List of computer term etymologies

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.

This is a list of the origins of computer-related terms or terms used in the computing world (i.e., a list of computer term

computer software
.

Names of many computer terms, especially computer applications, often relate to the function they perform, e.g., a

machine language
). However, there are other terms with less obvious origins, which are of etymological interest. This article lists such terms.

A

  • ABEND – originally from an IBM System/360 error message, short for "abnormal end". Jokingly reinterpreted as German Abend ("evening"), because "it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day."[1]
  • Ada – named after Ada Lovelace, who is considered by many to be the first programmer.
  • Apache – originally chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache. It was suggested that the name was appropriate, as Apache began as a series of patches to code written for NCSA's HTTPd daemon. The result was "a patchy" server.[2]

B

computer bug, a moth trapped in a relay of the Harvard Mark II

C

Computer room at Dryden Flight Research Center, 1949
  • C – a programming language.
Dennis Ritchie, having improved on the B language, named his creation New B. He later renamed it C. (See also D).
C++ creator
variable
it is appended to, thus C++ would increment the value of C.
The term was coined by web browser programmer Lou Montulli after the term "magic cookies" used by Unix programmers. The term "magic cookie" in turn derives from "fortune cookie", a cookie with an embedded message.
  • Cursor (user interface) - Cursor is Latin for 'runner.' A cursor is the name given to the transparent slide engraved with a hairline that is used for marking a point on a slide rule. The term was then transferred to computers through analogy.

D

  • D – a programming language.
Designed by Walter Bright as an improved C, avoiding many of the design problems of C (e.g., extensive pointer manipulation, unenforced array boundaries, etc.).
  • daemon – a process in an operating system that runs in the background.
It is not an acronym for Disk And Execution Monitor: according to the original team that introduced the concept, the use of the word daemon was inspired by the Maxwell's demon of physics and thermodynamics (an imaginary agent which helped sort molecules with differing velocities and worked tirelessly in the background)[15] The term was embraced, and possibly popularized,[citation needed] by the Unix operating systems which supported multiple background processes: various local (and later Internet) services were provided by daemons. This is exemplified by the BSD mascot, John Lasseter's drawing of a friendly imp.
  • Dashboard - Originally, the word dashboard applied to a barrier of wood or leather fixed at the front of a horse-drawn carriage or sleigh to protect the driver from mud or other debris "dashed up" (thrown up) by the horses' hooves.[1] The first known use of the term (hyphenated as dash-board, and applied to sleighs) dates from 1847.[2] Commonly these boards did not perform any additional function other than providing a convenient handhold for ascending into the driver's seat, or a small clip with which to secure the reins when not in use.
  • Debian – a Linux distribution.
A
portmanteau of the names Ian Murdock, the Debian Project creator, and Debra Lynn, Ian's then girlfriend and future wife.[16][17]
  • default – an initial value for a variable or user setting.
The original meaning of the word 'default' is 'failure to fulfill an obligation'. The obligation here is to provide an input that is required by a program. In the early days of programming, if an input value was missing, or 'null', the program would almost certainly crash. This is often to do with variable 'typing' – for example, a simple calculation program would expect a number as an input: any other type of input such as a text string or even a null (no value), would make any mathematical operation such as multiplication impossible. In order to guard against this possibility, programmers defined initial values that would be used if the user *defaulted* or failed to fulfill the obligation of providing the correct input value. Over time, the term 'default' has come to refer to the initial value itself.

E

According to
luminiferous ether"—the "substance" that was widely believed to be the medium through which electromagnetic radiation propagated in the late 19th century—and "net", short for "network".[18] When the networking team would describe data flowing into the network infrastructure, they would routinely describe it as data packets going "up into the ether".[19]

F
Les Earnest wrote the finger program in 1971 to provide for users who wanted information about other users on a network or system. According to Earnest, it was named after the act of pointing, because it "bypassed the need to point to a user ID and ask, 'Who is that?'"[20][21]
  • metasyntactic variables.[22]

