Tracing the Origins Of Tech Terminology

00:00:00
Ned: Every platform I’ve used to record podcasts are all universally okay. But none of them are great.

00:00:08
Chris: They’re differently bad.

00:00:10
Ned: Yes. Inconsistently… not awful?

00:00:14
Chris: I mean, if we use Zoom, we could do digital avatars. You could be a bunny like you’ve always wanted.

00:00:21
Ned: I am using a virtual avatar to make me look like a human. I mean because I am a human. Hello alleged human, and welcome to the [laugh] Chaos Lever podcast. My name is Ned, and I’m definitely not a robot or a bunny. I, too, feel the constant dread of my own mortality mixed with a sense of ever-present hope in the sweet oblivion to come, when my ones and zeros—I mean thoughts, yeah, thoughts—cease and peace embraces me everlasting with her crushing weight. With me is Chris, who is also here. Hi, Chris.

00:01:04
Chris: So, what you’re saying is you’re a robot bunny.

00:01:07
Ned: I did not say that.

00:01:08
Chris: You didn’t not say that.

00:01:11
Ned: [laugh] You’ve got me there. Just call me the Flippity-flops.

00:01:15
Chris: I’ll call you Frank.

00:01:17
Ned: Oh. See, I was trying to make a huge joke about, you know, the flip-flop of a transistor and… you ruined it. You ruin everything.

00:01:25
Chris: You’re the one that brought up oblivion.

00:01:28
Ned: [laugh].

00:01:28
Chris: Donnie Darko was only an obvious next step.

00:01:30
Ned: [laugh] Oh, yeah. You know, I haven’t actually watched that movie, probably in 20 years. Maybe it’s time.

00:01:39
Chris: It’s still awesome. You have to watch the Director’s Cut. The other one doesn’t exist.

00:01:43
Ned: Oh, interesting. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen the Director’s Cut.

00:01:47
Chris: Yeah, it’s got two things going for it that you have to be aware of: one, it’s about 20 minutes longer—

00:01:52
Ned: That’s okay.

00:01:53
Chris: And two, it makes sense.

00:01:56
Ned: That would be helpful. I feel like I got to the end of Donnie Darko, and it didn’t make sense. Something didn’t quite click for me.

00:02:03
Chris: Yeah, all the stuff they removed.

00:02:06
Ned: [laugh] Okay, so maybe—all right, I have my mission for this evening, if I choose to accept it, which I might. I recently watched The Marvels. There’s another movie that the ending makes no sense at all. Like, I know that superhero movies are going to have superhero logic and that a lot of times, it’s just like a big quest to get some tchotchke, a MacGuffin, you know? And the only thing that I ask is that, internally, the rules of the superheroes and their superpowers make internal sense. They don’t have to make actual sense. Like, I don’t need the physics to be true to real life, but I need them to be internally consistent and have some sort of logic within the movie, and this completely failed at that.

00:02:52
Chris: Yeah, so it’s two different problems. With Donnie Darko, it was all kinds of interference from the higher-ups, in the sense that they wanted to make the movie simpler, and more palatable, and you know, a wider audience, blahdy-blahdy blah. My understanding with The Marvels is that they just raced to the start line. It was an absolute rush job. And like, a lot of just, maybe if we had taken, you know, a few minutes and done a second pass, or edited at all, it would have helped.

00:03:25
Ned: They needed a James Gunn to come in, and make you care about the relationship between the characters, and then they also needed that touch of a good sci-fi author who knows how to build internal mechanics in a world and have them feel like they make sense.

00:03:39
Chris: Right. Didn’t do that.

00:03:41
Ned: No, they didn’t. Anyway, [laugh] let’s talk about something else. What’s in a word, Chris?

00:03:48
Chris: Letters.

00:03:50
Ned: At least four.

00:03:51
Chris: Occasionally, a hyphen.

00:03:54
Ned: How dare you? [laugh]. In the last two weeks, there’s been flooding, an earthquake, and a solar eclipse. Redis has changed their licensing model to be—I forget which one; SSPL maybe—and HashiCorp has started legal action against OpenTofu over claims of plagiarism, initially logged by Matt Asay from MongoDB, who have also changed their licensing model.

00:04:19
Chris: You remember the, like, 50 times we’ve talked about possibly doing an episode about licensing models, and just ran away screaming every single time?

00:04:28
Ned: Ah jeez. I mean, we can talk about it if you really want to, but I think my post on LinkedIn really said it all, which was quote, “I’d like to get back to building cool shit with Infrastructure as Code, and not engaging with the ‘discourse.’” I just, I can’t, Chris. I was offered a chance to know more about the legal details of the HashiCorp suit by an insider, and I declined.

