Q. What's a feep?
A. FEEP is the Fédération
des Établissements d'Enseignement
Privés. It is Field
Emission Electric Propulsion,
a type of thruster technology. It's also this guy's website.
Q. No, what is it, really?
A.
feep: /feep/
1. n. The soft electronic "bell"
sound of a display terminal (except for a VT-52); a
beep (in fact, the microcomputer world seems to
prefer
beep).
2. vi. To cause the display to
make a feep sound. ASR-33s (the original TTYs) do
not feep; they have mechanical bells that ring.
Alternate forms:
beep, "bleep", or just about anything
suitably onomatopoeic. (Jeff MacNelly, in his comic
strip Shoe, uses the word "eep" for sounds
made by computer terminals and video games; this is
perhaps the closest written approximation yet.) The
term "breedle" was sometimes heard at SAIL, where
the terminal bleepers are not particularly soft
(they sound more like the musical equivalent of a
raspberry or Bronx cheer; for a close
approximation, imagine the sound of a Star Trek
communicator's beep lasting for five seconds). The
"feeper" on a VT-52 has been compared to the sound
of a '52 Chevy stripping its gears. See also
ding.
From the Jargon File
version 4.4.7, 29 Dec 2003
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Q. Are you going to tell me why this domain is
named "feep.org"?
A. Okay, fine, yes. It's a nice, short,
memorable domain name, and one of the only reasonable
ones available when I registered it way back in 2000. Or
maybe the reason is much more sinister.
Q. Oh, hey, nice feep.org logo.
A. That's not a question. And yeah, it's my handwriting.
© 2000-2013 Joshua Myles
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