From: Grant Callaghan (grantc4@hotmail.com)
Date: Sun 20 Oct 2002 - 16:36:59 GMT
>
>In reply to the message from Grant Callaghan <grantc4@hotmail.com> about
>"Sexy memes", it should suffice to give the URL,
>http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/entry/SEX.html but instead let me
>quote the whole of that "Jargon File" or "New Hacker's
>Dictionary" entry:
>
>"SEX /seks/
>[Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 1. Software EXchange. A technique
>invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of millions of years
>ago to speed up their evolution, which had been terribly slow up until
>then. Today, SEX parties are popular among hackers and others
>(of course, these are no longer limited to exchanges of genetic software).
>In general, SEX parties are a Good Thing, but unprotected
>SEX can propagate a virus. See also pubic directory. 2. The rather Freudian
>mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a machine
>instruction found in the PDP-11 and many other architectures. The RCA 1802
>chip used in the early Elf and SuperElf personal
>computers had a `SEt X register' SEX instruction, but this seems to have
>had little folkloric impact. The Data General instruction
>set also had SEX.
>
>DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the SEX mnemonic
>out the door at one time, but (for once) marketing wasn't
>asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the last time this happened,
>either. The author of "The Intel 8086 Primer", who was one of
>the original designers of the 8086, noted that there was originally a SEX
>instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel
>management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and thus the
>instruction was renamed CBW and CWD (depending on what was
>being extended). Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM
>PC keyboards) is also missing straight SEX but has
>logical-or and logical-and instructions ORL and ANL.
>
>The Motorola 6809, used in the Radio Shack Color Computer and in U.K.'s
>`Dragon 32' personal computer, actually had an official SEX
>instruction; the 6502 in the Apple II with which it competed did not.
>British hackers thought this made perfect mythic sense; after
>all, it was commonly observed, you could (on some theoretical level) have
>sex with a dragon, but you can't have sex with an apple. "
>
>The New Hacker's Dictionary by Eric S. Raymond, President and a founder of
>the Open Source Initiative, www.OpenSource.Org is pretty
>much required reading for memetics people, isn't it?
>
> dpw http://www.SocialTechnology.Org/dpwilson.html
>
That was all very interesting and entertaining, but I can't see what it has
to do with my proposal. Was it the fact that I used the word "sexy" in my
subject line?
Cheers,
Grant
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