Citizendia

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). Etymology is the study of the History of Words &mdash when they entered a language from what source and how their form and meaning have changed over time It relates to both computer hardware and computer software. Typical PC hardware A typical Personal computer consists of a case or chassis in a tower shape (desktop and the following parts Motherboard

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). A compiler is a Computer program (or set of programs that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another In Computer science, source code (commonly just source or code) is any sequence of statements or declarations written in some Human-readable Machine code or machine language is a system of instructions and data executed directly by a Computer 's Central processing unit. 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.

Contents

A

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 National Center for Supercomputing Applications ( NCSA) is one of five original centers in the National Science Foundation 's Supercomputer Centers Program and a The NCSA HTTPd was a Web server originally developed at the NCSA by Robert McCool and others In Unix and other computer multitasking Operating systems a daemon (ˈdiːmən or /ˈdeɪmən/ is a Computer program that runs in the background The result was "a patchy" server.

B

The term is often (but erroneously) credited to Grace Hopper. Rear Admiral Grace Murray Hopper ( December 9 1906 – January 1 1992) was an American Computer scientist and United 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. The Harvard Mark II was an electromechanical computer built at Harvard University under the direction of Howard Aiken and was finished in 1947 A moth is an Insect closely related to the Butterfly, both being of the order Lepidoptera. A relay is an electrical Switch that opens and closes under the control of another Electrical circuit. 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. Scotland ( Gaelic: Alba) is a Country in northwest Europethat occupies the northern third of the island of Great Britain. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks.

C

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. A variable (ˈvɛərɪəbl is an Attribute of a physical or an abstract System which may change its Value while it is under Observation.
The term was coined by web browser programmer Lou Montulli after the term "magic cookies" used by Unix programmers. A web browser is a software application which enables a user to display and interact with text images videos music games and other information typically located on a Louis J Montulli II (best known as Lou Montulli) is a programmer who is well known for his work in producing Web browsers In 1991 he wrote a text web browser A magic cookie or just cookie for short is a token or short packet of data passed between communicating programs where the data is typically not meaningful to the recipient Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer

D–F

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. Maxwell's demon was an 1867 Thought experiment by the Scottish Physicist James Clerk Maxwell, meant to raise questions about the possibility [3]. 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. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer This is exemplified by the BSD mascot, John Lasseter's drawing of a friendly imp (copyright Marshall Kirk McKusick). John Alan Lasseter (born January 12 1957 is an Academy Award -winning American Animator and the chief creative officer at Pixar and An imp is a mythological being similar to a Fairy or Demon, frequently described in Folklore and Superstition. Marshall Kirk McKusick (b January 19, 1954 in Wilmington Delaware) is a computer scientist, known for his extensive work on BSD 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'.
Les Earnest wrote the finger program in 1971 to solve provide users who wanted information about other users on a network or system. Emacs is a class of feature-rich Text editors usually characterized by their extensibility A text editor is a type of program used for editing plain Text files Text editors are often provided with Operating systems or software development In Computer networking, the Name/Finger protocol and the Finger user information protocol are simple Network protocols for the exchange of human-oriented Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Lester Donald Earnest was born in the United States on December 17 1930 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. The standard Unix command who displays a list of users who are currently logged into a computer Earnest named his program after this phenomenon.

G

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 [4], by Flanders and Swann which is a song sung by a gnu. Richard Matthew Stallman (born March 16 1953 often abbreviated " rms " is an American software freedom activist The British duo "Flanders and Swann" were the actor and singer Michael Flanders (1922&ndash1975 and the composer pianist and linguist Donald Swann It is also an early example of a recursive acronym -- "GNU's Not Unix". A recursive acronym (or occasionally recursive initialism, and sometimes recursive backronym) is an Abbreviation that refers to itself in the
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. A googol is the Large number 10100 that is the digit 1 followed by one hundred zeros (in Decimal representation The word was originally invented by Milton Sirotta, nephew of mathematician Edward Kasner in 1938 during a discussion of large numbers and exponential notation. Edward Kasner (1878&ndash1955 ( City College of New York 1897 Columbia University M
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. For other uses see Gopher. Gopher is a distributed Document search and retrieval Network protocol designed The Minnesota Golden Gophers are the college sports team for the University of Minnesota.
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 is a command line text search utility originally written for Unix. ed is the standard Text editor on the Unix operating system ed was originally written by Ken Thompson and contains one of the first implementations of "Grep" like "Google" is often used as a verb, meaning "to search".

