Guy Steele and
   Eric Raymond, a cover by Duane Bibby (he of the TeX lion and the
   Metafont kitty), and the infamous Crunchly cartoons by Guy Steele as
   interior illos.
   
   No one can stop you from adding your own markup to the flat-ASCII
   version and laser-printing the result, and the coauthors have legally
   relinquished the right to even try in order to respect hackish
   traditions of information sharing. We do _ask_ you not to do this;
   widespread `pirating' of a typeset version would ruin anyone else's
   future chances of cooperating with a publisher on a project involving
   both free and commercial distribution.
   
   You should buy this book because, if it does well, it will encourage
   future projects that combine free and commercial distribution
   channels. This would be a Good Thing, because it would both promote
   free electronic access to information and reward people in the
   marketplace for putting it together and making it accessible.
   
                         HOW TO FIND IT IN BOOKSTORES
                                       
   The nice typeset book version is being carried by all major U.S. book
   chains --- B. Dalton's, Waldenbooks, Barnes & Noble, Brentano's, etc.
   (The D.C.-area Crown chain is an exception; they don't like the
   Press's discount structure.)
   
   It will also be in many college bookstores and the more cerebral sort
   of independent bookseller (especially SF and technical bookstores).
   Many stores will feature a big cardboard pop-up display featuring art
   by Duane Bibby.
   
   If you don't see it at your favorite bookstore, ask for it by name.
   Sometimes lesser branches of the chains won't actually order copies in
   from the chain's warehouses until they have someone order it. The good
   side of this is that your single request may cause them to order ten
   or more copies, which would be good for reasons I go into below.
   
                          DIRECT ORDERING INFORMATION
                                       
   Check out MIT Press's on-line catalog at http://www-mitpress.mit.edu
   
   The book can be ordered now in the U.S. directly through MIT Press.
   The mailing address is:
   
     The MIT Press
     55 Hayward Street
     Cambridge, MA 02142
     
   You may also order through MIT Press's FAX number (617)-258-6779 or by
   toll-free voice phone from within the U.S. at (800)-356-0343. If
   you're outside the U.S., use the customer service line:
   (617)-625-8481.
   
     Price: US$14.95 (Canadians add 7% g.s.t.) plus postage and handling
     as follows:
     
     U.S./Canada Book Rate: $2.75
     International priority airmail: $8.00
     International airmail printed matter: $5.00
     International surface book rate: $3.00
     
   The Press will accept VISA, MasterCard, a bank or postal money order,
   or a dollar-denominated check drawn on a U.S. bank.
   
                        IN THE BRITISH ISLES AND EUROPE
                                       
   Copies should be available through MIT Press's London office:
   
     The MIT Press, Ltd.
     14 Bloomsbury Square
     London WC1A 2LP
     U.K.
     
     Tel: +44 171 404 0603
     
   But anyone anywhere in the world can order through our domestic office
   here in Cambridge. Fax: 617/258.6779.
   
                   WHAT THE PUBLIC AND REVIEWERS ARE SAYING
                                       
   Sales have been brisk: see the sales figures.
   
   Internet hackerdom has taken this book to its collective heart.
   
   William Safire's December 8th 1991 "On Language" column in the New
   York Times mentioned TNHD as one of his picks for gift-giving that
   Christmas. _Byte_ ran an unabashed rave in their January 1992 issue.
   Laudatory reviews have also appeared in _PC Magazine_, _IEEE
   Spectrum_, _PC World_ and _Wired_. The December 1991 issue of
   _Computing Reviews_ ran TNHD's definition of `creationism' on its
   cover. More recently, the British journal _New Scientist_, _Sciences_,
   and _Mondo 2000_ have all praised the book. In mid-October 1992 it
   made "On Language" again and was cited by name on the front page of
   the _Wall Street Journal_. MTV has based segments of the "CyberStuff"
   feature of "This Week in Rock" on excerpts from the File.
   
   As TNHD II hit the street, _Newsweek_ magazine ran a major article on
   the Internet and its history, using the Jargon File as a primary
   source and quoting several File entries in a prominent sidebar. And in
   November 1995, Time Magazine used TNHD as the basis for an entire
   article on network culture in its first-ever "Time Digital" section.
   
   For scholars, the Oxford English Dictionary now uses TNHD as a major
   source for computing neologisms.
   
   We have continued to collect raves whenever the book has been
   reviewed, except for one or two reviewers who just didn't get it and
   went away puzzled.
   
                   WHY YOU WANT THIS BOOK TO SELL 1E6 COPIES
                                       
   A word from your humble compiler...
   
   One of my major objectives in seeing the Jargon File published on
   paper is to help the general public to get a truer and more positive
   image of hackers than they seem to have now.
   
   Right now, our society is in a phase of reforming its attitudes and
   laws about information privacy, intellectual property, hacking, and
   First Amendment issues in electronic networking. It is not a good
   thing for this process that many in the public think of hackers as a
   potential conspiracy of dangerous nerds, that the very term "hacker"
   is now considered by many ignorant people to be a synonym for
   "computer criminal". We must reclaim the word "hacker" for our own!
   
   There is a real danger to hackers that restrictive, wrong-headed
   information laws and strict licensing requirements for "software
   professionals" might kill our open, free-spirited culture. This would
   be a tragedy not just for us but for the whole world that benefits
   from our creativity.
   
   Groups like the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been formed to
   fight for hackerdom on the legal and political level. To support that,
   though, the public needs to be educated about all the positive aspects
   of hackerdom. We need them to see our sense of humor, our dedication,
   our playfulness, our idealism; we need to communicate the excitement,
   challenge and promise of the new worlds we're exploring. We need the
   man in the street to see us as allies, not as a threat.
   
