"foo" origin

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <15080002 at hpfijdw.HP.COM> jdw at hpfijdw.HP.COM (Jeff Wood) writes:
>In my lengthy career in Computer Science at the University,
>many professors used the acronym "foo".  None of which knew
>its origins.  Examples of code were called "foo.c", functions
>were called "int foo ()".  Do any of you gurus from way
>back know what this stands for????

Yes -- "foo" has two contribution origins.
The obvious one is "phooey" and related terms.
The more interesting one is FUBAR, which you can find in a dictionary.
Examples of filenames were often given as "FOO.BAR" etc.
Some sites adopted a convention that files called "foo" something
("foo files") were junk files that could be deleted without qualms.
Undoubtedly there is more to the history of "foo" than this,
but I hope that suffices.