H–K

Founder Jack Smith got the idea of accessing e-mail via the web from a computer anywhere in the world. Jack Smith, along with Sabeer Bhatia, founded the first free Web-based email service Hotmail, in 1995. 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. Sabeer Bhatia (सबीर भाटिया (born 1968 is the co-founder of Hotmail and an Entrepreneur. Mail, or post, is a method for transmitting information and tangible objects wherein written Documents typically enclosed in Envelopes and also HTML, an initialism of HyperText Markup Language, is the predominant Markup language for Web pages It provides a means to describe the structure It was initially referred to as HoTMaiL with selective upper casing.
"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.
ICQ is not an acronym. It is a play on the phrase "I seek you" (similar to CQ in ham radio usage). CQ is a code used by Wireless operators particularly those communicating in Morse code, but also by voice operators to make a general call (called a CQ call
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. Jakarta (also DKI Jakarta) is the Capital and largest city of Indonesia. The Republic of Indonesia ( (Republik Indonesia is a Country in Southeast Asia. Java (Jawa is an Island of Indonesia and the site of its Capital city Jakarta.
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. A programming language is an Artificial language that can be used to write programs which control the behavior of a machine particularly a Computer. James A Gosling OC, PhD (born May 19, 1955 near Calgary, Alberta, Canada) is a famous Software developer The programming team at Sun had to look for a substitute name as there was already another programming language called Oak. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services "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.
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. Greek mythology is the body of stories belonging to the ancient Greeks concerning their gods and Heroes the nature of the world and the origins and significance In Greek mythology, Cerberus or Kerberos ( Greek Κέρβερος Kérberos) the ker or Daimon of The reference to Greek mythology is most likely because Kerberos was developed as part of Project Athena. Project Athena was a joint project of MIT, Digital Equipment Corporation, and IBM.

L

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 an operating system that would address the problems of Minix. Linus Benedict Torvalds ( ˈtuːrvalds born December 28 1969 in Helsinki, Finland) is a Finnish software engineer MINIX is a Unix-like computer Operating system based on a Microkernel architecture. An operating system (commonly abbreviated OS and O/S) is the software component of a Computer system that is responsible for the management and coordination MS-DOS (short for M icro' s' oft D isk O perating S ystem is an Operating system commercialized by Microsoft. Hence the working name was Linux (Linus' Minix). He thought the name to be too egotistical 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 Lemmke (born December 12, 1963) is the person who gave Linux its name Ari gave Linus a directory called 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. Steven Paul Jobs (born February 24 1955 is the Co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Apple Inc and former CEO of Pixar Animation Accordingly, two humorous suggestions for expanding the acronym included Let's Invent Some Acronym and Let's Invent Silly Acronyms.

M

from McIntosh, a popular type of apple. The McIntosh Red ( McIntosh, Mac) is an apple Cultivar with red and green skin a tart flavor and tender white flesh Jef Raskin, a computer scientist, is credited with this naming. Jef Raskin ( March 9, 1943 &ndash February 26, 2005) was an American Human-computer interface expert best-known for starting
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".
Coined by Donald Michie in his 1968 paper Memo Functions and Machine Learning. Donald Michie ( November 11, 1923 – July 7, 2007) was a British researcher in Artificial intelligence.
When Marc Andreessen, founder of Netscape, created a browser to replace the Mosaic browser, it was internally named Mozilla (Mosaic-Killer, Godzilla). Marc Andreessen (born July 9, 1971, in Cedar Falls Iowa and raised in New Lisbon Wisconsin, United States) is known as a entrepreneur Netscape Communications (formerly known as Netscape Communications Corporation and commonly known as Netscape) is an American computer services company Mosaic is the browser which popularized the World Wide Web. It was also a browser for earlier concepts such as Ftp, Usenet, and Gopher Etymology Name "Godzilla" is a combination of two Japanese words and. When Netscape's Navigator source code was made open source, Mozilla was the internal name for the open source version. Open source is a development methodology which offers practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge

