Interesting histories and etymologies of web development technologies and other common terms

As a Developer there isn’t a day that goes by without making use of a name, acronym or phrase that doesn’t have an interesting history. Whilst we’re familiar with the usage of web technologies and concepts, not everyone knows much about their respective etymologies. I’ve looked up a few of them, and listed the more interesting ones here.

Algorithm

Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī

We know that algorithm was originally a mathematical and linguistics term. It dates back to the 9th century AD and a mistake in interpreting Hindu to Latin – Muhammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī wrote a piece on calculations with Hindu numerals in 825 AD, and when it was translated to Latin in the twelfth century, the translator used “Algoritmi” as the authors name, so the title was (approximate English translation) “Algoritmi on the numbers of the Indians”. So essentially the title was misunderstood, and “algoritmi” eventually “algorithm”. Here’s Muhammad on the right. He was a very serious looking fella with the bags under his eyes

ASP

The MS language started off at Aspect Software Engineering. They’d completed dbWeb, which was a commercial failure. Although Microsoft stepped in and bought ASE as they were creating i-Basic (dbWeb’s successor). MS then renamed it to ASP.

Boot

Baron Münchhausen

Short for bootstrap, it literally comes from the term ‘to pull one up by one’s bootstraps’. That particular term has been traced back to The Surprising Adventures of Baron Munchausen by Rudolf Erich Raspe, who lived in Germany during the 18th century. He was a librarian, but considered a rogue by his biographer, so supposedly a librarian you could sit next to at a dinner party. The reference to bootstraps stems from a story where the Baron escapes a swamp by pulling himself up by his bootstraps. The Baron was a real person, known for telling tall tales about his adventures (other feats include riding a cannonball and visiting the moon). The psychological disease Munchausen Syndrome is named after him, in which sufferers are driven to pretend to have an illness when they really don’t.

Bug/Debug

Thomas Edison first used the word ‘bug’ in a letter to Theodore Puskas in 1878.

“It has been just so in all my inventions. The first step is an intuition–and comes with a burst, then difficulties arise. This thing gives out and then that–”Bugs”–as such little faults and difficulties are called–show themselves”.

The word ‘debug’ was first used in the Journal of the Royal Aeronautical Society in 1945, and wasn’t used in computing until the mid-1950s.

C

C is so-named because its design was influenced by B, a language that died out in the ’90s. A relatively new language called D was influenced by C (as well as C++ and C#).

C++

Originally called ‘C with Classes’ (it was first developed as an extension for C). When it became a commercial language (in about 1983) it was renamed to C++, as “the name signifies the evolutionary nature of the changes from C”. The ++ is a tongue-in-cheek reference to C’s ‘++’ used to increment the value of a variable.

C#

Originally called Project Cool (C like Object Orientated Language), Microsoft wanted to keep the name, but changed their mind to name it C#. The ‘#’ is musically inspired, ‘C sharp’ being a semi-tone above C.

ColdFusion

Initially called Cold Fusion before becoming ColdFusion (one word instead of two), possibly for trademark reasons. The first version was created by JJ Allaire of Allaire Corp. and couldn’t do much more than access a database. Allaire Corporation were bought by Macromedia in 2001 who were in turn bought by Adobe a few years later.

CSS

Originally called CHSS (Cascading HTML Style Sheets), the ‘H’ was soon dropped as stylesheets could be used by other markup languages other than HTML.

EMACS

Based on the simple WYSIWYG editor called ‘E’ used in the Stanford AI lab in the early ’70s, EMACS stands for E with MACroS.

Erlang

Agner Krarup Erlang

Developed by Ericsson, You might think that Erlang is short for ‘Ericsson Language’, although it’s actually a reference to A. K. Erlang, a Danish engineer, mathematician and all-round bright guy. Although the guys at Ericsson admit that the double-meaning wasn’t a coincidence.

Flash

Originally called FutureSplash, it was created by a small company called FutureWave, a four-man company in San Diego who wanted to compete with Macromedia’s bloated ShockWave plugin. Having none of that nonsense Macromedia bought out FutureWave and went on to develop it into Flash.

Hypertext (as in HTTP and HTML)

Ted Nelson

Hyper is a greek word that means to overcome the traditional constraints of written text. Ted Nelson came up with the word, as well as hypermedia. He got a bit pissed when people started saying ‘interactive multimedia’ instead of hypermedia, not able to understand why anyone would want to use so many more syllables.

Java

Originally called Oak (Java’s creator, James Gosling had an oak tree outside his office window and didn’t really have much imagination). It was renamed to Green (guess he was still staring at the tree) before finally being renamed to Java from a list of random words.

JavaScript

Originally called Mocha, then renamed to LiveScript before settling on the current name of JavaScript. As you’ll probably know it has nothing to do with Java. Some believe its name was a marketing ploy by Netscape to ride the coattails of Sun’s Java, which was gaining some serious popularity at the time (around 1995).

JPEG

Developed by and named after the Joint Photographic Experts Group.

MPEG

Stands for Moving Picture Expert Group, who are an ISO Working Group. You can check out the official MPEG website here, although I have to warn you – it’s not pretty.

Perl

Originally it was called Pearl, after the Parable of the Pearl in the Gospel of Matthew. Although it was renamed when its creator, Larry Wall, realised a language called PEARL already existed.

PhotoShop

Thomas Knoll's 'Display'

Originally named ‘Display’ when it was a small project for the Macintosh Plus back at the University of Michigan in ‘87. A PhD student called Thomas Knoll was the developer behind the project. When his brother saw the potential in Display, they put six months aside to create ‘ImagePro’. They then changed their minds on the name again and renamed it PhotoShop when it was packaged along with a slide scanner.

PHP

Stood for ‘Personal Homepage’ in its inception in 1993, until version 3 in 1997 when it became known as a recursive initialism, PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor.

PuTTy

There’s no actual reason for the name, although TTy is the common Unix abbreviation for a terminal.

Python

Nothing to do with the snake, it’s actually named after Monty Python’s Flying Circus. There aren’t any similarities between Python and the BBC comedy, it just so happens that Guido van Rossum was reading the scripts from Monty Python when he was creating this language.

Ruby

In Ruby’s case the name was chosen before any code was written. In a choice between the names Ruby and Coral, Yukihiro Matsumoto opted for Ruby because it was the birthstone of one of his colleagues.

Spam

Another Monty Python reference. Some suggest it’s an acronym for ‘Shit Posing As Mail’ or ‘Stupid Pointless Annoying Messages’, although the accepted version is that the name is based on a Monty Python sketch about SPAM being the main ingredient in every dish offered in a cafe. Here’s that clip:
httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anwy2MPT5RE

The luncheon meat called SPAM is always spelt in uppercase. The makers of SPAM have never complained about the potential infringement on their trademark, as long as unsolicited emails are refered to as ’spam’ in lowercase only.

Wiki

A popular misconception is that wiki is an acronym for ‘What I Know Is’. Although I’ve since learnt that’s a backronym. It’s actually based on the Hawaiian word for ‘fast’.

XML

The eXtensible Markup Language could have been named MAGMA (Minimal Architecture for Generalized Markup Applications), MGML (Minimal Generalized Markup Language) or SLIM (Structured Language for Internet Markup). XML was designed by a W3C Working Group of eleven members who never actually met face-to-face.