00:04:52
Chris: Interesting.

00:04:53
Ned: That’s not like me. I like knowing things. Knowing things, that’s like—that’s kind of my jam. I’m the Tyrion Lannister over here. And yet, I simply cannot muster the will to engage. I was going to say that I can’t muster the will to care. That’s inaccurate. I do care, maybe too much. I care, but I just—I can’t muster the energy.

00:05:18
Chris: No. No, I get it. Sometimes you’re too close to the topic, and it wraps you up with all of its potentialities, and the only thing to do is sit on the couch and do nothing.

00:05:30
Ned: Well, I did something close [laugh]. I mean, so the state of open-source is looking a little shaky right now, and I would say that I want everyone out there in the landscape to start acting like grownups, but the problem is they kind of are. They’re acting like petty nitpicking adults who have totally lost the forest for the legal trees. So, maybe it’s time for them to, like, act like children. ‘Sharing is caring,’ all that giant purple dinosaur bullshit.

00:05:59
Chris: Sounds pretty communist, comrade.

00:06:04
Ned: [laugh] Jawohl. So, I need some whimsy in my life, Chris. That’s what I need. So, let’s get whimsical about the history of terms and technology.

00:06:12
Chris: Do I have to stretch first?

00:06:14
Ned: It couldn’t hurt. Or it might—

00:06:15
Chris: Oh [laugh], oh—

00:06:16
Ned: —depending on how you do your stretches [laugh]. It’s a deep burn [laugh]. All right. So, I’m calling this technology etymology.

00:06:27
Chris: Did you do that because it rhymes?

00:06:29
Ned: Yeeahhh. Naming things is hard. Rhyming helps.

00:06:33
Chris: [laugh].

00:06:34
Ned: It’s especially hard to name things when it’s something new that’s never existed before. And when we deal with new concepts or things, we tend to use the terminology of anything that is slightly analogous to it. Eventually, that analogy becomes disconnected, or the technology evolves to leave the original connection behind. You can think of the vestigial floppy disk icon that we use for saving things. I’m willing to wager that 90% of our audience hasn’t touched a floppy disk in a decade. The only reason I’m in the other 10% is because I helped clean out my parents’ house when they moved in 2022. And sidenote, in case you’re wondering, a Windows 11 does not know what to do with a floppy that was formatted for an Apple PowerPC running macOS 8. My poetry of 1997 is lost forever.

00:07:25
Chris: Every actual fan of E.E. Cummings is just breathing a huge sigh of relief.

00:07:30
Ned: [laugh]. You know I’m not going to engage on that because you’re too right, and it hurts [laugh].

00:07:34
Chris: [laugh].

00:07:37
Ned: I also did not capitalize things, for reasons.

00:07:40
Chris: It’s the meaning inside the meaning, man.

00:07:43
Ned: Oh… get over yourself.

00:07:46
Chris: [laugh].

00:07:46
Ned: There are words we use everyday to describe something technology-related, and we almost never think about where they came from. Well, I’m thinking about it now, so I don’t have to think about… other things. Let’s start with uploading and downloading. Where do those come from?

00:08:02
Chris: Space.

00:08:03
Ned: Not quite.

00:08:04
Chris: Oh.

00:08:05
Ned: Close, though.

00:08:06
Chris: Indianapolis?

00:08:07
Ned: No, definitely not.

00:08:08
Chris: All right, fine. Tell me. Just tell me. I give up.

00:08:10
Ned: Okay, so there’s actually two answers that I could find. A Search of Google Books turned up a document from 1921 called “Torsion of Wing Trusses at Driving Speeds” published by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. Load, in this case, the word load is talking about the load that is placed upon the trusses and wings of a plane when flying. The report talks about mono planes versus biplanes and how mono planes seem to be less safe due to the stresses of the upload and download. That’s a direct quote from the document. We’re talking about the load that’s pushing on the wings from above and below. Strangely, the report spells ‘upload’ as a single word and ‘down load’ as two words.

00:08:58
Chris: Well, that’s just because English is dumb.

00:09:00
Ned: Oh, yeah, absolutely confirmed. Maybe I should have started the whole episode—

00:09:04
Chris: [laugh].

00:09:04
Ned: —[laugh] with that. English is weird and mostly dumb.

00:09:08
Chris: Yeah, I imagine people have seen this graphic before in any book that ever shows you the basics of how flying works, the pressure on the wing pushing up and the pressure on the wing pushing down. That’s all it is.