N–O

Earlier spelling of the term is "Nurd" and the original spelling is "Knurd", but the pronunciation has remained the same. The term originated at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in the late 1940s. Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, or RPI, is a Nonsectarian private Research University located in Troy, New York 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 international popularity. Theodor Seuss Geisel (ˈsɔɪs ˈɡaɪzəl March 2 1904 – September 24 1991 was an American Writer and Cartoonist, better known by his pen name Happy Days is an American Television sitcom that originally aired from 1974 to 1984 on ABC.
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.
Larry Ellison, Ed Oates and Bob Miner were working on a consulting project for the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency). Lawrence Joseph "Larry" Ellison (born August 17, 1944) is an American entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Oracle Corporation near as long as it used to be several months ago It has been actively summarized and split into sub-articles and there is a dynamic talk page discussion of all The code name for the project was called Oracle (the CIA evidently saw this as a system that would give answers to all questions). An oracle is a person or agency considered to be a source of wise counsel or prophetic opinion an Infallible authority usually spiritual in nature The project was designed to use the newly written SQL database language from IBM. International Business Machines Corporation abbreviated IBM and nicknamed "Big Blue", is a multinational Computer Technology 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

The term comes from paku paku which is a Japanese onomatopoeia (written version of a noise) used for noisy eating; similar to chomp chomp. is an Arcade game developed by Namco and licensed for distribution A video arcade (also known as an amusement arcade in the United Kingdom in Japan or as an "arcade" is a venue where people play arcade video games Onomatopoeia (also spelled onomatopœia, from Greek: ονοματοποιΐα is a Word or a grouping of words that imitates the sound it is describing 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.
The Personal Computer Memory Card International Association is an international standards body that defines and promotes standards for expansion devices such as modems and external hard disk drives to be connected to notebook computers. Modem (from mo dulator- dem odulator is a device that modulates an analog carrier signal to encode Digital information A hard disk drive ( HDD) commonly referred to as a hard drive, hard disk, or fixed disk drive, is a Non-volatile storage device A laptop computer, also known as a notebook computer, is a small Personal computer designed for mobile use. Over time, the acronym PCMCIA has been used to refer to the PC card 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. The Pentium brand refers to Intel 's single-core x86 Microprocessor based on the P5 fifth-generation Microarchitecture. A microprocessor incorporates most or all of the functions of a Central processing unit (CPU on a single Integrated See also X86 assembly language The generic term x86 refers to the most commercially successful Instruction set architecture in the history of Personal 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. Titanium (taɪˈteɪniəm is a Chemical element with the symbol Ti and Atomic number 22
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. NOTES FOR EDITORS "Perl" is not an acronym (read the "Name" section below In Computer science, an interpreter normally means a Computer program that executes, i "Scripting" redirects here For other uses see Script. The Gospel of Matthew (Gk Κατά Ματθαίον Ευαγγέλιον is one of the four Canonical gospels in the New Testament and is a Synoptic gospel 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. Larry Wall (born September 27, 1954) is a Programmer and Author, most widely known for his creation of the Perl Programming 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. A backronym (or bacronym) is a Phrase that is constructed "after the fact" from a previously existing word or Abbreviation, the abbreviation
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". PHP is a computer Scripting language. Originally designed for producing Dynamic web pages it has evolved to include a Command line interface capability "Scripting" redirects here For other uses see Script. Zeev Suraski (זאב סורסקי is an Israeli Programmer, PHP developer and co-founder of Zend Technologies. Andi Gutmans (אנדי גוטמנס is an Israeli Programmer with Swiss roots PHP developer and co-founder of Zend Technologies. 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.
Acronym for "Program for Internet News & Email". Pine was a Freeware, Text-based E-mail client developed at the University of Washington. An e-mail client, aka Mail User Agent (MUA aka e-mail reader is a frontend Computer program used to manage E-mail. It is also a recursive acronym for "Pine Is Not Elm" (in reference to Elm, another email client)
The author of ping, Mike Muuss, named it after the pulses of sound made by a sonar called a "ping". Elm, a text-based E-mail client commonly found on Unix systems became popular as one of the first e-mail clients to use a Text user interface, and as a Ping is a Computer network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network it is also used to self test the network interface Michael John Muuss (October 16 1958 - November 20 2000 was the author of the Freeware network tool Ping. Sonar (which started as an Acronym for sound navigation and ranging) is a technique that uses Sound propagation (usually underwater to navigate Later Dave Mills provided the backronym "Packet Internet Groper". David L Mills (born June 3, 1938) was the first chairman of the Internet Architecture Task Force.

