funny money

n. 1. Notional dollar units of computing time and/or storage handed to
students at the beginning of a computer course; also called play money or
purple money (in implicit opposition to real or green money). In New Zealand
and Germany the odd usage paper money has been recorded; in Germany, the
particularly amusing synonym transfer ruble commemorates the funny money
used for trade between COMECON countries back when the Soviet Bloc still
existed. When your funny money ran out, your account froze and you needed to
go to a professor to get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing
cycles has made this less common. The amounts allocated were almost
invariably too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by with
minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to small-scale black
markets in bootlegged computer accounts. 2. By extension, phantom money or
quantity tickets of any kind used as a resource-allocation hack within a
system. Antonym: real money.

