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 etymologies). It relates to both computer hardware and computer software.
Names of many computer terms, especially computer applications, often relate to the function they perform, e.g., a compiler is an application that compiles (programming language source code into the
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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 etymologies). It relates to both computer hardware and computer software.
Names of many computer terms, especially computer applications, often relate to the function they perform, e.g., a compiler is an application that compiles (programming language source code into the
computer's machine language). There are other terms however whose history would indicate that it had less to do with the functionality, and hence are of etymological value. This article lists such terms.
ABEND — this term is short for abnormal end, and refers to a program stopping prematurely due to a bug. It is more commonly associated with mainframe programs, as this is its origin. Another purported origin of the term is that ABEND is called "abend" because it is what system operators do to the computer late on Friday when they want to call it a day, and hence is from the German word "Abend" meaning "Evening". This is untrue.
Ada programming language — named after Ada Lovelace, who is considered by many to be the first programmer.
Apache — the web server from the Apache Software Foundation. Originally this name was chosen by an author just because it was a catchy name. Soon enough, it was suggested that the name was indeed
appropriate, because its founders got started by applying patches to code written for NCSA's httpd daemon. The result was "a patchy" server.
awk — a computer pattern/action language, name made up of the surnames of its authors Alfred V. Aho, Peter J. Weinberger, and Brian W. Kernighan
B programming language — B was created by Ken Thompson as a revision of the BCPL programming language. biff — a command to turn on asynchronous email notification on Unix
systems. Actually named after a dog at U.C. Berkeley, who would bark when mail was delivered. (The dog belonged to Heidi Stettner, validation of this from Eric Cooper.)
bit — Claude E. Shannon first used the word bit in a 1948 paper. Shannon's bit is a portmanteau word for binary digit (or possibly binary digit). He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey. See Piece of eight.
Bon programming language — Bon was created by Ken Thompson and named after his wife Bonnie. However according to an encyclopedia quotation in Bon's manual, it was named after a religion (likely Tibetan) whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas. [1]
booting or bootstrapping — The term booting or bootstrapping a computer was inspired by the story of the Baron Münchhausen where he pulls himself out of a swamp by the straps on his boots.
Bug — a fault in a computer program which prevents it from working correctly. The term is often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper. In 1946, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she traced an error in the Harvard Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay.
This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. (See picture).
However, use of the word "bug" to describe defects in mechanical systems dates back to at least the 1870s, perhaps especially in Scotland. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks.
byte — the term was coined by Werner Buchholz in 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer. It was coined by mutating the word bite so it would not be accidentally misspelled as bit. A byte usually is a grouping of 8 bits, but technically refers to the smallest addressable unit of memory.
C programming language — Dennis Ritchie improved on the B programming language and called it New B. He later called it C.
C++ — an object-oriented programming language and a successor to the C programming language.
C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup called his new language "C with Classes" and then "new C". Because of which the original C began to be called "old C" which was considered insulting to the C community. At this time Rick Mascitti suggested the name C++ as a successor to C. In C the '++' operator increments the value of the variable it is appended to, thus C++ would increment the value of C.
Cookie — A packet of information that travels between a browser and the web server. The term was coined by web browser programmer Lou Montulli after the term "magic cookies" used by Unix programmers.
COBOL - COmmon Business-Oriented Language
D -- Walter Bright designed D as an improved C, avoiding many of the design problems of C (e.g., extensive pointer manipulation, unenforced array boundaries, ...).
Daemon — a process in an operating system that runs in the background. It is falsely considered 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 Daemon of physics and thermodynamics (an imaginary agent which helped sort molecules with differing velocities and worked tirelessly in the background)" thus evading the Laws of Thermodynamics. [2]. The earliest use appears to have been in the phrase "daemon of Socrates", which meant his "guiding or indwelling spirit; his genius", also a pre-Christian equivalent of the "Guardian Angel", or, alternatively, a demigod (who bears only an etymological connection to the word "demon"). The term was embraced, and possibly popularized, 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 (copyright Marshall Kirk McKusick). Thus, a daemon is something that works
magically without anyone being much aware of it. Note that an alternative spelling is 'daemon', which is sometimes slightly differentiated in purpose from 'demon'.
Debian — a Linux distribution, a portmanteau of project creator Ian Murdock's name and that of his girlfriend (now ex-wife) Debra.
Emacs — a text editor, acronym for Editor MACroS
finger — Unix command that provides information about users logged into a system
Les Earnest wrote the finger program in 1971 to solve provide users who wanted information about other users on a network or system. Prior to the finger program, the only way to get this information was with a who program that showed IDs and terminal line numbers for logged—in users; people used to run their fingers down the "who" list. Earnest named his program after this phenomenon.
Foobar — from the U.S. Army slang acronym, FUBAR Both foo and bar are used as metasyntatic variables.
Gentoo — a Linux distribution, named after a variety of penguin, the universal Linux mascot.
GNU — a project with an original goal of creating a free operating system. Gnu is also a species of African antelope. The founder of the GNU project Richard Stallman liked the name because of the humour associated with its pronunciation and was also influenced by the song The Gnu Song [3], by Flanders and Swann which is a song sung by a gnu. It is also an early example of a recursive acronym -- "GNU's Not Unix".
