When a Linux system starts up, it calculates the processor speed. (I don’t know why. I can’t imagine timing loops going on in the kernel.)
In the early days of ‘mini’ computers, manufacturers invented the term “MIPS” — “million instructions per second” — for marketing purposes. “Or processor does more MIPS than yours, nyaah nyaah nyaah.”
Commentators pointed out that the number of instructions per second meant different things on different processors. One company’s machine could easily be faster doing real work than another’s which had a higher MIPS rating. One response was to try to compare speed to a specific standard, for example “VAX MIPS” after Digital Equipment Corporation’s VAX mini.
More cynical observers simply redefined MIPS to mean “meaningless indication of processor speed”.
Another feature of that heady period of computer innovation was the language. I don’t mean Pascal and Ada; I refer to the spoken language of nerds as documented in the “Hacker’s Dictionary“. There were useful terms. For example, software might not be working because it is “broken” — contains a bug — or it might not be working because it is “brain-damaged” — designed wrongly from the start.
I still tend to use some of the words (in my head, at least), one of which is “bogus”. In normal English, it means counterfeit or fake, but in Hacker there’s a wider meaning, including useless or incorrect. “Man, your hashing algorithm is totally bogus.”
(I think I remember Bill and Ted using “bogus” in the Hacker sense. This and other Hacker terms leaked into Californian slacker culture. Excellent!)
The Linux indication of processor speed, printed out on startup, is “bogomips”.
(I’m trying to resurrect a tiny laptop I pulled out of a skip a number of years ago. A 300MHz Mobile Pentium MMX processor, coming in at 600.84 bogomips. In comparison, my everyday computer has two processor cores, each rated at 4991.12 bogomips.)
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