If you've ever had the (un)fortunate experience of having to work closely with a lawyer, you know that their profession seems to have it's own language. In fact, there are actually courses in law school that teach future attourneys to speak this strange mish-mash of English, French, Latin, and Greek. The medical profession shares this attribute, with doctors spewing Latin at us just to describe the common cold.
Unfortunately, ladies and gentlemen, the same can be said about us humble IT folk. It seems like every day a new acronym is created to cryptically describe something that could be very easily understood if we just used the whole words. TCP/IP, UDP, PHP, PGP, ATM... these are all great examples of the alphabet soup that surrounds the IT profession in these modern days.
I'm not suggesting that we do away with these two- to seven-letter gems. No! I love the language. It sets the true geek apart from the average user. What I would like to do is take a look back at our colorful, creative linguistic history. Below is a small collection of some of my personal favorite words, coined in the adventurous, early days of mainframe computer programming.
BOHICA - pronouced "Bo-hee-ka" - Bend Over, Here It Comes Again
Branch and Hang - The mythical assembly language instruction that would cause a computer to crash every time it was run.
Electing a Pope - To cause an integrated circuit or other electronic component to emit smoke by passing too much current through it. A reference to the smoke signal emitted when a new Pope is chosen.
EOU - End Of User - A mythical ASCII control character that would make the receiving device (originally an ASR-33 Teletype) explode on receipt.
FISH Queue - An anaolgy with FIFO (first in, first out) Queues - A joking way of pointing out that processing of a particular sequence of events or requests has stopped dead.
Garbageabetical Order - The state of any file or database that is supposed to be sorted but isn't.
Halt and Catch Fire - See "Branch and Hang" - Mythical instruction that causes components in a computer to smoke and/or catch fire.
Infinite Monkey Theorem - "If you put an infinite number of monkeys at typewriters, eventually one will bash our the script for Hamlet." See also "One-Banana Problem".
Mickey - Unit of measure of mouse movement.
Millihelen - The amount of beauty required to launch a single ship.
Ninety-Ninety Rule - The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time.
I could go on and on, but I'll let you. All of the above definitions comes from the Free On-Line Dictionary Of Computing, a wealth of information on the history of computing. The above definitions specifically came from the Humour section, but there are many, many more terms defined.
So now you know a bit of your history. As IT professionals, we have a very rich history of creativity, innovation, and sheer will-power. As we move forward, let's not forget where we've been.