[7bees]

I mean it literally starts with "What mindless cretin thought that it should be a good idea", and later calls them a "bagbiter". If you were responsible for the change, you would feel insulted. His basic point seems valid, but this is not a great way to present it.

[DonHopkins]

Marc was an old school hacker, so bagbiter is a term of endearment, completely sanitized. "Chomp chomp!"

bagbiter /bag'bi:t-*r/ n.

1. Something, such as a program or a computer, that fails to work, or works in a remarkably clumsy manner. "This text editor won't let me make a file with a line longer than 80 characters! What a bagbiter!" 2. A person who has caused you some trouble, inadvertently or otherwise, typically by failing to program the computer properly. Synonyms: loser, cretin, chomper. 3. `bite the bag' vi. To fail in some manner. "The computer keeps crashing every five minutes." "Yes, the disk controller is really biting the bag."

The original loading of these terms was almost undoubtedly obscene, possibly referring to a douche bag or the scrotum (we have reports of "Bite the douche bag!" being used as a taunt at MIT 1970-1976, and we have another report that "Bite the bag!" was in common use at least as early as 1965), but in their current usage they have become almost completely sanitized.

ITS's lexiphage program was the first and to date only known example of a program intended to be a bagbiter.

chomp: vi.

1. To lose; specifically, to chew on something of which more was bitten off than one can. Probably related to gnashing of teeth.

2. To bite the bag; See bagbiter.

A hand gesture commonly accompanies this. To perform it, hold the four fingers together and place the thumb against their tips. Now open and close your hand rapidly to suggest a biting action (much like what Pac-Man does in the classic video game, though this pantomime seems to predate that). The gesture alone means ‘chomp chomp’ (see Verb Doubling in the Jargon Construction section of the Prependices). The hand may be pointed at the object of complaint, and for real emphasis you can use both hands at once. Doing this to a person is equivalent to saying “You chomper!” If you point the gesture at yourself, it is a humble but humorous admission of some failure. You might do this if someone told you that a program you had written had failed in some surprising way and you felt dumb for not having anticipated it.

Marc also wrote RFC #748 documenting the Telnet Randomly-Lose Option on April 1, 1978:

https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/html/rfc748

   IAC WILL RANDOMLY-LOSE

      The sender  of this command  REQUESTS  permission  to, or confirms
      that it will, randomly lose.

   IAC WON'T RANDOMLY-LOSE

      The sender of this command REFUSES to randomly lose.

   IAC DO RANDOMLY-LOSE

      The sender  of this command  REQUESTS that the receiver, or grants
      the receiver permission to, randomly lose.

   IAC DON'T RANDOMLY-LOSE

      The command sender DEMANDS that the receiver not randomly lose.