Notes on  FOOBAR 

[very common] Another widely used METASYNTACTIC VARIABLE; see FOO
for etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem
manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) in 1960s and early
1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do not
generally use this to mean FUBAR in either the slang or jargon
sense. See also FRED FOOBAR. In RFC1639, "FOOBAR" was made an
abbreviation for "FTP Operation Over Big Address Records", but this
was an obvious BACKRONYM. It has been plausibly suggested that
"foobar" spread among early computer engineers partly because of
FUBAR and partly because "foo bar" parses in electronics techspeak as
an inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a
negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then a
horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label.

J3N Research Labs

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