/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]
Nearby terms:
WAIS « WAITS « wait state « waldo » walk » walking drives » walk off the end of
