RTM
/R·T·M/
[Usenet: abbreviation for ‘Read The Manual’] Politer variant of RTFM.
Robert Tappan Morris, perpetrator of the great Internet worm of 1988 (see Great Worm); villain to many, naive hacker gone wrong to a few. Morris claimed that the worm that brought the Internet to its knees was a benign experiment that got out of control as the result of a coding error. After the storm of negative publicity that followed this blunder, Morris’s username on ITS was hacked from RTM to RTFM.