waldo

/woldoh/ , n. [From Robert A. Heinlein's story Waldo ] 1. A mechanical
agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were
developed for the nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after
the invention described by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942.
Now known by the more generic term telefactoring , this technology is of
intense interest to NASA for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At
Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead of
foobar as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See foo , bar
, foobar , quux.