FOLDOC is a searchable dictionary of acronyms, jargon, programming languages, tools, architecture, operating systems, networking, theory, conventions, standards, mathematics, telecoms, electronics, institutions, companies, projects, products, history, in fact anything to do with computing.
This dictionary is Copyright 1993 by Denis Howe.
Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this dictionary or works derived from it, provided that every such copy or derived work carries the above copyright notice and is distributed under terms identical to these. Individual definitions from this dictionary may be used without restriction provided no more than twenty are used in any one work.
Please refer to the dictionary as "The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing, http://www.foldoc.org/, Editor Denis Howe" or similar.
The dictionary has been growing since 1985 and now contains over 13000 definitions totalling nearly five megabytes of text. Entries are cross-referenced to each other and to related resources elsewhere on the net.
Where LaTeX commands for certain non-ASCII symbols are mentioned, they are described in their own entries. "\" is also used to represent the Greek lower-case lambda used in lambda-calculus. Cross-references to other entries look like this. Note that not all cross-references actually lead anywhere yet, but if you find one that leads to something inappropriate, please let me know. Dates after entries indicate when that entry was last updated. They do not imply that it was up-to-date at that time.
You can search the latest version of the dictionary by WWW (URL http://www.foldoc.org/). If you find an entry that is wrong or inadequate please let me know.
See Pronunciation for how to interpret the pronunciation given for some entries.
(2000-05-18)
Many thanks to the hundreds of contributors, and especially to the Guest Editors, mirror site maintainers and the maintainers of the following resources from which some entries originate:
Mike Sendall's STING Software engineering glossary <sendall@dxpt01.cern.ch>, 1993-10-13,
Bill Kinnersley's Language List v2.2, 1994-01-15,
Mark Hopkins' catalogue of Free Compilers and Interpreters v6.4, 1994-02-28,
The on-line hacker Jargon File v3.0.0, 1993-07-27,
Internet Users' Glossary (RFC 1392, FYI 18), Jan 1993.
John Cross's computer glossary, 1994-11-01.
John Bayko's Great Microprocessors of the Past and Present, v4.0.0, 1994-08-18.
Electronic Commerce Dictionary.
(1997-08-01)