The Stanford AI Lab had effectively ceased to exist by 1980, although
the SAIL computer continued as a Computer Science Department resource
until 1991. Stanford became a major [47]TWENEX site, at one point
operating more than a dozen TOPS-20 systems; but by the mid-1980s most
of the interesting software work was being done on the emerging BSD
Unix standard.

In April 1983, the PDP-10-centered cultures that had nourished the
File were dealt a death-blow by the cancellation of the Jupiter
project at Digital Equipment Corporation. The File's compilers,
already dispersed, moved on to other things. Steele-1983 was partly a
monument to what its authors thought was a dying tradition; no one
involved realized at the time just how wide its influence was to be.

By the mid-1980s the File's content was dated, but the legend that had
grown up around it never quite died out. The book, and softcopies
obtained off the ARPANET, circulated even in cultures far removed from
MIT and Stanford; the content exerted a strong and continuing
influence on hacker language and humor. Even as the advent of the
microcomputer and other trends fueled a tremendous expansion of
hackerdom, the File (and related materials such as the [48]Some AI
Koans in Appendix A) came to be seen as a sort of sacred epic, a
hacker-culture Matter of Britain chronicling the heroic exploits of
the Knights of the Lab. The pace of change in hackerdom at large
accelerated tremendously -- but the Jargon File, having passed from
living document to icon, remained essentially untouched for seven
years.

This revision contains nearly the entire text of a late version of