n. Refers to emulations
of way-behind-the-state-of-the-art hardware or software, or
implementations of never-was-state-of-the-art; esp. if such
implementations are elaborate practical jokes and/or parodies of
more 'serious' designs. Perhaps the most widely distributed
retrocomputing utility was the 'pnch(6)' or 'bcd(6)'
program on V7 and other early UNIX versions, which would accept up
to 80 characters of text argument and display the corresponding
pattern in
punched card code. Other well-known retrocomputing
hacks have included the programming language
INTERCAL, a
JCL-emulating shell for UNIX, the card-punch-emulating editor
named 029, and various elaborate PDP-11 hardware emulators and RT-11
OS emulators written just to keep an old, sourceless
Zork binary
running.