Camino Real

El Camino Real (the royal highway in the Spanish language) was the name of a series of pre-automobile highways linking the various New World colonies of Spain.

El Camino Real in California

This is historically the road built to connect Catholic missions in California during the Spanish colonial era.

Many streets throughout California today bear the name of this famous road, often with little factual relation to the original. Those that do follow portions of the path of the original highway are often marked with distinctive bells as a historical marker - however in many cases, bells that were once placed have disappeared as victims of vandalism or theft. The original highway runs from Sonoma to what is now Presidio Park in San Diego.

Navigation on the San Francisco Peninsula is usually done relative to El Camino Real, which defines logical north and south even though it isn't really north-south in many places. Visitors to the area are often confounded by the street numbers on El Camino Real, which reset (often to 100) when each new city is entered (roughly every two or three miles). El Camino Real runs right past Santa Clara University and Stanford University and so is familiar to hackers.

Camino Real

Camino Real is the title of a play by Tennessee Williams first produced on Broadway in 1953.

Computer Usage (from the Jargon File)

In the FORTRAN language, a 'real' quantity is a number typically precise to seven significant digits, and a `double precision' quantity is a larger floating-point number, precise to perhaps fourteen significant digits (other languages have similar 'real' types). When a hacker from MIT, Guy L. Steele, visited Stanford in 1976, he remarked what a long road El Camino Real was. Making a pun on 'real', he started calling it 'El Camino Double Precision' -- but when he was told that the road was hundreds of miles long (resulting in extremely large street address numbers), he renamed it 'El Camino Bignum' ("bignum" is LISP jargon for an indefinite-precision integer), and that name has stuck.

In recent years, the synonym "El Camino Virtual" has been reported as an alternate at IBM and Amdahl sites in the Silicon Valley. Mathematically literate hackers in the Valley have also been heard to refer to some major cross-street intersecting El Camino Real as "El Camino Imaginary". One popular theory is that the intersection is located near Moffett Field - where they keep all those complex planes.