G

Gentoo Linux is named after the penguin
Named after a variety of penguin, the universal Linux mascot.
In the project's initial README file, Linus Torvalds wrote that "'git' can mean anything, depending on your mood", and offers several definitions:[23]
  • A random three-letter combination which is pronounceable and not a preexisting
    Unix command
  • British English slang, meaning a stupid or contemptible person
  • An acronym for "global information tracker" (when it works)
  • An acronym for "goddamn idiotic truckload of sh*t" (when it breaks)
When asked about the origin of the name, Torvalds jokingly stated, "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself."[24]
antelopes resembling cattle. The founder of the GNU project Richard Stallman liked the name because of the humour associated with its pronunciation (officially, /ɡnuː/ ⓘ),[25][26] and was also influenced by The Gnu Song,[27] by Flanders and Swann, which is sung by a gnu. It is also an early example of a recursive acronym: "GNU's Not Unix".[28]
The name started as an exaggerated boast about the amount of information the search engine would be able to search. It was originally named '
Milton Sirotta
, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner, in 1938 during a discussion of large numbers and exponential notation.
  • Gopher – an early protocol for distributing documents over a network. Declined in favor of the World Wide Web.
The name was coined by developer Farhad Anklesaria, as a play on gofer, an assistant who fetches things, and a gopher, who digs, as if through nested hierarchies.[29] The name was also inspired by Goldy Gopher, the mascot for the University of Minnesota where the protocol was developed.
  • command line
    utility
The name comes from a command in the Unix text editor
ed that takes the form g/re/p meaning search globally for a regular expression and print lines where instances are found.[30]
"Grep" like "Google" is often used as a verb, meaning "to search".

H
Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. When Sabeer Bhatia came up with the business plan for the mail service, he tried all kinds of names ending in 'mail' and finally settled for Hotmail as it included the letters "HTML" – the markup language used to write web pages. It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.

I

  • i18n
     – short for "internationalization".
"18" is for the number of letters between the i and the n. Related, less common terms include l10n (for localization), g11n (for globalization) and a11y (for accessibility).
ICQ is not an
initialism. It is a play on the phrase "I seek you" or "Internet seek you" (similar to CQ in ham radio usage).[citation needed
]

J

  • JSPs
    .
Jakarta was the name of the conference room at Sun where most of the meetings between Sun and Apache took place. The conference room was most likely named after Jakarta, the capital city of Indonesia, which is located on the northwest coast of the island of Java.
Named after
Oak Technologies, so the developers had to choose another name shortly before release. Other suggested names were "WebRunner", "DNA", and "Silk".[31]
It was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape under the name "Mocha", which was later renamed to "LiveScript", and finally to "JavaScript".[32] The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. JavaScript was first introduced and deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3 in December 1995. The naming has caused confusion, giving the impression that the language is a spin-off of Java, and it has been characterized by many as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web-programming language.[33]

K

When created by programmers at
MIT in the 1970s, they wanted a name that suggested high security for the project, so they named it after Kerberos, in Greek mythology the three-headed dog guarding the gates of Hades. The reference to Greek mythology is most likely because Kerberos was developed as part of Project Athena.[citation needed
]

L

  • Linux – an operating system kernel, and the common name for many of the operating systems which use it.
Linux creator
Ari Lemmke encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be easily downloaded. Ari gave Linus a directory named linux on his FTP server
, as he did not like the name Freax.
Apple stated that Lisa was an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture; however, it is often inferred that the machine was originally named after the daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and that this acronym was invented later to fit the name. Accordingly, two humorous suggestions for expanding the acronym included Let's Invent Some Acronyms, and Let's Invent Silly Acronyms.
A play on the terms "software" and "hardware". Coined in 1966, the word indicates that sometimes the computer problem is not with the computer itself, but with the user.

M

McIntosh
From McIntosh, a popular type of apple.

N

  • Nerd – A colloquial term for a computer person, especially an obsessive, singularly focused one. Originally created by Dr. Seuss from his book If I Ran the Zoo.

O

  • relational database management system
    (RDBMS).
Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). The code name for the project was Oracle (the CIA evidently saw this as a system that would give answers to all questions). The project was designed to use the newly written SQL database language from IBM. The project eventually was terminated but they decided to finish what they started and bring it to the world. They kept the name Oracle and created the RDBMS engine.

