OT fubar/foobar/foo etc

[Alex Rice]

[this post may contain offensive language]

On Friday, January 31, 2003, at 01:20  PM, Klaus Major wrote:

> another programmers term whose meaning i have been looking
> for for years. Can you enlighten me?

I see you are running Mail.app and so are an OS X user. May I recommend 
OmniDictionary.app from omnigroup.com. I typed in foobar and I get all 
these definitions. hyperlinks not shown in this plaintext copy:

foo
    <jargon> /foo/ A sample name for absolutely anything,
    especially programs and files (especially scratch files).
    First on the standard list of metasyntactic variables used
    in syntax examples.  See also bar, baz, qux, quux,
    corge, grault, garply, waldo, fred, plugh,
    xyzzy, thud.

[snipped about 10 pages of entymology about foo]
-----------------
  From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (09 FEB 02):
FUBAR
    1. (WWII military slang) Fucked up beyond all
    recognition (or repair).

    See foobar.

    2. <hardware> The Failed UniBus Address Register in a
    VAX.  A good example of how jargon can occasionally be snuck
    past the suits.

    Larry Robinson <lrobins at indiana.edu> reports the following
    nonstandard use for FUBAR:

    One day somebody got mad at the card reader (or card eater
    that day) on our Univac 3200.  He taped a sign, "This thing
    is FUBAR", on the metal weight that sits on the stack of
    unread cards.  The sign stayed there for over a year.  One
    day, somebody said, "Don't forget to put the fubar on top of
    the stack".  It stuck!  We called that weight the fubar until
    they took away the machine.  The replacement card reader had
    two spring loaded card clamps, one for the feed and one for
    the return, and we called THOSE fubars until we dumped punch
    cards.

    Incidently, the way he taped the sign on the weight made up
    for the lack of a little nylon piece that was missing from it,
    and fixed the card reader.  That's why the sign stayed there.

    [Jargon File]
    (1997-03-18)
-----------------
 From V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms December 2001:
FUBAR
         Fouled / Fucked Up Beyond All Recognition / Repair (slang, 
Usenet, IRC)

  From Jargon File (4.3.0, 30 APR 2001):
-----------------
foobar n. [very common] Another widely used metasyntactic variable;
    see foo for etymology. Probably originally propagated through
    DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and
    early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do 
_not_
    generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon sense.
    See also Fred Foobar. In RFC1639, "FOOBAR" was made an abbreviation
    for "FTP Operation Over Big Address Records", but this was an obvious
    backronym. It has been plausibly suggested that "foobar" spread among
    early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because 
"foo
    bar" parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo signal; if a
    digital signal is coded so that a positive voltage or high current
    condition represents a "1", then a horizontal bar is commonly placed
    over the signal label.
-----------------
  From The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing (09 FEB 02):
foobar
    Another common metasyntactic variable; see foo.  Hackers
    do *not* generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the
    slang or jargon sense.

    [Jargon File]
-----------------
  From V.E.R.A. -- Virtual Entity of Relevant Acronyms December 2001:
FOOBAR
         FTP Operation Over Big Address Records (RFC 1639, FTP)


Alex Rice, Software Developer
Architectural Research Consultants, Inc.
alrice at ARCplanning.com
alrice at swcp.com