Google — search engine on the web. The name started as an exaggerated boast about the amount of
information the search-engine would be able to search. It was originally named 'Googol', a word for the number represented by 1 followed by 100 zeros. The word was originally invented by Milton
Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938 during a discussion of large numbers and exponential notation.
Gopher — an early distributed document search and retrieval network protocol on the Internet
The source of the name is claimed to be three-fold: first, that it is used to "go-for" information; second, that it does so through a menu of links analogous to gopher holes; and third, that the mascot of the
protocol authors' organization, the University of Minnesota, is Goldy the Gopher.
grep — a Unix 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. "Grep" like "Google" is often used as a verb, meaning "to search".
56. HOTMAIL — free email service, now part of MSN.
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.
59.i18n — short for internationalization.
"18" is for the number of letters between the i and the n. The term l10n (for localization) has failed to catch on to the same degree, but is used by some.
60.ICQ — an instant messaging service.
ICQ is not an initialism. It is a play on the phrase "I seek you" (similar to CQ in ham radio usage).
61.ID10T - pronounced "ID ten T" - is a code frequently used by a customer service representative (CSR) to annotate their notes and identify the source of a problem as the person who is reporting the
problem rather than the system being blamed. This is a thinly veiled reference to the CSR's opinion that the person reporting the problem is an IDIOT. Example: Problem reported caused by ID10T, no resolution possible. See also PEBKAC.
62.JAKARTA PROJECT — a project constituted by Sun and Apache to create a web server for Java servlets and 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.
63.JAVA (programming language)|Java — programming language Originally called "D", but with the connotation of a near-failing mark on a report card the language was renamed Oak by Java-creator James Gosling, from the tree that stood outside his window. The programming team at Sun had to look for a substitute name as there was already another programming language called Oak. "Java" was selected from a list of suggestions, primarily because it is a popular slang term for coffee, especially that grown on the island of Java. As the programmers drank a lot of coffee, this seemed an appropriate name. Many people mistakenly think that Java is indeed an acronym and spell it JAVA. When one of the original Java programmers from Sun was asked to define JAVA he said it stood for nothing, but if it must stand for something: "Just Another Vague Acronym."
64.JAVA SCRIPT — programming language (is NOT Java)
JavaScript was originally developed by Brendan Eich of Netscape under the name Mocha, which was later renamed to LiveScript, and finally to JavaScript.[1] 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.[2][3]
65.JOB(software)|Job
66.KERBEROS (protocol)|Kerberos]] — a computer network authentication protocol that is used by both Windows 2000 and Windows XP as their default authentication method.
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 the Greek mythology character kerberos, (also spelled Cerberus), the mythical three-headed canine guarding Hades' gates. The reference to Greek mythology is most likely because Kerberos was developed as part of Project Athena.
Linux - the kernel of the GNU/Linux operating system.
Linux creator Linus Torvalds originally used the Minix operating system on his computer, didn't like it, liked MS-DOS less, and started a project to develop a better operating system than either. Hence the
working name was Linux (Linus' Minix). He thought the name to be too egoistical and planned to name it Freax (free + freak + x). His friend Ari Lemmke encouraged Linus to upload it to a network so it could be
easily downloaded. Ari gave Linus a directory called linux on his FTP server, as he did not like the name Freax.
Lisa - A personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s. Some say it is an acronym for Local Integrated Software Architecture, others that it was named after the daughter of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, and that the acronym was invented later to fit the name, expanding the acronym to Let's Invent Some Acronym.
Lotus Software - Lotus founder Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position' or 'Padmasana'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.
Apple Macintosh, Mac - computer system from Apple Computer. from McIntosh, a popular type of apple. Jef Raskin, a computer scientist, is credited with this naming.
Mac OS - The operating system used in the Macintosh computer system. from "Mac", a shortened form of Macintosh and a commonly-used name for the Macintosh computer system (see elsewhere on this page), and "OS", the common abbreviation for "operating system".
Memoization - the process of automatically modifying functions to include caching behavior.
Coined by Donald Michie in his 1968 paper Memo Functions and Machine Learning.
Mozilla - a browser and successor to Netscape Navigator. When Marc Andreesen, founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer,
Godzilla). When the Navigator source code was made open source, the internal name was for the open source version.
Nerd - A colloquial term for a computer person, especially an obsessive, singularly focused one.
Earlier spelling of the term is "Nurd" and the original spelling is "Knurd", but the pronunciation has remained the same. The term originated at the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1940s.
Students who partied, and rarely studied were called "Drunks", while the opposite - students who never partied and always studied were "Knurd" ("Drunk" spelled backwards). The term was also (independently)
used in a Dr. Seuss book, and on the TV show Happy Days, giving it national popularity.
Novell NetWare - a network operating system from Novell. Novell, Inc. was originally Novell Data Systems co-founded by George Canova. The name was suggested by George's wife who mistakenly thought that "Novell" meant "new" in French.
