crawling horror

jargon Ancient crufty hardware or software that is kept

obstinately alive by forces beyond the control of the hackers

at a site. Like dusty deck or gonkulator, but connotes

that the thing described is not just an irritation but an

active menace to health and sanity. "Mostly we code new stuff

in C, but they pay us to maintain one big Fortran II

application from nineteen-sixty-X that's a real crawling

horror."

Compare WOMBAT.

[Jargon File]

(1994-12-01)