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W
Wabbit
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Walk Off The End Of
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WAN (Wide Area Network)
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Wedged
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What's A Spline?
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Wheel Bit
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Wide Area Network
Wide Area Network (WAN)
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Widget n.
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WIMP Environment
Win
Win Big vi.
Win Win
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Window Shopping
Window SysIWYG
Windoze /win'dohz/
Winged Comments
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Wired equivalent privacy (WEP)
Wirehead /wi:r'hed/
Wireless Fidelity Alliance
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Wiretap warrant
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Within Epsilon Of
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WNINTEL
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Word Length
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World
World Wide Web (WWW)
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Worms
Wound Around The Axle
WPA
Wrap Around
Write
Write Access
Write Cycle Time
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Write Head
Write Protection Label
Write Up
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Write-Only Language
Write-Only Memory
Write-Protect Tab
Wrong Thing
Wugga Wugga
Wumpus
WWMCCS
WWW (World Wide Web)
WWW root
WYSIAYG
WYSIWYG
Wumpus
  • /wuhm'p*s/ n. The central monster (and, in many versions, the name) of a famous family of very early computer games called "Hunt The Wumpus", dating back at least to 1972 (several years before ADVENT) on the Dartmouth Time-Sharing System. The wumpus lived somewhere in a cave with the topology of an dodecahedron's edge/vertex graph (later versions supported other topologies, including an icosahedron and M"obius strip). The player started somewhere at random in the cave with five `crooked arrows'; these could be shot through up to three connected rooms, and would kill the wumpus on a hit (later versions introduced the wounded wumpus, which got very angry). Unfortunately for players, the movement necessary to map the maze was made hazardous not merely by the wumpus (which would eat you if you stepped on him) but also by bottomless pits and colonies of super bats that would pick you up and drop you at a random location (later versions added `anaerobic termites' that ate arrows, bat migrations, and earthquakes that randomly changed pit locations). This game appears to have been the first to use a non-random graph-structured map (as opposed to a rectangular grid like the even older Star Trek games). In this respect, as in the dungeon-like setting and its terse, amusing messages, it prefigured ADVENT and Zork and was directly ancestral to the latter (Zork acknowledged this heritage by including a super-bat colony). Today, a port is distributed with SunOS and as freeware for the Mac. A C emulation of the original Basic game is in circulation as freeware on the net.