funny money

Notional units of computing time and/or storage handed to

students at the beginning of a computer course; also called

"play money" or "purple money" (in implicit opposition to real

or "green" money).

In New Zealand and Germany the odd usage "paper money" has

been recorded; in Germany, the particularly amusing synonym

"transfer ruble" commemorates the funny money used for trade

between COMECON countries back when the Soviet Bloc still

existed.

When your funny money ran out, your account froze and you

needed to go to a professor to get more. Fortunately, the

plunging cost of time-sharing cycles has made this less

common. The amounts allocated were almost invariably too

small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide by with

minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to

small-scale black markets in bootlegged computer accounts. By

extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind used

as a resource-allocation hack within a system.

[Jargon File]