00:09:21
Ned: Yeah. The upload and the download. Now, that’s actually not where our use of it comes from. I did some more searching and I came across an etymology discussion on English Stack Exchange, which—is a rabbit hole that you can definitely fall down—and the evidence was that an alternate origin of the term comes from the military, and more specifically the US Air Force. The term download was meant to refer to the act of removing items from an aircraft. Literally, you were taking the load down from the plane, hence ‘download.’ The term appears in the US Air Force aircraft accident and maintenance review document saying, quote, “During downloading of armament for a routine check, it was discovered that all the missiles aboard the F-102 had their internal power source activated.” Now, that sounds ominous.

00:10:15
Chris: Yeah, but everybody that knows somebody from the Air Force is like, “Yep, I get it.”

00:10:21
Ned: [laugh]. Oh, dear. So, how did removing missiles from a plane turn into a term for computer systems? Well, the same Stack Exchange article highlights a USAF document from 1968 detailing the migration of data from one base supply system to another, and it includes downloading from a 305 system and uploading to the newer 1050 system. It appears that the terminology they were already using to refer to the movement of supplies got transposed onto the movement of data across these two systems. Now, I’m not certain that this is the authoritative origin of downloading information, but I think it’s pretty plausible.

00:11:07
Chris: Yeah, it tracks.

00:11:09
Ned: As to why we download things from the internet, that probably has to do with the client-server relationship of early computing systems: the server being the repository of information, and the client was the intended recipient of that information. So, I guess that means that servers are metaphorical planes downloading their armed and powered-on missiles onto our devices? It’s kind of apt, really.

00:11:37
Chris: Yeah, especially since a lot of the times, the security code for those missiles is 00000.

00:11:43
Ned: [laugh]. No, it’s 12345.

00:11:45
Chris: Now, is it? Well, 00000 is based on a true story.

00:11:49
Ned: I know. But, people are going to get the Spaceballs reference more than the zeros. But fine, fine. We’ll go with yours. The next one is about logging. Why do we log onto or log into and out of our systems? What do arboreal remnants have to do with gaining access to computer systems? This one is actually less of a mystery.

00:12:13
Chris: Oh. I did not expect you to say that [laugh].

00:12:16
Ned: [laugh] I asked ChatGPT and it, unsurprisingly, quoted Wikipedia back at me. Brief aside here. I’m pretty confident that ChatGPT basically just rephrase his whole Wikipedia articles as its primary function.

00:12:31
Chris: Yeah, that’s correct. And it would be an absolute miscarriage of justice if OpenAI didn’t fund Wikipedia from now until infinity.

00:12:41
Ned: They really should. They should be the top donor to Wikipedia every year. They probably won’t be.

00:12:46
Chris: No, of course not. That would be too fair.

00:12:49
Ned: So, the log in question can be traced back to two different traditions: that have a ship’s log, and a guestbook at a hotel or similar establishments. But that just begs the further question, why was the ship’s log called a log? Hmm. Well, that’s because one of the things that’s recorded in the ship’s log is the speed of the ship as it traveled, and the device used to estimate the ship speed was called a chip log, and it was quite literally a log or some other piece of wood with a string wrapped around it that had knots placed at regular intervals. The string—or logline—could be used to determine roughly how fast the ship was going, aka how many knots. Look at that. We’ve untangled two mysteries in one.

00:13:42
Chris: Wait, so they had a log—

00:13:45
Ned: Yes.

00:13:45
Chris: It was connected to a string.

00:13:47
Ned: Mm-hm.

00:13:48
Chris: Did they just throw it off the back of the boat and count as the knots passed, and said, like, X amount per minute equals this many knots is your speed?

00:13:58
Ned: If you know the circumference of the log, and I guess how fast the knots are going past, then you can roughly approximate how fast the boat is going. Or the current in the water. One or the other. So, that’s how they did it, and that’s why we measure the speed that ships travel in knots.

00:14:15
Chris: I learned something this year.

00:14:17
Ned: Yay I did it. So, that’s why it’s called a log because included in the ship’s log was that information, so they called it, you know, the log the recording of the log speeds. Also in that ship’s log were the sailors’ names who are on the ship for a given voyage, and so the term log started to refer to our record of events, and some of those events were sailors coming and going. When early mainframe systems came about in the 1960s, those systems needed to keep track of who was accessing the systems and when. That information was stored in a log, and the process of accessing the system included adding an entry to the log or logging in, sometimes also called signing in, it’s kind of funny that both loading and logging come from nautical origins, at least insofar as Air Force terminology borrows heavily from nautical terminology.

