Wugga Wugga

Definitions

1. Onomatopoeia for a low, throbbing, irregular mechanical sound, especially the kind produced by disk drives thrashing or a fan bearing beginning to fail. The word is used diagnostically as much as descriptively: a machine that has started to go wugga wugga is understood to be in trouble, even when no instrument has yet registered a fault. It belongs to a small family of Jargon File terms that encode hardware experience as sound, alongside 'grind' for heavy disk activity and 'crunch' for sustained computation, from an era when the machine was audibly in the room with you.