16 lines
840 B
Plaintext
16 lines
840 B
Plaintext
foobar
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n. [very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable ; see foo for
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etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by
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Digital Equipment Corporation ( DEC ) in 1960s and early 1970s; confirmed
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sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do not generally use this to mean
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FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense. See also Fred Foobar. In RFC1639,
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FOOBAR was made an abbreviation for FTP Operation Over Big Address Records ,
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but this was an obvious backronym. It has been plausibly suggested that
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foobar spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and
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partly because foo bar parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo
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signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage
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condition represents a 1 ) then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the
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signal label.
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