P

  • video arcade
    game.
The term comes from paku paku which is a Japanese onomatopoeia used for noisy eating; similar to chomp chomp. The game was released in Japan with the name Puck-Man, and released in the US with the name Pac-Man, fearing that kids may deface a Puck-Man cabinet by changing the P to an F.
  • Patch – A set of changes to a computer program or its supporting data designed to update, fix, or improve it.
Historically, software suppliers distributed patches on
punched cards
, expecting the recipient to cut out the indicated part of the original tape (or deck), and patch in (hence the name) the replacement segment
The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association is an international standards body that defines and promotes standards for expansion devices such as
form factor
used on notebook computers. A twist on the acronym is People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms.
The fifth microprocessor in the
80x86 series. It would have been named i586 or 80586, but Intel decided to name it Pentium (penta = five) after it lost a trademark infringement lawsuit against AMD due to a judgment that numbers like "286", "386", and "486" cannot be trademarked. According to Intel, Pentium conveys a meaning of strength, like titanium.[citation needed
]
Since some early Pentium chips contained a mathematical precision error, it has been jokingly suggested that the reason for the chip being named Pentium rather than 586 was that Intel chips would calculate 486 + 100 = 585.99999948.
Perl was originally named Pearl, after the "pearl of great price" of Matthew 13:46.[citation needed] Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, wanted to give the language a short name with positive connotations and claims to have looked at (and rejected) every three- and four-letter word in the dictionary. He even thought of naming it after his wife Gloria. Before the language's official release Wall discovered that there was already a programming language named Pearl, and changed the spelling of the name. Although the original manuals suggested the backronyms "Practical Extraction and Report Language" and "Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister", these were intended humorously.[citation needed]
Originally named "Personal Home Page Tools" by creator Rasmus Lerdorf, it was rewritten by developers Zeev Suraski and Andi Gutmans who gave it the recursive name "PHP Hypertext Preprocessor". Lerdorf currently insists the name should not be thought of as standing for anything, for he selected "Personal Home Page" as the name when he did not foresee PHP evolving into a general-purpose programming language.
  • e-mail client
    .
Many people believe that Pine stands for "Pine Is Not Elm". However, one of its original authors, Laurence Lundblade, insists this was never the case and that it started off simply as a word and not an acronym; his first choice of a backronym for pine would be "Pine Is Nearly Elm". Over time it was changed to mean Program for Internet News and E-mail.[34]
  • ping – a computer network tool used to detect hosts.
The author of ping, Mike Muuss, named it after the pulses of sound made by a sonar called a "ping". Later Dave Mills provided the backronym "Packet Internet Groper".
Named after the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus.[35]

R

  • GUI widget
    used for making selections.
Radio buttons got their name from the preset buttons in radio receivers. When one used to select preset stations on a radio receiver physically instead of electronically, depressing one preset button would pop out whichever other button happened to be pushed in.
Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) by his grandfather while at college. People would turn to him to solve their problems, and he was referred to as "that guy in the red hat". He lost the cap and had to search for it desperately. The manual of the beta version of Red Hat Linux had an appeal to readers to return the hat if found by anyone.
  • public key cryptography
    .
Based on the surnames of the authors of this algorithm –
Len Adleman
.

S

The name samba comes from inserting two vowels into the name of the standard protocol that Microsoft Windows network file system use, named Server Message Block (SMB). The author searched a dictionary using grep for words containing S M and B in that order; the only matches were Samba and Salmonberry.
  • shareware – coined by Bob Wallace to describe his word processor PC-Write in early 1983.[citation needed] Before this Jim Knopf (also known as Jim Button) and Andrew Fluegelman called their distributed software "user supported software" and "freeware" respectively, but it was Wallace's terminology that prevailed.
  • e-mail
    .
The term spam is derived from the
SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where everything on the menu includes SPAM
luncheon meat. While a customer plaintively asks for some kind of food without SPAM in it, the server reiterates the SPAM-filled menu. Soon, a chorus of Vikings join in with a song: "SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, SPAM, lovely SPAM, wonderful SPAM", over and over again, drowning out all conversation.
Swing was the code-name of the project that developed the new graphic components (the successor of AWT). It was named after swing, a style of dance band jazz that was popularized in the 1930s and unexpectedly revived in the 1990s. Although an unofficial name for the components, it gained popular acceptance with the use of the word in the package names for the Swing API, which begin with javax.swing.[citation needed]