   I think this book can be a big help with that. If it sells a million
   copies, that's a million people who will learn something of our
   traditions, and our dreams, and (perhaps most importantly) how to
   laugh with us. That's a million friends. I think we need those
   friends, and I think we're going to need them a lot more before
   society completes its adaptation to the new computing technologies.
   
   Since I wrote the preceding in 1991 (five years ago), positive changes
   in the mainstream culture have made some of these issues perhaps a bit
   less pressing. The battle to reclaim the term `hacker' hasn't been
   definitively won, but at least Time Magazine and its ilk routinely
   mention the hacker vs. cracker distinction in major stories.
   
   Despite the occasional cyberporn flap, the public seems to generally
   side with hackers and civil libertarians on information-freedom
   issues. The Clipper-chip power-grab of '92 was foiled by
   Internet-centered agitation, and the obscenely repressive
   "Communications Decency Act" was thoroughly nuked by a federal court
   following a high-profile campaign by freee-speech rights groups. And
   the public is voting with their dollars for more freedom, turning away
   from video-on-demand and filtered commercial BBSes like Prodigy
   towards the Internet. Positive buzz about the Internet is everywhere.
   Even IBM now advertises its hardware and software on the strength of
   its Internet-access capabilities. And perhaps most remarkably, there
   are studies suggesting the the Internet is even pulling mainstream
   Americans away from their TV sets!
   
   We're still a tiny minority, but our stock in the pop culture has
   definitely risen since TNHD I. Movies like "Sneakers", "The Net", and
   "Independence Day", silly though they are, feature hacker heroes. The
   kinds of teenage techno-nerds that sometimes mature into hackers have
   become admired role models rather than automatic objects of contempt.
   Despite the tiresomeness of much `information superhighway' rhetoric,
   it has focused a lot of attention and approval on the infrastructure
   hackers have been quietly helping to build for decades.
   
   In short, hackerdom seems to be winning its culture war. Now we have
   to cope with success.
   
   The explosion of public interest in the Internet since 1994 has, if
   anything, made TNHD's role more important. While it's kind of fun to
   have everybody want to play our game after thirty years of being
   marginalized as dreamers and geeks, there's now another real danger;
   that the culture and shared values that make the Internet work could
   get lost in the noise made by millions of newbies. To counter this, we
   need to tell our story and transmit our culture in a way that's
   accessible to those hordes of new users. While TNHD can't do that all
   by itself (because it takes long-term person-to-person contact to do
   acculturation really right), it's far from the least effective vector
   we have. And TNHD plus Internet exposure is effective.
   
   This is why I hope you will want The New Hacker's Dictionary to sell a
   million copies. I think there's a significant chance for it to make a
   significant impact on the public's consciousness, by becoming
   everybody's idea of the perfect gift book for the budding Internet
   user.
   
   Soooo...tell your friends about this book. I used to say "the freedom
   you help save may be your own". That's still an issue, but I can now
   ask you to plug TNHD for less fearful reasons. Help out the poor
   bewildered Internet newbies in their teeming millions! Our hacker
   heritage is just what they need to make moral and mythic sense of the
   infant cyberspace struggling to be born out of the Net. This is our
   time. This is our book. Share, and enjoy!
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   
    Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>

                              JARGON FILE HISTORY
                                       
   We make at least the newest and oldest versions of the Jargon File
   available here.
   
     * jarg400.txt.gz -- The 4.0.0 release in flat-ASCII form, 25 Jul
       1996. This was the TNHD III manuscript after final copy-edit.
       
     * jarg400.info.gz -- Version of the above suitable for info
       browsing.
       
     * jargon-upd.lst -- All new and changed entries since 3.0.0 (TNHD
       II).
       
     * jargon.text.z -- the original MIT/Stanford AI jargon file.
       
   Entries with only trivial changes (spelling, punctuation, references,
   minor changes of phrasing) have been omitted from the change list.
   
   Some archive sites will also include the following, depending on free
   space available and the sysadmin's whim:
   
     * jarg333.txt.gz -- The 3.3.3 version, Spring 1996.
       
     * jarg330.txt.gz -- The 3.3.0 version, Winter 1995-1996.
       
     * jarg320.txt.gz -- The 3.2.0 version, Spring 1995.
       
     * jarg310.txt.gz -- The 3.1.0 version, Fall 1994.
       
     * jarg300.txt.gz -- The 3.0.0 version, corresponding to the second
       paper edition from MIT Press. 1961 entries.
       
     * jargon2912.txt.gz -- May 10 1993 update. Last revision before the
       3.0 freeze for TNHD's second edition. A few terms have been
       deleted, mostly game-specific slang from the MUD community. 1946
       entries
       
     * jargon2911.ascii.gz -- Jan 01 1993 update. 1922 entries.
       
     * jargon2910.ascii.gz -- Jul 01 1992 update, with new entries and
       much additional historical material. 1891 entries.
       
     * jargon299.ascii.gz -- Apr 01 1992 update, with new entries from
       XEROX PARC and elsewhere. 1821 entries.
       
     * jargon298.ascii.gz -- Jan 01 1992 update, with corrections and new
       entries. 1760 entries.
       
     * jargon296.ascii.gz -- the sixfold-expanded version published in
       1991 as "The New Hacker's Dictionary" by MIT Press. This is the
       entire text, except for Guy Steele's and Eric Raymond's
       introductions and the "vietnam wall" credits list at the end (and
       of course no fancy fonts and cartoons). 1702 entries.
       
   
     _________________________________________________________________
   
   
    Eric S. Raymond <esr@snark.thyrsus.com>
