SEX

SEX /seks/  [Sun Users' Group & elsewhere] n. 1. Software
   EXchange.  A technique invented by the blue-green algae hundreds of
   millions of years ago to speed up their evolution, which had been
   terribly slow up until then.  Today, SEX parties are popular among
   hackers and others (of course, these are no longer limited to
   exchanges of genetic software).  In general, SEX parties are a
   {Good Thing}, but unprotected SEX can propagate a {virus}.
   See also {pubic directory}.  2. The rather Freudian mnemonic
   often used for Sign EXtend, a machine instruction found in the
   PDP-11 and many other architectures.  The RCA 1802 chip used in the
   early Elf and SuperElf personal computers had a `SEt X register'
   SEX instruction, but this seems to have had little folkloric
   impact.

   DEC's engineers nearly got a PDP-11 assembler that used the
   `SEX' mnemonic out the door at one time, but (for once)
   marketing wasn't asleep and forced a change.  That wasn't the last
   time this happened, either.  The author of "The Intel 8086
   Primer", who was one of the original designers of the 8086, noted
   that there was originally a `SEX' instruction on that
   processor, too.  He says that Intel management got cold feet and
   decreed that it be changed, and thus the instruction was renamed
   `CBW' and `CWD' (depending on what was being extended).
   Amusingly, the Intel 8048 (the microcontroller used in IBM PC
   keyboards) is also missing straight `SEX' but has logical-or
   and logical-and instructions `ORL' and `ANL'.

   The Motorola 6809, used in the U.K.'s `Dragon 32' personal
   computer, actually had an official `SEX' instruction; the 6502
   in the Apple II with which it competed did not.  British hackers
   thought this made perfect mythic sense; after all, it was commonly
   observed, you could (on some theoretical level) have sex with a
   dragon, but you can't have sex with an apple.