27 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
27 lines
1.6 KiB
Plaintext
El Camino Bignum
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/el k@meenoh bignuhm/ , n. The road mundanely called El Camino Real, running
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along San Francisco peninsula. It originally extended all the way down to
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Mexico City; many portions of the old road are still intact. Navigation on
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the San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real,
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which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really
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north-south in many places. El Camino Real runs right past Stanford
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University and so is familiar to hackers. The Spanish word real (which has
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two syllables: /rayahl/ ) means royal ; El Camino Real is the royal road. In
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the FORTRAN language, a real quantity is a number typically precise to seven
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significant digits, and a double precision quantity is a larger
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floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other
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languages have similar real types). When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford
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in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on
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real , he started calling it El Camino Double Precision but when the hacker
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was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it El Camino
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Bignum , and that name has stuck. (See bignum. ) [GLS has since let slip
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that the unnamed hacker in this story was in fact himself ESR] In the early
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1990s, the synonym El Camino Virtual was been reported as an alternate at
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IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley. Mathematically literate hackers in the
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Valley have also been heard to refer to some major cross-street intersecting
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El Camino Real as El Camino Imaginary. One popular theory is that the
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intersection is located near Moffett Field where they keep all those complex
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planes.
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