engine

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 CharlesBabbage's time, which explains why he named the

stored-program computer that he designed in 1844 the

"Analytical Engine".

[Jargon File]

(1996-05-31)