/seks/ [
Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] 1. Software EXchange. A
technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of
millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had
been terribly slow up until then. Today,
SEX parties are
popular among hackers and others (of course, these are no
longer limited to exchanges of genetic software). In general,
SEX parties are a
Good Thing, but unprotected
SEX can
propagate a
virus. See also
pubic directory.
2. The
mnemonic often used for Sign EXtend, a machine
instruction found in the
PDP-11 and many other
architectures. The
RCA 1802 chip used in the early
Elf
and SuperElf
personal computers had a "SEt X register"
SEX
instruction, but this seems to have had little folkloric
impact.
DEC's engineers nearly got a
PDP-11 assembler that used
the "
SEX" mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once)
marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change. That wasn't the
last time this happened, either. The author of "The Intel
8086 Primer", who was one of the original designers of the
Intel 8086, noted that there was originally a "
SEX"
instruction on that processor, too. He says that Intel
management got cold feet and decreed that it be changed, and
thus the instruction was renamed "CBW" and "CWD" (depending on
what was being extended). The
Intel 8048 (the
microcontroller used in
IBM PC keyboards) is also missing
straight "
SEX" but has logical-or and logical-and instructions
"ORL" and "ANL".
The
Motorola 6809, used in the UK's "
Dragon 32" {personal
computer}, actually had an official "
SEX" instruction; the
6502 in the
Apple II with which it competed did not.
British hackers thought this made perfect mythic sense; after
all, it was commonly observed, you could (on some theoretical
level) have
sex with a dragon, but you can't have
sex with an
apple.
[
Jargon File]
(1998-03-03)