00:15:15
Chris: Well, we are all 70% water.

00:15:17
Ned: Yes. Me included.

00:15:20
Chris: That probably has nothing to do with it, but I’m going to smile and nod knowingly.

00:15:24
Ned: [laugh] Exactly. One user you can log in as is root, at least on most Unix and Linux systems. But why is the primary user on a Linux or Unix system called that? Another question.

00:15:40
Chris: Because of trees?

00:15:41
Ned: No, unf—well, sort of. Sort of yes. And we’ll get to that. I’ll admit that most non-technical people probably don’t use the term root very often, at least, not in reference to computer systems. Still, I was curious why the superuser is called root and not something like admin or God or user0. Interestingly, user0 was not that far off, and in fact, the superuser accounts on Unix and Linux systems, it isn’t actually always called root. It can be called admin, supervisor, BeOS called it Baron, which is delightful, or even toor, T-O-O-R—which is root backwards—on some variants of BSD, I believe.

00:16:29
Chris: [sigh].

00:16:29
Ned: Those have all been used. I know. Listen, people think they’re cute and clever [laugh]. We just got to give it to them. All of these accounts have one thing in common though, and that is the user ID is zero—so user0, it’s close—and they all have special permissions that no other users have on the system. Since, as you well know, Chris, Unix and Linux are file-based, meaning that everything and I mean, everything is represented as a file, the file system is kind of important.

00:16:59
Chris: You could say that, yeah.

00:17:01
Ned: Yeah. And owing to the vagaries of computer science in general, file systems are generally represented using a tree structure. So, there. We got there. It does have something to do with trees.

00:17:13
Chris: So, I was right, and you lied to me.

00:17:15
Ned: Like every other day, yes. You know, what’s at the base of a tree?

00:17:20
Chris: Apples.

00:17:21
Ned: Well, if enough of them fall, yes.

00:17:23
Chris: Uh, sleepy physicists.

00:17:25
Ned: [laugh] Not anymore. Roots. A root is at the base of a tree. In parlance, this is represented as the single forward slash to represent the root of a file system. And historically, the superuser or user ID 0 had the root of the file system as their home directory, and they were the only account able to alter aspects of the root of the file system. And so, the superuser on some operating systems ended up being called root.

00:18:00
Chris: I’ve now been looking at the word root for far too long, and it has officially lost all meaning.

00:18:06
Ned: Don’t start saying orange a bunch of times. It’s not going to end well. Nowadays, the root account has its own home directory stored at slash root, and we have also started using root as a verb as in, I rooted my Android phone to install custom firmware, which probably don’t do that. But wait, why is it called hardware and software and firmware? I didn’t have time for that one, so I’ll just link the Etymonline post for that one, which is yet another rabbit hole.

00:18:36
Chris: Say that five times fast.

00:18:38
Ned: Please, no. Okay. So, the last one I want to bring up is ‘network.’ Why is a set of interconnected systems called a network? Why is the word made up of net and work? And does this have anything to do with nautical pursuits? I think you can guess the answer to the last one.

00:19:00
Chris: I’m going to go with, probably.

00:19:03
Ned: It’s actually funny how Kubernetes has a ton of links, and its related projects also use a bunch of nautically-themed stuff. Kubernetes itself refers to a helmsman in Greek, I think. But a bunch of the other projects also use that nautical theme.

00:19:20
Chris: The setups are Helm charts and… is it Admiral?

00:19:25
Ned: There’s one called Admiral. There’s another one that was called Tiller that was part of Helm, the original deployment of Helm. And the list does keep going. Just go look at the CNCF landscape and you can pick them all out. It’s fun. Before we can talk about the word network as it applies to technology, we first have to trace back the origin of the compound word itself, since it’s a combination of net and work. Net is from Old English describing a woven mesh for catching things. Its proto-Germanic origins get a little fuzzy, so we won’t concern ourselves with them except to say that my name, Ned, was one of the alternate ways of spelling and pronouncing it. Eh? Hurray.

00:20:07
Chris: I don’t think that’s true.

00:20:09
Ned: Look it up. Work also comes from Old English worc, W-O-R-C, and has a ton of possible definitions including a military fortification, discrete action performed by a person, or a product of labor. I think the implication is that a network is a woven mesh that is a product of labor. In fact, that is how it was defined in the 1550s. Quote, “Net-like arrangement of threads, wires, et cetera, anything formed in the manner of or presenting the appearance of a net or netting.” The definition was extended in the mid-1800s to refer to any complex interlocking system like railroads, rivers, canals, et cetera. And then, in 1914, the term was applied to radio broadcast systems that were composed of transmitters and receivers.

