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]