n. 1. Notional 'dollar' units of computing time and/or
storage handed to students at the beginning of a computer course;
also called 'play money' or 'purple money' (in implicit
opposition to real or 'green' money). When your funny money
ran out, your account froze and you needed to go to a professor to
get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of timesharing cycles has
made this less common. The amounts allocated were almost
invariably too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide
by with minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to
small-scale black markets in bootlegged computer accounts.
2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind used as a resource-allocation hack within a system.
Antonym: 'real money'.
