dump: n. 1. An undigested and voluminous mass of information
about a problem or the state of a system, especially one routed to
the slowest available output device (compare core dump), and most
especially one consisting of hex or octal runes describing the
byte-by-byte state of memory, mass storage, or some file. In elder
days, debugging was generally done by `groveling over' a dump (see
grovel); increasing use of high-level languages and interactive
debuggers has made such tedium uncommon, and the term `dump' now has
a faintly archaic flavor. 2. A backup. This usage is typical only
at large timesharing installations.
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