"hork" is from the old BBS days, when the Internet was too expensive, too
inaccessible, and we all ran around on BBS's...

You see, BBS's had a policy of download our stuff, only if you upload
stuff. That way, their software libraries would be more interesting, I
guess. I think this gets into software piracy BBS's, etc...

Anyways, if you went to a BBS and downloaded a bunch of stuff, but didn't
upload anything, that was referred to as "horking" off the system. It soon
came to mean just downloading anything.

For some reason, the word fell out of use...

Of course, this is how I understand the story of the origins of the word
"hork" :)

I'm pretty sure this won't help anyone. Heh. Sorry for the tangent...

Josh

On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Colin Wood wrote:

> David A. Gatwood wrote:
> > 
> > On Mon, 18 Aug 1997, Colin Wood wrote:
> > > Anyway, for some systems (i.e. those with Quantum drives and the ncr5380
> > > chip) the sbc driver appears to be more stable than the ncrscsi driver.
> > > This seems to be the case for most systems using a Jaz/Zip drive as well.
> > > However, there are a few systems where the sbc driver will totally hork
> > > the filesystem and the ncrscsi driver works just fine (yours seems to
> > > qualify).  Unfortunately, other than rather general statements like those
> > > I've just given, there is no real way to determine which system is which
> > > before actually running a kernel and seeing how it goes :-(
> > 
> > hork?  Never seen that one before....
> 
> I wish I could say I made it up, but whatever it's origins, 'horked' has
> always sounded like the perfect word to describe the filesystem while I'm
> sitting there watching 'fsck -y' run and the list of munged inode's goes
> scrolling by ;-)  It really is a great word, tho.  Try using it sometime:
> "My machine was running just fine until the nightly daily script ran and
> _horked_ the machine" or "Every time I try to do a kernel build these
> days, the system _horks_ itself..."  See? ;-)