While this has some meaning, its more a candidate for MD.
David Newton wrote:foo, bar, baz, plugh, xyzzy, etc. are all metasyntactic variables. (Although the Wikipedia article, inexplicably, has an entry for xyzzy and not plugh.)
For sure. While the Wikipedia article mentions foo, and cites Don Eastlake's April Fools RFC, even that shorts the history. See the Jargon file, I've got put a fairly old copy (~vintage early 80s) at
http://pfarrell.com/technotes/jarg1-81-MM-DD.txt
Its all out of MIT, which spun off most of (many?) the 60s and 70s computer companies near Boston. DEC (aka Digital Equipment) was home to a lot of serious hardware used for critical development of operating systems, so many of the folks at DEC were from MIT, bringing 'foo' and "bar" with them. Clearly the original meaning was from the Army's fubar, and its likely that many of the pioneers were GI Bill army folks at MIT, Harvard, UMass, and other Boston schools. Most of the early uses in the computer field used "foo", "bar" and "baz". in various combinations.
Interestingly that the Wikipedia article also fails to make the obvious jump into business schools, where nearly all cases talk about making Widgets, or Widget Corp. which are similarly metasyntactic nouns.