waldo
/wol'doh/ [Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"] 1. A mechanical agent, such as a
gripper arm, controlled by a human limb. When these were developed for the
nuclear industry in the mid-1940s they were named after the invention described
by Heinlein in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic
term "telefactoring", this technology is of intense interest to NASA for tasks
like space station maintenance.
2. At Harvard (particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead
of foobar as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See foo, bar,
foobar, quux.
[Jargon File]
Nearby terms:
WAIS « WAITS « wait state « waldo » walk »
walking drives » walk off the end of
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