San Francisco peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real,
which defines {logical} north and south even though it isn't
really north-south in many places. El Camino Real runs right past
Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.

The Spanish word `real' (which has two syllables: /ray-ahl'/)
means `royal'; El Camino Real is `the royal road'. In the FORTRAN
language, a `real' quantity is a number typically precise to seven
significant digits, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger
floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant
digits (other languages have similar `real' types).

When a hacker from MIT visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a
long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on `real', he started
calling it `El Camino Double Precision' -- but when the hacker
was told that the road was hundreds of miles long, he renamed it
`El Camino Bignum', and that name has stuck. (See {bignum}.)
In recent years, the synonym `El Camino Virtual' has been
reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Valley.

[GLS has since let slip that the unnamed hacker in this story was
in fact he --ESR]

:elder days: /n./ The heroic age of hackerdom (roughly,
pre-1980); the era of the {PDP-10}, {TECO}, {{ITS}}, and the
ARPANET. This term has been rather consciously adopted from
J. R. R. Tolkien's fantasy epic "The Lord of the Rings".
Compare {Iron Age}; see also {elvish} and {Great Worm,
the}.