waldo: /wol'doh/ n. [From Robert A. Heinlein's story "Waldo"]
1. A mechanical agent, such as a gripper arm, controlled by a human
limb. When these were developed for the nuclear industry in the
mid-1940s they were named after the invention described by Heinlein
in the story, which he wrote in 1942. Now known by the more generic
term `telefactoring', this technology is of intense interest to NASA
for tasks like space station maintenance. 2. At Harvard
(particularly by Tom Cheatham and students), this is used instead of
foobar as a metasyntactic variable and general nonsense word. See
foo, bar, foobar, quux.
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