Oracle - a 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 called Oracle (the CIA saw this as the system to give answers to all questions or some such). 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.
Pac-Man - a video arcade game
The term comes from paku paku which is a Japanese slang to describe the opening and closing of the mouth. 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.
PCMCIA - a wireless network card, about the size of a credit card. PCMCIA cards weres developed by the Personal Computer Memory Card International Association (an international standards association) as
a standard for devices such as modems and external hard disk drives to be connected to notebook computers. Over time, the acronym PCMCIA has come to mean the form factor used for wireless networking cards on notebook computers. (A twist on the acronym is People Can't Memorise
Complete Insane Acronyms).
Pentium - Microprocessor from Intel
The fifth microprocessor in the 80x86 series. It would have been called i586 or 80586, but Intel decided to name it Pentium (penta = five) after it lost a trademark infringement lawsuit against AMD. (The
judgment was that numbers like "286", "386", and "486" could not be trademarked.) According to Intel, Pentium conveys a meaning of strength "like titanium". 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 - programming language
Perl was originally named Pearl, after the "pearl of great price" of Matthew 13:46. 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. PHP programming language - a server-side scripting language.
Originally called "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".
Pine - email client
Acronym for "Program for Internet News & Email". It is also a self-referential acronym for "Pine Is Not Elm" (in reference to Elm, another email client) Ping - 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 Grouper".
PKZIP - compression or zipping tool. It was written by Phil Katz and stands for Phil Katz's ZIP program.
Python programming language - an interpreted scripting language. Named after the television series Monty Python's Flying Circus.
Radio button - a 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.
Red Hat Linux - a Linux distribution from Red Hat.
Company founder Marc Ewing was given the Cornell lacrosse team cap (with red and white stripes) while at college by his grandfather. 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 his Red Hat if found by anyone!
RSA - an asymmetric algorithm for public key cryptography Based on the surnames of the authors of this algorithm -- Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman.
Samba software - a free implementation of Microsoft's networking protocol. The name samba comes from inserting two vowels into the name of the standard protocol that Microsoft Windows network file system use, called SMB (Server Message Block). The author searched a dictionary using grep for words containing S M and B in that order; the only matches were Samba and Salmonberry.
SCO UNIX - a UNIX variant from SCO.
The company was called "Santa Cruz Operation", as its office was in Santa Cruz, California.
sed - stands for stream editor, used for textual transformation of a sequential stream of text data. It is modelled after the ed editor.
shareware - coined by Bob Wallace to describe his word processor PC-Write in early 1983. Prior to this Jim Button and Andrew Fluegelman called their distributed softwares as "user supported software" and
"freeware" respectively, but it was Wallace's terminology that stuck.
Slashdot - a technology oriented weblog While registering the domain, Slashdot-creator Rob Malda wanted to make the URL silly, and unpronounceable ("http://slashdot.org" gets
pronounced as "h t t p colon slash slash slash dot dot org")
Spam - unwanted repetitious messages, such as unsolicited bulk e-mail The term spam is derived from the Monty Python 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. (Hormel Food's position on the use of the term is at http://www.spam.com/ci/ci_in.htm )
SPIM - the assembly language used on MIPS processors, is simply MIPS spelled backwards. MIPS stands for Millions of Instructions Per Second, from way back when that was something to boast of.
Swing - a graphics library for Java.
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 unexpectly 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.
Tomcat - a web server from the Jakarta ProjectTomcat was the code-name for the JSDK 2.1 project inside Sun. 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 Times font family in troff by default. Troff has its origins from Roff, an earlier formatting program, whose name is a contraction of
"run off".
Trojan horse (computing) - 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.
Unix - an operating system.
When Bell Labs pulled out of MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing System), which was originally a joint Bell Labs/GE/MIT project, Ken Thompson of Bell Labs, soon joined by Dennis Ritchie,
wrote a simpler version of the operating system. They needed the OS to run the game Space War which had been compiled under MULTICS. The new OS was called UNICS - UNIplexed operating and Computing System by Brian Kernighan. An alternative spelling was Eunuchs, it being a sort of 'reduced' MULTICS. It was later shortened to Unix.
vi - a text editor, initialism for visual, a command in the ex editor which helped users to switch to the visual mode from the ex mode.
Vim - a text editor, 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.
Virus - a piece of program code that spreads by making copies of itself. The term virus was first used in print by Fred Cohen in his 1984 paper "Experiments with Computer Viruses", where he credits 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 called
VIRUS that worked just like a virus (and was countered by a program called ANTIBODY). The term "computer virus" also appears in the comic book "Uncanny X-Men" No. 158, published in 1982.
Wiki or WikiWiki - a hypertext document collection or the collaborative software used to create it.
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 Hawai'ian term he learned on his first visit to the islands. The airport counter agent directed him to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.
Worm - a self-replicating program, similar to a virus. The name 'worm' was taken from a 1970s science fiction novel by 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.
X Window System - a windowing system for computers with bitmap displays X derives its name as a successor to a pre-1983 window system called W (the W Window System). X follows W in the alphabet.
Yahoo! - internet portal and web directory. It is an acronym for "Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle". 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.
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