MYSTERIOUS ORIGINS
OF TECH TERMS
OF TECH TERMS
Decoding
the genesis of some common technology terms that have been downloaded into our
collective hardware
Bluetooth
The 10th century King Harald Gormsson is known
as much for uniting all of Scandinavia as for having one gnarly tooth so rotten
that it looked blue. Hence he earned the nickname Bluetooth. His kitschy
moniker inspired Jim Kardach, a software developer from Intel, to pitch
Bluetooth as the name for a single wireless standard that Intel, Ericsson,
Nokia, and IBM were developing together in 1997. The name wasn't a huge hit but
since the other names were worse (like Flirt) Bluetooth was used as a code name
for the project. All four companies agreed on PAN (personal area networking)
which was later abandoned due to web optimisation issues, and the product was
released as Bluetooth out of sheer desperation.
Google
If you find Google to be a calculating
corporation, you're not far off. The word Google is actually a play on the
mathematical term “googol“, a number represented by the numeral 1 followed by
100 zeros. The name acts as a metaphor for founders Larry Page and Sergey
Brin's mission to organise a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.
Spam
Spam for years was known as canned mystery meat
worthy of mockery. So much so, that British surreal comedy group Monty Python
did a sketch about it in which the word spam was repeated over and over by a
waitress, customers and even a group of Vikings. Many Monty Python fans were
also early MUD, Prodigy and AOL chatroom frequenters who used AOL chatroom
frequenters who used the word “spam“ to refer to people who created macros to
say the same thing over and over again, clogging up chatrooms. So, when repetitive
masses of unwanted email began circulating in the early 90s, people familiar
with the interwebs began dubbing it as spam.
Podcast
Logically, the word is a hybrid of the words
“pod“ -from iPod -and “broadcast“. The term “podcasting“ was merely a suggested
term for the new technology in an article written by The Guardian's Ben
Hammersley in 2004, along with the other contenders like “audioblogging“ and
“GuerillaMedia“. But due to the popularity of the iPod, which was released only
three years earlier in 2001, “podcast“ had an appealing snap that stuck.
Cookies
Cookies are used to store a user's information
-like a username and password. For instance, when you click the “Remember me“
button, that's a cookie. The fact that it's a pretty sweet treat is not the
reason it's called a cookie, though. The term cookie is actually a comparison
with a fortune cookie. Early programmers thought there was a pretty strong
similarity between a program that saves information within its code and the
Chinese staple that saves fortunes within its stale walls.
Stream
When we used to think of a stream we thought of
a narrow river or a continuous flow. But today when we think of “stream“ we
think Netflix, which allows transmitting or receiving data over a steady,
continuous flow, hence the name. The first use of streaming as a verb was in
'20s, when a system for the transmission and distribution of signals over
electrical lines became the basis for what later evolved into elevator music,
which would stream a continuous soundtrack to commercial customers without the
use of radio.So, think of Muzak as the original Pandora.
Wiki
“Wiki wiki“ in Hawaiian means “quick“.
Wiki's creator, Ward Cunningham, decided that a
wiki would be a quick, simple way to access multiple sites and get information.
Bug
In 1947, Grace Hopper, a pioneer of computer
programming, was working on the Harvard Mark II computer when work was
suspended due to the presence of a moth stuck in the relay. When she remarked
they were “debugging“ the system to get it started again, the term “bug“ in
regards to computer glitches was born. The moth she found can still be seen on
display in the Smithsonian Museum.
Tweet
When Twitter launched in July 2006, “twittering“
was used to describe the act of writing on Twitter.The verb along with the
phrase “Post a Twitter Update,“ (that has 21 space-killing characters!) felt
clunky, especially to software developer Craig Hockenberry. His frustration led
to the invention of Twitterific, a Twitter app that offered a different user
experience. One of Hockenberry's goals with Twitterific was to hatch up a few
one-syllable nouns and verbs for the app, including the word “twit“ instead of
“twittering“ in 2007. When Twitter developer Blaine Cook noticed “twit“ being
used on Twitterific, he suggested the word “tweet“ to Hockenberry instead, and
Twitterific embraced it quicker than a scandal trend on Twitter. Twitter,
however, didn't adopt the term “tweet“ until June 2008.
Hack
The word's context
of messing with machinery originated at MIT in 1955 where the notes of a Tech
Model Railroad Club state that “Mr Eccles requests that anyone working or
hacking on the electrical system turn the power off to avoid fuse blowing“.
Then in 1975, the word “hacker“ appeared in The Jargon File, a glossary for computer
programmers, with eight definitions. The last, and only negative entry, stated
that a hacker was, “A malicious meddler who tries to discover sensitive
information by poking around“.Of course, this definition was the most popular
amongst the media and in 1990, when The New York Times used it three times in
an article about Kevin Poulson (aka Dark Dante) and Robert Tappan Morris
(creator of the Morris Worm) and its negative connotation as a digital
trespasser was coded into our lexicon.
404
As you might assume,
the phrase “404 Not Found Error“ is merely a code. When communicating via HTTP,
a server is required to respond to a request -like you typing
OfficeSuppliesForGuys.
com into a browser
-with a numeric response, or a code (404), and an optional human readable
reason phrase (“not found“). In the code 404, the first digit 4 indicates a
client error, such as a mistyped URL (i.e. OrificeSuppliesForGuys.
com). The next two
digits, “04“ indicate the specific error encountered, which is why that site
wasn't found.
Mouse
When Douglas C
Engelbart, a 25-year-old whippersnapper, entered the computing world, computers
were the size of a room and could only be accessed by one person at a time. It
was convoluted and Engelbart's frustrations led to the creation of, among other
things, the mouse, which he debuted during what is dubbed “the mother of all
demos“ in 1968 at a computing conference in San Francisco, and went mainstream
a couple of decades later with the famous Macintosh personal computer. The name
“mouse“ for the device came to be because the term CAT was used to describe the
cursor on a screen and it seemed like the cursor was chasing the tailed desktop
device.
ETM18JAN15
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