foobar

n. [very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable ; see foo for
etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by
Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC ) in 1960s and early 1970s; confirmed
sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do not generally use this to mean
FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. See also Fred Foobar. In RFC1639,
FOOBAR was made an abbreviation for FTP Operation Over Big Address Records ,
but this was an obvious backronym. It has been plausibly suggested that
foobar spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and
partly because foo bar parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo
signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage
condition represents a 1 ) then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the
signal label.

