marbles

jargon (From the mainstream "lost his marbles") The minimum

needed to build your way further up some hierarchy of tools or

abstractions. After a bad system crash, you need to

determine if the machine has enough marbles to come up on its

own, or enough marbles to allow a rebuild from backups, or

if you need to rebuild from scratch. "This compiler doesn't

even have enough marbles to compile hello, world."

[Jargon File]

(1998-05-21)