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.

Here’s the basic facts:

• I made it as far as Morrisset before being told I should turn round and go back to Sydney as Newcastle is completely flooded.
• The entire journey involved 5 trains and 5 buses in 8.5 hours, with my final drop off point by the last bus I was on ultimately being a 2 minute walk from where I got on the first train. The list of methods of transportation goes: train, train, long wait, bus, train, bus, train, bus, long wait, train, bus, long wait, bus, bus.
• Starving hungry, I put my last coin into a vending machine at Gosford station at 11:30pm, to have it swallow my money and not give me anything. This was not a pleasant evening.
• Laura didn’t make it to Newcastle, instead the bus turned round and took her back to Muswellbrook. On the bright side she didn’t have to change transportation once.
• ‘This is a train line not a bloody airline,’ said the man working at the station at Wyong when I asked if they were going to help people find accommodation after he told me they won’t take me to Newcastle and I can’t get back to Sydney either. I hope he’s still standing in the rain as I write this.
• I was seriously weighing up advice I was given by another passenger to sleep on the train for the night and work things out from wherever I woke up in the morning.
• Although a lot of the staff in the stations were doing the best they could, the remainder were arse holes and it was pretty much impossible to find out what was going on, and when I could find out what was going on, what was going on was not going to help me at all.
• The NSW government declared the storms a natural disaster, but of course to most people stuck in the rain it seemed like more of a personal one.

Arriving home wet, tired and hungry at 2:30am this morning; I can say I’ve had better evenings, although most of which are far less memorable. I guess there isn’t an easy way to prove Marcel Proust was right all along.

I went with Laura on a day adventure in the Blue Mountains. Unfortunately my camera broke when we were sandboarding up in Newcastle.

We started the day with a quick lesson: stick your thumb up your bum to stop yourself from falling. Whatever you do, do not let go of the rope because you’ll die. A couple of people had a go on a 2-metre high surface, but everyone else who felt more confident about where to shove their thumbs went straight for cliff-face number one, at 15 metres.

Abseiling’s fantastic fun. It’s the going back up that sucks. A 15 metre hill climb is nothing for what came after.

We had a small lunch before having another go on a slightly bigger descent: this time somewhere just short of 30 metres. This was easy, except for Sagi who managed to go head-over-heals. Apparently hanging head first down the side of a cliff and still remembering not to let go of the rope takes a calm and collected mind. Figures.

Laura managed to take to it straight away, having already abseiled down Table Mountain in South Africa. The guide had a bit of trouble keeping the support rope slack for her. I’d have only just have beaten her if I jumped down the cliff like a lemming.

Straight afterwards was a short walk to the big cliff. With trees stretched out along the valley below and our heads literally in the clouds we stuck the rope in the harness and started the big descent.

Due to the unfortunate set up of my harness between my legs, it was a painful 60 metres going down but pausing to take in the view, dangling from a rope with the mountains cascading into the horizon in all direction worked as a pretty good sedative. Laura and I walked back up to the top (it’s serious hill climbing) where we thought we’d have another go.

Below is a shot of me just started my last descent.