moby

/mohbee/ [MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years
ago. Derived from Melville's Moby Dick (some say from Moby Pickle ). Now
common.] 1. adj. Large, immense, complex, impressive. A Saturn V rocket is a
truly moby frob. Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the
Harvard-Yale game. (See Appendix A for discussion.) 2. n. obs. The maximum
address space of a machine (see below). For a 680[234]0 or VAX or most
modern 32-bit architectures, it is 4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes).
3. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually used to
show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent hacker.
Greetings, moby Dave. How's that address-book thing for the Mac going? 4.
adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in moby sixes , moby ones , etc.
Compare this with bignum (sense 3): double sixes are both bignums and moby
sixes, but moby ones are not bignums (the use of moby to describe double
ones is sarcastic). Standard emphatic forms: Moby foo , moby win , moby
loss.

