An old-timer gets into a tizz when
he realises that a computer has stolen his pet’s name
BC: Can you imagine people naming their
pets after computer jargon? I read about this guy who named his
guinea pigs Qwerty and Wysiwyg (What you see is what you get).
AD: Not surprising, I have a friend who
named his dog Floppy because he had long ears.
BC: Can you imagine a cat being named
Laptop and a Chihuahua being called a Widget?
AD: Going by your logic, a mule can be
named ASCII and…
BC: But my neighbour's dog can surely
be named GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out). That’s exactly what he
does all day.
AD: But why can’t animals be named
after computer terminology when computer parts are named after
animals?
BC: What do you mean?
AD: One of the reasons why the mouse
was named so was because the cord that connected it to the computer
resembled a tail.
BC: But now you’ve also got Mouse NT.
AD: NT as in New Technology, like
Windows NT?
BC: No, NT as in No Tail - the cordless
infrared mouse.
AD: And then, you have software
glitches that are called bugs. Can you believe that they once found a
real bug – a moth – that caused the malfunction of the computer?
BC: That must have been terribly
bugging, right?
AD: But the bug didn’t stop there.
Technology dug its way underground as well and unleashed the worm, a
destructive, self-replicating programme that ‘worms’ its way into
computer networks. There are different kinds of worms - Sadmind,
Sasser, Santy, Klez, Blaster, Sober, Witty…
BC: Sounds like the seven dwarves with
Snow White…
AD: Snow White incidentally, is a virus
that appeared a decade ago.
BC: A virus and seven worms causing
millions of computers to lie still and lifeless – that doesn’t
make for a pretty fairy tale.
AD: Then there’s GNU, an operating
system that’s…
BC: Gnu’s an African antelope, right?
AD: Yes, but it stands for Gnu’s Not
Unix – hence GNU!
BC: Who would go for a name like that?
AD: ‘Go for’ reminds me of gopher,
an internet application. You'll be surprised at the number of animals
that are called gopher – a species of rodent, a large burrowing
snake, a prairie squirrel, a large land tortoise…
BC: I can understand technology being
named after an antelope - but a tortoise?
AD: In that case, what would you say to
a programming language named python? Did you know that it was
developed for an open source operating system called Amoeba?
BC: Can you imagine calling helpline
and complaining that there's a virus in your amoeba?
AD: How about Tomcat, a java-based web
server from Apache? They also created Ant – an acronym for Another
Neat Tool - a software tool for Java projects.
BC: Worms, viruses and ants. Think I’ll
just go back to conventional names like Coco for my dog.
AD: Sorry, the Tandy TRS-80 Color
Computer was called Coco, short for Color Computer.
BC: Ok, Lassie then? That’s common
enough, right?
AD: Not really. LASsie (Light
Application Security) is a library of Microsoft Access objects…
BC: Is there anything at all that I can
call my pet?
AD: How about ‘dog’? It's not yet
computer jargon.
BC: Oh c’mon…
AD: It could have been worse. Imagine
if your pet was a mouse…
