luser

(To the tune of Beck's "Loser")

In the day of sysop nerds I was a flunkie
Jolt in my brains and body feeling chunky
With the plastic mouse balls spray paint the Commodore
System install with the hard drive on the floor

Kill the process and put it in /dev/null
Email flaming with the user hitting D-control
Shell's called Reno and it's written in C
Got a couple of xterms, keys set to repeat

Root came sayin' I'm insane to complain
About an online wedding and a stain on my screen
Don't believe everything that you make(1)
You get a cracker from Europe and a login that's fake

So write your code in Perl in the dark
Saving all your hacks for working at a tech park
Yo - punch it

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Double dense floppy)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?

Forces of evil in a MUD/MOO nightmare
Ban all the members in a phony #chat channel 'cause
One's got a handle and the other's got a .plan
One online spammed the other and ran

With the FTP and the insane print job
The daytime crap of the alt.test slob
He hung himself with a call to ping
Twenty milliseconds and it's spitting out another string

RTFM if you can't relate
Trade the Sun for a car and the Web for a date
And MIME is a nifty hack for mailing to a newbie
That's choking on my MPEGs

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Get crazy with the caps lock)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Drive-by BIFF post)

Yo, bring it on down

I'm a hacker, I'm a winner
Program's gonna work, I can feel it

So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(I can't retrieve you)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(NULL)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Sprecken sie DOS, eh, baby)
So - dumping core
I'm a user, baby, so why don't you kill(1) me?
(Know what I'm typin'?)

           --Unknown, The Net

lurker = L = M

luser /loo'zr/ n.

[common] A user; esp. one who is also a loser. (luser and loser are pronounced identically.) This word was coined around 1975 at MIT. Under ITS, when you first walked up to a terminal at MIT and typed Control-Z to get the computer's attention, it printed out some status information, including how many people were already using the computer; it might print "14 users", for example. Someone thought it would be a great joke to patch the system to print "14 losers" instead. There ensued a great controversy, as some of the users didn't particularly want to be called losers to their faces every time they used the computer. For a while several hackers struggled covertly, each changing the message behind the back of the others; any time you logged into the computer it was even money whether it would say "users" or "losers". Finally, someone tried the compromise "lusers", and it stuck. Later one of the ITS machines supported luser as a request-for-help command. ITS died the death in mid-1990, except as a museum piece; the usage lives on, however, and the term `luser' is often seen in program comments and on Usenet. Compare mundane, muggle.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.