Related:

• cycle crunch n.,obs. A situation wherein the number of people trying to use a computer simultaneously has reached the point where no one can get enough cycles because they are spread too thin and the system has probably begun to thrash.
  This scenario is an inevitable result of Parkinson's Law applied to timesharing....
• dump: n. 1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem or the state of a system
  especially one routed to the slowest available output device (compare {core dump}), and most especially one consisting of hex or octal {runes} describing the byte-by-byte state of memory, mass storage, or some file....
• cycle drought: n. A scarcity of cycles. It may be due to a {cycle crunch}, but it could also occur because part of the computer is temporarily not working, leaving fewer cycles to go around.
  "The {high moby} is {down}, so we're running with only half the usual amount of memory....
• dump n. 1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information about a problem or the state of a system
  especially one routed to the slowest available output device (compare core dump), and most especially one consisting of hex or octal runes describing the byte-by-byte state of memory, mass storage, or some file....
• mart terminal: n. 1. A terminal that has enough computing capability to render graphics or to offload some kind of front-end processing from the computer it talks to.
  The development of workstations and personal computers has made this term and the product it describes semi-obsolescent, but one may still hear variants of the phrase `act like a smart terminal' used to describe the behavior of workstations or PCs with respect to programs that execute almost entirely out of a remote {server}'s storage, using said devices as displays....
• cycle: 1. n. The basic unit of computation. What every hacker wants more of (noted hacker Bill Gosper describes himself as a "cycle junkie").
  One can describe an instruction as taking so many `clock cycles'....
• mainframe: n. Term originally referring to the cabinet containing the central processor unit or `main frame' of a room-filling {Stone Age} batch machine.
  After the emergence of smaller `minicomputer' designs in the early 1970s, the traditional {big iron} machines were described as `mainframe computers' and eventually just as mainframes....
• BASIC: [acronym, from Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code] n.
  A programming language, originally designed for Dartmouth's experimental timesharing system in the early 1960s, which has since become the leading cause of brain-damage in proto-hackers....
• umber-crunching: n. Computations of a numerical nature, esp.
  those that make extensive use of floating-point numbers....