00:21:04
Chris: Sure, telegrams and telegraphs had a play in this as well.

00:21:08
Ned: Yes, absolutely. It’s not too far of a leap from there to the first computer networks that used a variety of mediums to transmit and receive information, up to and including radio signals. And because I like having fun and avoiding my problems, I dug up a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics technical note from 1947 that discussed the, “Electrical computer for the solution of shear-lag and bolted-joint problems.” I’m not going to quote the whole block of text that I dropped into our doc because it’s a lot, but what they talk about is a network that is used to approximate the stresses in flat, stiffened panels, and doing that using the distribution of electric current in a ladder-type resistance network. So, this is not a data network as we typically think of it, but rather a network of nodes to measure the shearing forces, and an analog computer that models a dynamic system that is very difficult to express mathematically. I included a picture as well because it’s cool.

00:22:16
Chris: Yeah, I don’t have any idea what I’m looking at, but it is cool.

00:22:20
Ned: It’s a whole set of resistors that are set up in parallel in some cases, and in series in others, and you can adjust the resistance of each dial to sort of create a model of the shearing forces on a plane. The document is actually really interesting, if you care about any of that [laugh]. We’re talking about 1947 here, so you couldn’t exactly, like, whip out your laptop, fire up CAD, and run a series of multivariate simulations. Analog computers were super important for modeling dynamic systems by expressing things as derivatives. And oddly enough, analog computers might be making something of a comeback, as detailed in a recent video by Matt Ferrell over at the Undecided YouTube channel. Analog computers are kind of cool.

00:23:12
Chris: That’s a fair statement.

00:23:13
Ned: Mm-hm. Still, computing systems were using the network terminology as early as 1947, and possibly earlier. And once mainframes and terminals became a thing, it was natural to extend the terminology to refer to the mesh that interconnects nodes in a system. So, there you go. Some interesting history on how coming computing terms came into being. And for listeners out there, hi. I’m curious to see if you have terms you’ve always wondered about. Send us a message via the contact form at chaoslever.com, or ping me on LinkedIn. I had a lot of fun preparing this show. I’d be happy to do another, especially when I’m avoiding doing some other kind of work.

00:23:56
Chris: And because Ned had fun doing it, I am, of course, completely against it.

00:24:00
Ned: [laugh] As you should be. It actually all started because my oldest asked me, “Why do we hang up a phone?” And I was like, “Oh, that’s a really good question.” Because in his lifetime, he’s barely ever seen, like, a landline phone and so the act of hanging up makes no sense to him. And even landline phones, you don’t really hang them up. You put the receiver down, right?

00:24:25
Chris: Yeah. I mean, it came from the very original ones where you had the—first of all, it was the cloth cable that connected the phone—

00:24:33
Ned: Yep.

00:24:34
Chris: And then you spoke into a thing that you held, and you held the little cup to your ear.

00:24:40
Ned: Yep.

00:24:40
Chris: I mean, we’re talking about phones from, like, the ’20s. And you would, when you were done, it would hang there, and that’s how you shut the circuit.

00:24:48
Ned: Right. Yeah, you would drop the listening cup into a receptacle that would pull down the lever and disconnect the circuit. You were literally hanging something up to end the call.

00:24:59
Chris: Right.

00:24:59
Ned: And much like the floppy diskette, it makes no sense, but it’s just what—

00:25:05
Chris: Yeah, in the modern era. But we’re not going to change it. Until we do.

00:25:09
Ned: [laugh] Until we got something else [laugh].

00:25:12
Chris: The youth will probably end up calling it, like, squishing the floob, or some stupid thing.

00:25:16
Ned: [laugh]. Oh, hey, thanks for listening or something. I guess you found it worthwhile enough if you made it all the way to the end, so congratulations to you, friend. You accomplished something today. Now, you can squish the floob on your couch, eat a chili dog, and think about networks and how they’re cool. You’ve earned it. You can find more about the show by visiting our LinkedIn page, just search ‘Chaos Lever,’ or go to our website, chaoslever.com where you’ll find show notes, blog posts, and general tomfoolery. We’ll be back next week to see what fresh hell is upon us. Ta-ta for now.

00:25:52
Chris: I mean, I’m just saying man, squishing the floob: that’s got rizz. [crosstalk 00:26:00].

00:26:00
Ned: [laugh] Get the fuck out of here [laugh].