JargonFile/entries/moby.txt
2014-04-26 15:52:28 +01:00

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moby
/mohbee/ [MIT: seems to have been in use among model railroad fans years ago. Derived from Melville's Moby Dick (some say from Moby Pickle ). Now common.] 1. adj. Large, immense, complex, impressive. A Saturn V rocket is a truly moby frob. Some MIT undergrads pulled off a moby hack at the Harvard-Yale game. (See Appendix A for discussion.) 2. n. obs. The maximum address space of a machine (see below). For a 680[234]0 or VAX or most modern 32-bit architectures, it is 4,294,967,296 8-bit bytes (4 gigabytes). 3. A title of address (never of third-person reference), usually used to show admiration, respect, and/or friendliness to a competent hacker. Greetings, moby Dave. How's that address-book thing for the Mac going? 4. adj. In backgammon, doubles on the dice, as in moby sixes , moby ones , etc. Compare this with bignum (sense 3): double sixes are both bignums and moby sixes, but moby ones are not bignums (the use of moby to describe double ones is sarcastic). Standard emphatic forms: Moby foo , moby win , moby loss.