foobar

[very common] Another widely used {metasyntactic variable}; see {foo} for etymology. Probably originally propagated through DECsystem manuals by Digital Equipment Corporation ({DEC}) in 1960s and early 1970s; confirmed sightings there go back to 1972. Hackers do not generally use this to mean {FUBAR} in either the slang or jargon sense. See also {Fred Foobar}. In RFC1639, "FOOBAR" was made an abbreviation for "FTP Operation Over Big Address Records", but this was an obvious {backronym}. It has been plausibly suggested that "foobar" spread among early computer engineers partly because of FUBAR and partly because "foo bar" parses in electronics techspeak as an inverted foo signal; if a digital signal is active low (so a negative or zero-voltage condition represents a "1") then a horizontal bar is commonly placed over the signal label.

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