1. Name used in many places (DEC, IBM, and others) for the asterisk ("*") character (AsCII 0101010). This may derive from the "squashed-bug" appearance of the asterisk on many early line printers. 2. Name used by some MIT people for the "#" character (AsCII 35). 3. (Rochester Institute of Technology) The feature key on a Mac (same asalt). 4. An obsolete name used by some people for the stanford/ITsextended AsCII circle-x character. This character is also called "blobby" and "frob", among other names it issometimes used by mathematicians as a notation for "tensor product". 5. An obsolete name for the semi-mythical stanford {extended AsCII} circle-plus character. see also AsCII. [Jargon File] (1995-01-19)