[WikiEN-l] Cruft

[Ray Saintonge]

Neil Harris wrote:

>Joe Anderson wrote:
>  
>
>>John, Not suitable for inclusion in the encyclopedia due to limited scope of
>>interest is pretty much what I thought it meant.  
>>    
>>
>Unfortunately, the original meaning of the hacker term "cruft" is (at 
>its most polite) "undiscarded technical clutter".
>
I started looking back into  where this term comes from and Google Book 
Search gave me "...we meet with vaft galleries, along which, and out of
which, the lava has flowed, leaving the cruft entire."  They credit the 
extract to the "Transactions of the Royal Society of Edimburgh" without 
giving a date.  They also give only snippets of the work.  This is 
apparently out of respect for copyrights.  The use of the long "S" in 
typography was abandoned rather abrubtly around the year 1800.  Even 
admitting that a few of the Scots' southrrn neighbours would consider 
them a little backwards, this seems more like an example of Google-cruft.

Ec