{{Short description|Humour about computers and their users}} {{Use British English |date=February 2024}} {{Use dmy dates |date=February 2024}} {{Multiple issues| {{Notability|date=June 2023}} {{More citations needed |date=February 2024}} }} '''Computer humour''', also known as '''hacker humour''', is humour on the subject of computers or their users.<ref name="mah17" />

==Examples== Examples of computer humour include: *"Any key", taken to mean pressing the (non-existent) "Any" key rather than any key *April Fools' Day Request for Comments *Bastard Operator From Hell, a fictional rogue computer operator *Blinkenlights, a neologism for diagnostic lights *Bogosort, a portmanteau of the words bogus and sort *COMEFROM, an obscure programming language control flow structure, originally as a joke *"The Complexity of Songs", a journal article published by computer scientist Donald Knuth in 1977 as an in-joke about computational complexity theory *''The Computer Contradictionary'', a non-fiction book by Stan Kelly-Bootle that compiles a satirical list of definitions of computer industry terms *''The Daily WTF'', a humorous blog dedicated to "Curious Perversions in Information Technology" *''Dilbert'', an American comic strip *Easter egg, an intentional inside joke, hidden message or image, or secret feature of a work **List of Google Easter eggs **List of Easter eggs in Microsoft products **''The Book of Mozilla'' *Elephant in Cairo, in computer programming, a piece of data inserted at the end of a search space, which matches the search criteria, in order to make sure the search algorithm terminates; it is a humorous example of a sentinel value *''Epigrams on Programming'', a humorous article by Alan Perlis in 1982. *Evil bit, a fictional IPv4 packet header field *Eyeball search, humorous terminology *FINO (first in, never out) (sometimes seen as "FISH", for first in, still here), a humorous scheduling algorithm, as opposed to traditional first in, first out (FIFO) and last in, first out (LIFO) *Garbage in, garbage out (GIGO), the concept that flawed, or nonsense input data produces nonsense output *J. Random Hacker, an arbitrary programmer (hacker) *Halt and Catch Fire (HCF), an idiom referring to a computer machine code instruction that causes the computer's CPU to cease meaningful operation *Hex, a fictional computer featured in the ''Discworld'' novels by Terry Pratchett *Hexspeak, like leetspeak, a novelty form of spelling using the hexadecimal digits *Hyper Text Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP), a facetious communication protocol for controlling, monitoring, and diagnosing coffee pots *Interactive EasyFlow, a diagramming and flow charting software package that included a humorous software licence ''This is where the bloodthirsty licensing agreement is supposed to go...'' *Internet Oracle, an effort at collective humor in a pseudo-Socratic question-and-answer format *IP over Avian Carriers, a joke proposal to carry IP traffic by birds such as homing pigeons *''It's Geek 2 Me'', a tech cartoon *Jargon File, a glossary and usage dictionary of slang used by computer programmers *''The Joy of Tech'', a webcomic *Kitchen Table International, a fictitious computer company *Kremvax, originally a fictitious Usenet site at the Kremlin, named like the then large number of Usenet VAXen with names of the form "foovax" *lp0 on fire (also known as Printer on Fire), is an outdated error message generated on some Unix and Unix-like computer operating systems in response to certain types of printer errors *Magic smoke (also factory smoke, blue smoke, angry pixies, or the genie), a humorous name for the caustic smoke produced by burning out electronic circuits or components *Ninety–ninety rule: "the first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time" *Null device, in programmer jargon, the bit bucket or black hole *PC LOAD LETTER or PC LOAD A4, a printer error message that has entered popular culture as a technology meme referring to a confusing or inappropriate error message *Slowsort, a humorous, not useful, sorting algorithm *''The Tao of Programming'', a 1987 book by Geoffrey James *TPS report, Testing Procedure Specification, has come to mean pointless, mindless paperwork *User error, an error made by the human user of a complex system. Related slang terms include PMAC ("problem exists between monitor and chair"), identity error or ID-10T/1D-10T error ("idiot error"), PICNIC ("problem in chair, not in computer"), IBM error ("idiot behind machine error") *''User Friendly'', a former daily webcomic *''Working Daze'', a comic strip *Write-only memory (joke) *''xkcd'', a webcomic *Zaltair, a fictional computer created by Steve Wozniak

==See also== *Computational humor, a branch of computational linguistics and artificial intelligence which uses computers in humor research *Humor on the internet *Mathematical joke *Geek *Esoteric programming language *List of humorous units of measurement

==References== <references>

<ref name="mah17">{{cite conference |title=Computer-Related Cartoons and Humor and Its Historical Transition |first=Russell |last=McMahon |page=177 |conference=Proceedings of the 18th Annual Conference on Information Technology Education (SIGITE '17) |date=October 4-7, 2017 |location=Rochester, NY, USA |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery |doi=10.1145/3125659.3125705 |isbn=9781450351003 }}</ref>

</references>

Category:Computer humour Category:Computing-related lists