Your editor has heard two separate reports that suggest that the
crocked login did make it out of Bell Labs, notably to BBN, and
that it enabled at least one late-night login across the network by
someone using the login name `kt'.

:backbone cabal: /n./ A group of large-site administrators who
pushed through the {Great Renaming} and reined in the chaos of
{Usenet} during most of the 1980s. The cabal {mailing list}
disbanded in late 1988 after a bitter internal catfight.

:backbone site: /n./ A key Usenet and email site; one that
processes a large amount of third-party traffic, especially if it
is the home site of any of the regional coordinators for the Usenet
maps. Notable backbone sites as of early 1993, when this sense of
the term was beginning to pass out of general use due to wide
availability of cheap Internet connections, included uunet and
the mail machines at Rutgers University, UC Berkeley, {DEC}'s
Western Research Laboratories, Ohio State University, and the
University of Texas. Compare {rib site}, {leaf site}.

[1996 update: This term is seldom heard any more. The UUCP network
world that gave it meaning has nearly disappeared; everyone is on
the Internet now and network traffic is distributed in very
different patterns. --ESR]

:backgammon:: See {bignum} (sense 3), {moby} (sense 4),
and {pseudoprime}.

:background: /n.,adj.,vt./ To do a task `in background' is to
do it whenever {foreground} matters are not claiming your