person, humour A shadowy group of moustachioed hackers named

Eric first pinpointed as a sinister conspiracy by an infamous

talk.bizarre posting ca. 1986. This was doubtless influenced

by the numerous "Eric" jokes in the Monty Python oeuvre.

There do indeed seem to be considerably more moustachioed

Erics in hackerdom than the frequency of these three traits

can account for unless they are correlated in some arcane way.

Well-known examples include Eric Allman (of the "Allman

style" described under indent style), Erik Fair (co-author

of NNTP), Eric S. Raymond and about fifteen others. The

organisation line "Eric Conspiracy Secret Laboratories" now

emanates regularly from more than one site.