48 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML
48 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML
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<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml"><head><title>moby</title><link rel="stylesheet" href="../../jargon.css" type="text/css"/><meta name="generator" content="DocBook XSL Stylesheets V1.61.0"/><link rel="home" href="../index.html" title="The Jargon File"/><link rel="up" href="../M.html" title="M"/><link rel="previous" href="mobo.html" title="mobo"/><link rel="next" href="mockingbird.html" title="mockingbird"/></head><body><div class="navheader"><table width="100%" summary="Navigation header"><tr><th colspan="3" align="center">moby</th></tr><tr><td width="20%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="mobo.html">Prev</a> </td><th width="60%" align="center">M</th><td width="20%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="mockingbird.html">Next</a></td></tr></table><hr/></div><dt><a id="moby"/><dt xmlns="" id="moby"><b>moby</b>: <span xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" class="pronunciation">/moh´bee/</span></dt></dt><dd><p> [MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago.
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Derived from Melville's <i class="citetitle">Moby Dick</i> (some say from
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‘Moby Pickle’). Now common.] </p></dd><dd><p> 1. <span class="grammar">adj.</span> Large, immense, complex,
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impressive. “<span class="quote">A Saturn V rocket is a truly moby frob.</span>”
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“<span class="quote">Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the Harvard-Yale
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game.</span>” (See <a href="../appendixa.html" title="Appendix A. Hacker Folklore">Appendix A</a> for
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discussion.)</p></dd><dd><p> 2. <span class="grammar">n.</span> obs. The maximum address
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space of a machine (see below). For a 680[234]0 or
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<a href="../V/VAX.html"><i class="glossterm">VAX</i></a> or most modern 32-bit architectures, it is
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4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes). </p></dd><dd><p> 3. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually
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used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent
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hacker. “<span class="quote">Greetings, moby Dave. How's that address-book thing for
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the Mac going?</span>”</p></dd><dd><p> 4. <span class="grammar">adj.</span> In backgammon, doubles
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on the dice, as in <span class="firstterm">moby sixes</span>,
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<span class="firstterm">moby ones</span>, etc. Compare this with
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<a href="../B/bignum.html"><i class="glossterm">bignum</i></a> (sense 3): double sixes are both bignums and
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moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums (the use of <span class="firstterm">moby</span> to describe double ones is sarcastic).
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Standard emphatic forms: <span class="firstterm">Moby foo</span>,
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<span class="firstterm">moby win</span>, <span class="firstterm">moby loss</span>. <span class="firstterm">Foby
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moo</span>: a spoonerism due to Richard Greenblatt. </p></dd><dd><p> 5. The largest available unit of something which is available in
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discrete increments. Thus, ordering a “<span class="quote">moby Coke</span>” at the
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local fast-food joint is not just a request for a large Coke, it's an
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explicit request for the largest size they sell.</p></dd><dd><p>This term entered hackerdom with the Fabritek 256K memory added to
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the MIT AI PDP-6 machine, which was considered unimaginably huge when it
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was installed in the 1960s (at a time when a more typical memory size for a
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timesharing system was 72 kilobytes). Thus, a moby is classically 256K
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36-bit words, the size of a PDP-6 or PDP-10 moby. Back when address
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registers were narrow the term was more generally useful, because when a
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computer had virtual memory mapping, it might actually have more physical
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memory attached to it than any one program could access directly. One
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could then say “<span class="quote">This computer has 6 mobies</span>” meaning that the
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ratio of physical memory to address space is 6, without having to say
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specifically how much memory there actually is. That in turn implied that
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the computer could timeshare six ‘full-sized’ programs without
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having to swap programs between memory and disk.</p><p>Nowadays the low cost of processor logic means that address spaces
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are usually larger than the most physical memory you can cram onto a
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machine, so most systems have much <span class="emphasis"><em>less</em></span> than one
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theoretical ‘native’ moby of <a href="../C/core.html"><i class="glossterm">core</i></a>.
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Also, more modern memory-management techniques (esp. paging) make the
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‘moby count’ less significant. However, there is one series of
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widely-used chips for which the term could stand to be revived — the
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Intel 8088 and 80286 with their incredibly
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<a href="../B/brain-damaged.html"><i class="glossterm">brain-damaged</i></a> segmented-memory designs. On these, a
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<span class="firstterm">moby</span> would be the 1-megabyte address
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span of a segment/offset pair (by coincidence, a PDP-10 moby was exactly 1
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megabyte of 9-bit bytes).</p></dd><div class="navfooter"><hr/><table width="100%" summary="Navigation footer"><tr><td width="40%" align="left"><a accesskey="p" href="mobo.html">Prev</a> </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="u" href="../M.html">Up</a></td><td width="40%" align="right"> <a accesskey="n" href="mockingbird.html">Next</a></td></tr><tr><td width="40%" align="left" valign="top">mobo </td><td width="20%" align="center"><a accesskey="h" href="../index.html">Home</a></td><td width="40%" align="right" valign="top"> mockingbird</td></tr></table></div></body></html>
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