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engine n.
1. A piece of hardware that encapsulates some
function but can't be used without some kind of front end.
Today we have, especially, `print engine': the guts of a laser
printer. 2. An analogous piece of software; notionally, one that
does a lot of noisy crunching, such as a `database engine'.
The hacker senses of `engine' are actually close to its original,
pre-Industrial-Revolution sense of a skill, clever device, or
instrument (the word is cognate to `ingenuity'). This sense had
not been completely eclipsed by the modern connotation of
power-transducing machinery in Charles Babbage's time, which
explains why he named the stored-program computer that
he designed in 1844 the `Analytical Engine'.
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