The astounding speed and creativity in the field of IT development has seen an unprecedented proliferation of new technologies, rivalled only by the industrial revolution. And like that fertile period, we have also needed to invent a lot of new terminology to describe the latest tech. Whether the intention is to educate, inspire or market, we need ways of communicating about our concepts, theories and products.
Many of these terms are coined in English, but are commonly adopted more or less verbatim by other languages. While this takes them one step further from their origins, it is also true that the etymology of many terms remains unknown to native English speakers, too.
The origins of some terms have become fairly well known, perhaps through social media or quiz shows. Many people will have heard, for instance, that the term bug refers to real insects attracted by the warmth of the vacuum tubes used in early computers and obstructing connections. The cloud is a rather picturesque way of describing the diffuse nature of online data storage or services. Firewalls existed long before IT as physical barriers to prevent fire spreading from one sector of a building to another. Sandboxing derives from the area where children can play safely or to the detonation of explosive devices in a safe environment. Harald Bluetooth was a Danish King whose Runic initials form the bluetooth logo.
Both spam and Python were inspired by Monty Python’s Flying Circus, revealing the sense of humor shared by techies the world over. I’m surprised unresponsive devices are not yet referred to as dead parrots.
But do you know the interesting origins of avatar, cyberspace, wiki and Ubuntu? And the history of the word algorithm?
Avatar
Now mainly referring to colorful, wide-eyed gamer surrogates, the word avatar has a much loftier history. It originates from the Sanskrit word avatāra, which means "descent". In Hinduism, a deity might descend from heaven to earth in human or animal form to restore cosmic order, such as the incarnations of Vishnu. It entered English in the late 18th century to describe this divine incarnation. Current use of the term to describe a digital incarnation dates back to a 1979 computer game called Avatar. The term avatar was also used in Songs from the Stars, a 1980 novel by Norman Spinrad, in a description of a computer-generated virtual experience.
Cyberspace
Coined by William Gibson in his novel Neuromancer, cyberspace was a term the author said “seemed like an effective buzzword. It seemed evocative and essentially meaningless.” He used it in the book in the following sense: “Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity.” Sounds familiar.
Wiki
The word wiki, used to denote an online publication which can be edited collaboratively, has its origins in the Hawaiian expression wiki-wiki, which means “quick”. The first user-editable website was called WikiWikiWeb. Launched in 1995, WikiWikiWeb’s founder was inspired by the Wiki Wiki shuttle service he had used to get around the Honolulu airport terminal.
Ubuntu
The widely used open-source operating system Ubuntu has a name based African philosophy. The word belongs to the Bantu family of African languages and means “I am because we are”, representing a focus on interpersonal relationships, community, and sharing. Its founder, the South African tech entrepreneur Mark Shuttleworth, chose the name "Ubuntu" to represent the project’s community-driven ethos, emphasizing that “we bring the spirit of Ubuntu to the world of computers and software”.
Algorithm
Muḥammad ibn Mūsā al-Khwārizmī was a Persian mathmatician, who lived from the eighth to ninth centuries CE. When his works were translated into Latin, his name was latinized to Algoritmi and he became the father of the algorithm. By all accounts, this genius laid the foundations for modern mathematics and computation. His impressive work titled The Compendious Book on Calculation by Completion and Balancing presented the first systematic solutions of linear and quadratic equations, using geometric reasoning rather than symbolic notation. Its original title included the term al-jabr (meaning “restoration”), which gave rise to the word algebra.