RE:foobar

[Andrew Agno <agno@AI.SRI.COM>]

Richardson, Martin writes:
 > Does anyone know where foobar originates from, and its meaning?

Check the latest version of the Jargon Dictionary (for example at:
http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/jargon/html/index.html)

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 coded so that a positive voltage or high
 current condition represents a "1", then a horizontal bar is commonly 
 placed over the signal label.

Also check foo and bar.