era
= E =
Eris
Eric Conspiracy n.
A shadowy group of mustachioed
hackers named Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an
infamous talk.bizarre posting ca. 1987; this was doubtless
influenced by the numerous `Eric' jokes in the Monty Python
oeuvre. There do indeed seem to be considerably more mustachioed
Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits can
account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way.
Well-known examples include Eric Allman (he of the `Allman style'
described under indent style) and Erik Fair (co-author of
NNTP); your editor has heard from more than a hundred others by
email, and the organization line `Eric Conspiracy Secret
Laboratories' now emanates regularly from more than one site. See
the Eric Conspiracy Web Page at
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/ecsl/ for full details.
--The Jargon File version 4.3.1, ed. ESR, autonoded by rescdsk.