Acme

A popular Mid-Atlantic supermarket chain founded in South Philadelphia in 1891. It is the dominant supermarket in the Greater Philadelphia area. One of the largest in existence is within walking distance of my house.

Incorrectly pronounced "Ac-a-me" by hundreds of thousands of Philadelphians. I have managed to overcome this particular manifestation of the Philly accent, but Acme remains my preferred supermarket.

Acme (created by Rob Pike) is a text editor for the Plan 9 operating system; it integrates the mouse much more intuitively into the user interface than does any other editor I have seen. There is a UNIX/X clone of Acme called Wily.

ACK = A = acolyte

Acme n.

[from Greek `akme', highest point of perfection or achievement] The canonical supplier of bizarre, elaborate, and non-functional gadgetry - where Rube Goldberg and Heath Robinson (two cartoonists who specialized in elaborate contraptions) shop. The name has been humorously expanded as A (or American) Company Making Everything. (In fact, Acme was a real brand sold from Sears Roebuck catalogs in the early 1900s.) Describing some X as an "Acme X" either means "This is insanely great", or, more likely, "This looks insanely great on paper, but in practice it's really easy to shoot yourself in the foot with it." Compare pistol.

This term, specially cherished by American hackers and explained here for the benefit of our overseas brethren, comes from the Warner Brothers' series of "Roadrunner" cartoons. In these cartoons, the famished Wile E. Coyote was forever attempting to catch up with, trap, and eat the Roadrunner. His attempts usually involved one or more high-technology Rube Goldberg devices - rocket jetpacks, catapults, magnetic traps, high-powered slingshots, etc. These were usually delivered in large wooden crates labeled prominently with the Acme name - which, probably not by coincidence, was the trade name of the animation rotation board used by cartoonists since forever. Acme devices invariably malfunctioned in improbable and violent ways.

--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.

(recursive acronym: "The ACME Crossassembler for Multiple Environments")

A 6502 crossassembler from Smørbrød Software (Marco Baye), distributed under GPL. It is portable and runs on various platforms (*NIX, MS-DOS, AmigaOS, OS/2 and RISC OS, the original platform where it was written on). It supports many kinds of 6502 variants (6502, 65c02, 65816 - though it will not produce files bigger than 64k!), and supports for illegal opcodes are being worked on.

It appears to be very well-featured: it allows complicated preprocessing (conditional and looping code, inclusion of other source files and binaries, math parsing), supports global and local labels, and has powerful macro support. It also appears to support position-independent code (but will not make linkable objects - hmmmm). It also seems to have ASCII-to-PETSCII/screencodes conversion built in. And, according to the hype, it is also fast.

Ac"me (#), n. [Gr. point, top.]

1.

The top or highest point; the culmination.

The very acme and pitch of life for epic poetry. Pope.

The moment when a certain power reaches the acme of its supremacy. I. Taylor.

2. Med.

The crisis or height of a disease.

3.

Mature age; full bloom of life.

B. Jonson.

 

© Webster 1913.