T

Tomcat was the code-name for the JSDK 2.1[clarification needed] project inside Sun.[citation needed] Tomcat started off as a servlet specification implementation by James Duncan Davidson who was a software architect at Sun. Davidson had initially hoped that the project would be made open-source, and since most open-source projects had O'Reilly books on them with an animal on the cover, he wanted to name the project after an animal. He came up with Tomcat since he reasoned the animal represented something that could take care of and fend for itself.
  • troff – a document processing system for Unix.
Troff stands for "typesetter roff", although many people have speculated that it actually means "Times roff" because of the use of the
roff, an earlier formatting program, whose name is a contraction of "run off".[citation needed
]
  • Trojan horse – a malicious program that is disguised as legitimate software.
The term is derived from the classical myth of the Trojan Horse. Analogously, a Trojan horse appears innocuous (or even to be a gift), but in fact is a vehicle for bypassing security.
Linus Torvalds, the creator of Linux, suggested a penguin mascot because he "likes penguins a lot", and wanted Linux to be associated with something "kind of goofy and fun".[36] The logo was originally created by Larry Ewing in 1996 as an entry in a Linux Logo competition. The name Tux was contributed by James Hughes, who suggested "(T)orvolds (U)ni(X) — TUX!"[37]

U

  • Canonical Ltd.
Derived from
ubuntu
, a South African ideology.
When
MIT project, Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, soon joined by Dennis Ritchie, wrote a simpler version of the operating system for a spare DEC minicomputer, allegedly found in a corridor. They needed an OS to run the game Space Travel
, which had been compiled under MULTICS. The new OS was named UNICS – UNiplexed Information and Computing System by Brian Kernighan.

V
Initialism for visual, a command in the ex editor which helped users to switch to the visual mode from the ex mode. the first version was written by Bill Joy at UC Berkeley.
Acronym for Vi improved after Vim added several features over the vi editor. Vim however had started out as an imitation of Vi and was expanded as Vi imitation.
The term virus was first used as a technical computer science term by
Len Adleman with coining it. Although Cohen's use of virus may have been the first academic use, it had been in the common parlance long before that. A mid-1970s science fiction novel by David Gerrold, When H.A.R.L.I.E. was One, includes a description of a fictional computer program named VIRUS that worked just like a virus (and was countered by a program named ANTIBODY). The term "computer virus" also appears in the comic book "Uncanny X-Men
" No. 158, published in 1982. A computer virus's basic function is to insert its own executable code into that of other existing executable files, literally making it the electronic equivalent to the biological virus, the basic function of which is to insert its genetic information into that of the invaded cell, forcing the cell to reproduce the virus.

W
Coined by Ward Cunningham, the creator of the wiki concept, who named them for the "wiki wiki" or "quick" shuttle buses at Honolulu Airport. Wiki wiki was the first Hawaiian term he learned on his first visit to the islands. The airport counter agent directed him to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.
The name 'worm' was taken from a 1970s
John Brunner entitled The Shockwave Rider
. The book describes programs known as "tapeworms" which spread through a network for the purpose of deleting data. Researchers writing an early paper on experiments in distributed computing noted the similarities between their software and the program described by Brunner, and adopted that name.
  • WYSIWYG – describes a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product.
Acronym for What You See Is What You Get, the phrase was originated by a newsletter published by Arlene and Jose Ramos, named WYSIWYG. It was created for the emerging Pre-Press industry going electronic in the late 1970s.

X

X derives its name as a successor to a pre-1983 window system named the W Window System.

Y

Yahoo!'s history site says the name is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle", but some remember that in its early days (mid-1990s), when Yahoo! lived on a server named akebono.stanford.edu, it was glossed as "Yet Another Hierarchical Object Organizer." The word "Yahoo!" was originally invented by Jonathan Swift and used in his book Gulliver's Travels. It represents a person who is repulsive in appearance and action and is barely human. Yahoo! founders Jerry Yang and David Filo selected the name because they considered themselves yahoos.

Z

The file format was created by Phil Katz, and given the name by his friend Robert Mahoney. The compression tool Phil Katz created was named PKZIP. Zip means "speed", and they wanted to imply their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time.