R

Radio buttons got their name from the preset buttons in radio receivers. This article is about a radio receiver for other uses see Radio (disambiguation. 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) while at college by his grandfather. Marc Ewing is the creator and originator of the Red Hat brand of software most notably the Red Hat range of Linux operating system distributions Lacrosse is a full contact Team sport played using a solid rubber ball and long handled racket called a crosse or Lacrosse stick. 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.
Based on the surnames of the authors of this algorithm — Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Len Adleman. In Cryptography, RSA is an Algorithm for Public-key cryptography. Symmetry generally conveys two primary meanings The first is an imprecise sense of harmonious or aesthetically-pleasing proportionality and balance such that it reflects beauty or In Mathematics, Computing, Linguistics and related subjects an algorithm is a sequence of finite instructions often used for Calculation Public-key cryptography, also known as asymmetric cryptography, is a form of Cryptography in which the key used to encrypt a message differs from the key Ronald Linn Rivest (born 1947, Schenectady, New York) is a cryptographer. Adi Shamir (עדי שמיר born 1952 is an Israeli cryptographer. Leonard Max Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is a theoretical computer scientist and professor of Computer science and Molecular biology

S

The company was called "Santa Cruz Operation", as its office was in Santa Cruz, California. Santa Cruz Operation ( SCO) was a Software company based in Santa Cruz California which was best known for selling three Unix variants for Santa Cruz is the County seat and largest city of Santa Cruz County, California, United States.
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") Alternatively, many say that the Slashdot(/. Slashdot, often abbreviated as /, is a technology-related news Website owned by SourceForge Inc A blog (a contraction of the term " Web log " is a Web site, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary descriptions of ) name refers to the *NIX command line interpretation of the "root" directory, or a play on the website being the "root" of all tech news.
Apple Computer had a long litigation history with Apple Records, the Beatles' recording company. Apple Inc, ( formerly Apple Computer Inc, is an American Multinational corporation with a focus on designing and manufacturing Consumer electronics Apple Records is a record label founded by The Beatles in 1968 as a division of Apple Corps Ltd. The Beatles were a pop and rock band from Liverpool, England formed in 1960 Fearing that the ability to record musical sound would cause yet more legal action, the Apple legal department allegedly ordered the sound to be renamed from its original, musical name. So the developers changed the name to Sosumi ("So sue me"). Depending on who was asked, they quipped that it was Japanese for either "absence of sound" or "a light pleasing tone".
The term spam is derived from the Monty Python SPAM sketch, set in a cafe where everything on the menu includes SPAM luncheon meat. Spamming is the abuse of electronic messaging systems to indiscriminately send unsolicited bulk messages Electronic mail, often abbreviated to e-mail, email, or originally eMail, is a Store-and-forward method of writing sending receiving Monty Python (sometimes known as The Pythons) is the collective name of the six creators of Monty Python's Flying Circus, a British Television "Spam" is a popular Monty Python sketch, first televised in 1970 Name origin Introduced on July 5 1937, the name "Spam" was chosen in the 1930s when the product whose original name was far less memorable (Hormel 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. The term " swing dance " commonly refers to a group of dances that developed concurrently with the swing style of Jazz music in the 1920s '30s and '40s although Jazz is an American Musical art form which originated in the beginning of the 20th century in African American communities in the Southern United States 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.

