tourist information

Information in an on-line display that is not immediately

useful, but contributes to a viewer's gestalt of what's going

on with the software or hardware behind it. Whether a given

piece of info falls in this category depends partly on what

the user is looking for at any given time. The "bytes free"

information at the bottom of an MS-DOS "dir" display is

tourist information; so (most of the time) is the TIME

information in a Unix "ps(1)" display.

[Jargon File]