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Subject:What RTFM stands for From:Patrick O'Connell <patricko -at- EICON -dot- COM> Date:Fri, 7 Oct 1994 08:09:00 PDT
Sorry if a lot of you are scratching your heads. Aging hackers like to say
"it stands for Read the Fine Manual, except you don't say fine, you say
another four-letter word that starts with F." There's been at least one UNIX
man page for the "RTFM command" -- it was hilarious, but I lost my copy some
time ago. It's probably on some MIT machine or other.
The definition of this and a lot of other peculiar acronyms and terms can be
found in the Jargon File, a kind of historical dictionary of computing terms
that's a lot of fun just to browse through. You can get a
not-quite-up-to-date WinHelp version from (not sure here) oak.oakland.edu and
other Simtel mirror sites, OR ftp.cica.indiana.edu and its mirror sites.
Look for the string "jrg2912" in the whole-site indices for these -- one of
them's got it. I'd put the exact path here but I'm composing this from home
through PC Anywhere and I don't have my handy-dandy C:\NET directory here.
Pat O'Connell
patricko -at- eicon -dot- com
(don't have my signature file at home either!)
