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