T–V

Tomcat was the code-name for the JSDK 2. A task is "an execution path through address space" In other words a set of program instructions that are loaded in memory. The term web server can mean one of two things A Computer program that is responsible for accepting HTTP requests from web clients which are The Jakarta Project creates and maintains Open source software for the Java platform. 1 project inside Sun. Sun Microsystems Inc ( is a multinational vendor of Computers computer components Computer software, and Information technology services 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. Open source is a development methodology which offers practical accessibility to a product's source (goods and knowledge O'Reilly Media (formerly O'Reilly & Associates) is an American media company established by Tim O'Reilly He came up with Tomcat since he reasoned the animal represented something that could take care of and fend for itself. WikipediaManual of Style (spelling, articles should conform to one overall spelling style of English typically the one most linked to the article topic (if it is geographic
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. See also Trough. TROFF may also refer to a command in the BASIC programming language. Unix (officially trademarked as UNIX, sometimes also written as Unix with Small caps) is a computer Troff has its origins from Roff, an earlier formatting program, whose name is a contraction of "run off". roff was the first Unix Text-formatting Computer program, also the most important application run on the first machine specifically purchased to run
The term is derived from the classical myth of the Trojan Horse. The Trojan Horse was part of the Trojan War, as told in Virgil 's Latin Epic poem The Aeneid. Analogously, a Trojan horse appears innocuous (or even to be a gift), but in fact is a vehicle for bypassing security.
Strictly speaking, TWAIN is not an acronym, but has often been referred to as an acronym for "Technology Without An Intelligent Name". TWAIN, widely known unoffically as "Technology Without an Interesting Name Historical precedent Scanners can be considered the successors of early telephotography input devices consisting of a rotating drum with a single Photodetector at
When Bell Labs pulled out of the MULTICS (MULTiplexed Information and Computing System) project, 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 for a spare DEC minicomputer, allegedly found in a corridor. Bell Laboratories (also known as Bell Labs and formerly known as AT&T Bell Laboratories and Bell Telephone Laboratories) is the Research organization Multics ( Mult iplexed I nformation and C omputing S ervice was an extremely influential early Time-sharing Operating system Kenneth Lane Thompson (born February 4 1943) commonly referred to as Ken Thompson (or simply Dennis MacAlistair Ritchie (born September 9, 1941) is an American computer scientist notable for his influence on C and other Programming They needed an 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.
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. Fred Cohen is an American Computer scientist and best known as the inventor of Computer virus defense techniques Leonard Max Adleman (born December 31, 1945) is a theoretical computer scientist and professor of Computer science and Molecular biology 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. David Gerrold, born Jerrold David Friedman ( January 24, 1944) in Chicago Illinois, is a Science fiction author who started his career 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. A comic book (often shortened to simply comic and sometimes called a comic paper or comic magazine) is a Magazine or Book of narrative The X-Men is a team of fictional Superhero characters in Comic books published by Marvel Comics. 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–Z

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 Hawaiian language (Hawaiian ‘Ōlelo Hawai‘i) is an Austronesian language that takes its name from Hawai'i, the largest island in the tropical The airport counter agent directed him to take the wiki wiki bus between terminals.
The name 'worm' was taken from a 1970s science fiction novel by John Brunner entitled The Shockwave Rider. John Kilian Houston Brunner ( September 24, 1934 &ndash August 26, 1995) was a prolific British author of Science fiction The Shockwave Rider is a Science fiction novel by John Brunner, originally published in 1975. 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.
Acronym for What You See Is What You Get, the phrase was originated by a newsletter published by Arlene and Jose Ramos, called WYSIWYG. It was created for the emerging Pre-Press industry going electronic in the late 1970s.
X derives its name as a successor to a pre-1983 window system called W (the W Window System). A windowing system (or window system) is a component of a Graphical user interface (GUI and more specifically of a Desktop environment, which supports In Computer graphics, a bitmap or pixmap is a type of memory organization or Image file format used to store Digital images The The W Window System is a graphical windowing system and precursor in name and concept to the modern X Window System. X follows W in the alphabet.
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 called 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. Jonathan Swift (30 November 1667 Gulliver's Travels (1726 amended 1735 officially Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World in Four Parts 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.
The file format was created by Phil Katz, and given the name by his friend Robert Mahoney. The ZIP File format is a Data compression and archival format. A file format is a particular way to encode information for storage in a Computer file. Phillip Walter Katz ( November 3, 1962 – April 14, 2000) better known as Phil Katz, was a Computer The compression tool Phil Katz created was called PKZIP. PKZIP is an archiving tool originally written by Phil Katz and marketed by his company PKWARE Inc Zip means "speed", and they wanted to imply their product would be faster than ARC and other compression formats of the time.

See also

This is a list of company names with their name origins explained This is a list of etymological lists. General List of company name etymologies List of computer term etymologies
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