1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ("*") character (ASCII 0101010). This may derive from the "squashed-bug" appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers.
2. Name used by some MIT people for the "#" character (ASCII 35).
3. (Rochester Institute of Technology) The feature key on a Mac (same as alt ).
4. An obsolete name used by some people for the Stanford / ITS extended ASCII circle-x character. This character is also called "blobby" and "frob", among other names; it is sometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for "tensor product".
5. An obsolete name for the semi-mythical Stanford extended ASCII circle-plus character.
See also ASCII .
[ Jargon File ]
(1995-01-19)