<jargon> 1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some
function but can't be used without some kind of front end.
Today we have, especially, "print engine": the guts of a
laser printer.
2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that does a
lot of noisy crunching, such as a "database engine", or
"search engine".
The hackish senses of "engine" are actually close to its
original, pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever
device, or instrument (the word is cognate to "ingenuity").
This sense had not been completely eclipsed by the modern
connotation of power-transducing machinery in Charles
Babbage's time, which explains why he named the
stored-program computer that he designed in 1844 the
"Analytical Engine".
[Jargon File]
(1996-05-31)
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