Cruft is jargon for anything that is left over, redundant and getting in the way. It is used particularly for superseded and unused technical and electronic hardware and useless, superfluous or dysfunctional elements in computer software.
Around 1958, the term was used in the sense of "garbage" by students frequenting the MIT Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC). In the 1959 edition of the club's dictionary, it was defined as "that which magically amounds in the Clubroom just before you walk in to clean up. In other words, rubbage". Its author Peter Samson later explained that this was meant in the sense of "detritus, that which needs to be swept up and thrown out. The dictionary has no definition for 'crufty,' a word I didn't hear until some years later".
The origin of the term is uncertain, but it may be derived from Harvard University's Cruft Laboratory (built in 1915 as a gift from a donor named Harriet Otis Cruft), which was the Harvard Physics Department's radar lab during World War II. As late as the early 1990s, unused technical equipment could be seen stacked in front of Cruft Hall's windows. According to students, if a place filled with useless machinery is called Cruft Hall, the machinery itself must be cruft. This image of "discarded technical clutter" quickly migrated from hardware to software. Cruft may also be a play on the archaic medial "s", rendering "crust" as "cruſt". In the TMRC dictionary, the relation to the term "crud" (dirt, crap) is pointed out by humorously defining the better known word (crud) by the more obscure one (cruft).
Cruft is poor quality computing material.
Cruft may also be:
In the gleaming nightfall we can watch the light retreat.
Its rays slither eastward, like snakes along the grass,
As it leaves us to ourselves.
Woods of tall trees
Old, deformed and barren - obscuring the sun -
Red and tired
From working its way up from life giver
To massive hydrogen bomb
We can't see the sun,
But we can see the god rays surrounding the trees
And brief dim flickers of light shining through them.
These are rays from a god that is long dead.
It's our final night in this place.
There is no tomorrow.