[Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 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 rather Freudian 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. The Data General instruction set also had SEX.
