:Easter egging: /n./ [IBM] The act of replacing unrelated
components more or less at random in hopes that a malfunction will
go away. Hackers consider this the normal operating mode of
{field circus} techs and do not love them for it. See also the
jokes under {field circus}. Compare {shotgun debugging}.

:eat flaming death: /imp./ A construction popularized among
hackers by the infamous {CPU Wars} comic; supposedly derive from
a famously turgid line in a WWII-era anti-Nazi propaganda comic
that ran "Eat flaming death, non-Aryan mongrels!" or something
of the sort (however, it is also reported that the Firesign
Theater's 1975 album "In The Next World, You're On Your Own"
included the phrase "Eat flaming death, fascist media pigs"; this
may have been an influence). Used in humorously overblown
expressions of hostility. "Eat flaming death, {{EBCDIC}} users!"

:EBCDIC:: /eb's*-dik/, /eb'see`dik/, or /eb'k*-dik/ /n./
[abbreviation, Extended Binary Coded Decimal Interchange Code] An
alleged character set used on IBM {dinosaur}s. It exists in at
least six mutually incompatible versions, all featuring such
delights as non-contiguous letter sequences and the absence of
several ASCII punctuation characters fairly important for modern
computer languages (exactly which characters are absent varies
according to which version of EBCDIC you're looking at). IBM
adapted EBCDIC from {{punched card}} code in the early 1960s and
promulgated it as a customer-control tactic (see {connector
conspiracy}), spurning the already established ASCII standard.
Today, IBM claims to be an open-systems company, but IBM's own
description of the EBCDIC variants and how to convert between them
is still internally classified top-secret, burn-before-reading.