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funny money: n. 1. Notional ‘dollar’ units of computing time and/or
storage handed to students at the beginning of a computer course; also
called play money or purple money (in implicit opposition to real or
green money). In New Zealand and
Germany the odd usage paper money has
been recorded; in Germany, the particularly amusing synonym transfer ruble commemorates the funny money
used for trade between COMECON countries back when the Soviet Bloc still
existed. When your funny money ran out, your account froze and you needed
to go to a professor to get more. Fortunately, the plunging cost of
timesharing cycles has made this less common. The amounts allocated were
almost invariably too small, even for the non-hackers who wanted to slide
by with minimum work. In extreme cases, the practice led to small-scale
black markets in bootlegged computer accounts. 2. By extension, phantom money or quantity tickets of any kind used
as a resource-allocation hack within a system. Antonym: real money.
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