It is popular with technical support staff who have to deal with lusers as part of their job, often metaphorically employing a LART (Luser Attitude Readjustment Tool, also known as a clue-by-four,[3] cluestick, or cluebat), meaning turning off the user's access to computer resources and the like.
The Jargon File states that the word was coined around 1975 at MIT,[4] although LUSER is visible in CTSS source code circa 1969 in subroutines involving spying on and killing users and deleting their files and directories.
Later, ITS also had the command "luser", which attempted to summon assistance from a list of designated helpers.
Although ITS ceased to be used in the mid-1990s, use of the term continued to spread, partly because in Unix-style computer operating systems, "user" designates all unprivileged accounts, while the superuser, or root, is the special user account used for system administration.
"root" is the conventional name of the user who has all rights or permissions (to all files and programs) in all modes (single- or multi-user).