See also

References

  1. ISBN 978-0-262-18178-5.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link
    )
  2. ^ "FAQ – Httpd Wiki". Retrieved 15 November 2012.
  3. ^ Hamilton, Naomi (27 May 2008). "The A-Z of Programming Languages: AWK". ComputerWorld.com.au. Retrieved 15 November 2012.
  4. ^
    doi:10.1145/155360.155580. The B language's
    name most probably represents a contraction of BCPL, though an alternate theory holds that it derives from Bon [Thompson 69], an unrelated language created by Thompson during the Multics days. Bon in turn was named either after his wife Bonnie, or (according to an encyclopedia quotation in its manual), after a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas.
  5. ^ Cooper, Eric. "biff: Did You Know?". Archived from the original on 13 November 2012. Retrieved 17 November 2012.
  6. ^ "What does {some strange unix command name} stand for?". UNIXguide.net. Retrieved 17 November 2012.
  7. ^ "Jargon File: biff". Retrieved 17 November 2012.
  8. hdl:10338.dmlcz/101429. Archived from the original
    on 1 October 2007. Retrieved 20 November 2012. The choice of a logarithmic base corresponds to the choice of a unit for measuring information. If the base 2 is used the resulting units may be called binary digits, or more briefly bits, a word suggested by J. W. Tukey.
  9. ISBN 9780718196950
    .
  10. ISBN 0-14-009741-4
    , on page 75.
  11. IBM 360
    used 8-bit characters, although not ASCII directly. Thus Buchholz's "byte" caught on everywhere. I myself did not like the name for many reasons. […]
  12. alphanumeric
    work, or to handle bytes of only one bit for logical analysis, or to offset the bytes by any number of bits. […]
  13. System/360
    took over many of the Stretch concepts, including the basic byte and word sizes, which are powers of 2. For economy, however, the byte size was fixed at the 8 bit maximum, and addressing at the bit level was replaced by byte addressing. […]
  14. LCCN 61-10466, archived
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  15. ^ "The Origin of the word Daemon".
  16. ISBN 978-0-596-80484-8
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  17. ^ About Debian
  18. ^ Cade Metz (13 March 2009). "Ethernet – a networking protocol name for the ages: Michelson, Morley, and Metcalfe". The Register. p. 2. Retrieved 4 March 2013.
  19. ^ The History of Ethernet. NetEvents.tv. 2006. Archived from the original on 21 December 2021. Retrieved 10 September 2011.
  20. ^ "Origins of the finger command". groups.google.com. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
  21. ^ Earnest, Les (29 October 2017). "How a nosy bureaucrat accidentally created the first social networking and blogging service". web.stanford.edu. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
  22. doi:10.17487/RFC3092. Retrieved 15 November 2012. {{cite journal}}: Cite journal requires |journal= (help
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  23. ^ "Initial revision of 'git', the information manager from hell · git/git@e83c516". GitHub. Archived from the original on 8 October 2017. Retrieved 21 January 2016.
  24. ^ "After controversy, Torvalds begins work on "git"". PC World. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
  25. ^ "What is GNU?". The GNU Operating System. Free Software Foundation. 4 September 2009. Retrieved 9 October 2009. The name 'GNU' is a recursive acronym for 'GNU's Not Unix'; it is pronounced g-noo, as one syllable with no vowel sound between the g and the n.
  26. ^ Stallman, Richard (9 March 2006). The Free Software Movement and the Future of Freedom. Zagreb, Croatia: FSF Europe. Retrieved 20 February 2007.
  27. ^ The Gnu Song
  28. ^ Stallman, Richard. "Initial Announcement of the GNU Project September 27, 1983". gnu.org. Retrieved 20 November 2013.
  29. ^ "The rise and fall of the Gopher protocol". MinnPost. 11 August 2016. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
  30. ^ "The Open Group Base Specifications Issue 7 IEEE Std 1003.1, 2013 Edition Copyright © 2001-2013 The IEEE and The Open Group". The Open Group. Retrieved 20 November 2013.
  31. ^ Murphy, Kieron (4 October 1996). "So why did they decide to call it Java?". InfoWorld. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
  32. ^ Krill, Paul (23 June 2008). "JavaScript creator ponders past, future". InfoWorld. Retrieved 19 May 2009.
  33. ^ "O'Reilly – Safari Books Online – 0596101996 – JavaScript: The Definitive Guide, 5th Edition". Safari.oreilly.com. Archived from the original on 8 December 2008. Retrieved 19 May 2009.
  34. ^ Lundblade, Laurence. "Laurence's home page: Naming Pine". Archived from the original on 7 June 2011. Retrieved 17 November 2012.
  35. ^ "General Python FAQ". Python.org. Python Software Foundation. Retrieved 4 June 2020.
  36. ^ "Tux Gallery - Everyone's Favorite Linux Mascot". www3.nd.edu. Retrieved 30 April 2021.
  37. ISSN 1059-1028
    . Retrieved 30 April 2021.
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