n. 1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for
the asterisk ('*') character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive
from the 'squashed-bug' appearance of the asterisk on many early
line printers.
2. [MIT] Name used by some people for the '#' character (ASCII 0100011).
3. [Rochester Institute of
Technology] The command key on a Mac (same as ALT,
sense 2).
4. [Stanford] Name used by some people for the
Stanford/ITS extended ASCII circle-x
character.
This character is also called 'blobby' and 'frob',
among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a
notation for 'tensor product'.
5. [Stanford] Name for the
semi-mythical extended ASCII circle-plus character.
6. Canonical name for an output routine that outputs
whatever the local interpretation of 'splat' is.
With ITS and WAITS gone, senses 4-6 are now nearly obsolete.
See also ASCII.
