under the hood

   [hot-rodder talk]

   1.  Used  to  introduce  the  underlying  implementation of a product
   (hardware, software, or idea). Implies that the implementation is not
   intuitively  obvious from the appearance, but the speaker is about to
   enable  the  listener to {grok} it. "Let's now look under the hood to
   see how ...."

   2.  Can  also  imply that the implementation is much simpler than the
   appearance  would indicate: "Under the hood, we are just fork/execing
   the shell."

   3.  Inside  a  chassis,  as in "Under the hood, this baby has a 40MHz
   68030!"

[glossary]