[ale] cruft

[Sean Kilpatrick]

This is a word I have used for years.

When I used it tonight at dinner my wife asked me what it meant.
And, as we are both liberal arts types, she wanted to know its origin.
So I grabbed the OED (Oxford English Dictionary), Volume "C" only to 
discover that the word isn't there.  It also isn't in my (weighty) 
American Heritage Dictionary.
WTF

But Google is your friend. :)

This word comes to us out of MIT, where it first appeared in the club 
dictionary of the (MIT) Tech Model Railroad Club in 1959!
 It -- perhaps -- arose out of MIT's Cruft Laboratory (c. 1915) which was 
used as a radar lab during WW II.

So how many knew the origin of this word?  And its meaning: detritus, left 
over crud, especially these days leftover code that leads to dependency 
hell?

Sean
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