Acronyms, numbers and letters
The IT profession was characterized by alphabet soup right from the word GO!
Last week my daughter asked me why my profession is called IT, instead of something in plain English. She did have a point – though I refrained from commenting on the DVDs and CDs lying on the floor of her room, or the time she spends on MSN while listening to her MP3.
All professions have their jargon. Doctors favor marathon words longer than German nouns. Lawyers use long-winded English, with some Latin thrown in for good measure. The computer industry of course favors acronyms. There are two types of acronyms : the ubiquitous 3-letter ones like ERP (Enterprise Rectal Pain), and gobbledygook like PCMCIA (People Can’t Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms). The first computers were called ENIAC, RAMAC and PDP, ran languages like FORTRAN, COBOL and JCL, and were built by companies like IBM, DEC and the BUNCH (Burroughs, Univac, NCR, Control Data and Honeywell). The profession was therefore characterized by alphabet soup right from the word GO. Even the alphabet was not enough – the colons of a new era went overboard in their use of colons and other special characters. The whole #&*%@:$! industry was awash in it !
So to no one’s surprise, the newest member of the organizational chart in the fifties branded itself with an acronym : EDP (Erroneous Data Processing ), followed later by MIS (Mostly Inadequate Service) and finally IT (I Try). In contrast, other company departments get by with plain English names, like Finance, Accounting or Purchasing. Even the legal profession, that bastion of conservatism and intellectual superiority, is content to go by the simple name of Legal – which is just as well, otherwise we’d have even more lawyer jokes doing the rounds. HR, incidentally, was the only other department to go down the acronym route, but they’ve always been an insecure lot anyway (plus any re-branding away from the word ‘personnel’ could only be a step in the right direction).
Acronyms may be irritating after a while, but there’s no denying their staying power. Examples : IBM and NCR are the only member of the original BUNCH still in existence today; in the HP-Compaq merger, guess who’s running the show? There’s also no denying the marketing power of acronyms, and their ability to get people to buy in to the latest buzzword, as long as it’s known by a clever acronym, eg CRM (Can’t Really Matter).
And when we ran out of acronyms, we simply tagged on numbers. The first mainframes and minicomputers had names like CDC-7600, PDP-11, VAX or the IBM 390 – not to be confused with the IBM 3090. This numbers game continued with the first micro-computers, like the MITS Altair 8800, Radio Shack TSR 80 and the Levi Strauss 501.
This great tradition was diluted, however, as numbers and letters gradually gave way to names. The person who kicked off this trend was Apple’s Steve Jobs, who started by naming his company after a fruit. He then brought out a computer named after a girl, the Lisa, which was based on technology he picked up during a stroll in the PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) at Xerox. Since then we’ve seen computers called the ProLinea, Performa, Presario, Aptiva, Jornada, Inspiron, Vaio and Lenovo. Geez, where do all these cutesy names come from ? Who let these marketing people through the door ?
I think it was a plot by the folks from Detroit who were laid off during the slump in the American auto industry in the 80s. Determined to wreak revenge on the thriving computer industry for transforming them into second-class corporate citizens, they successfully took over all of marketing in Silicon Valley. This explains why most computers today have meaningless, feel-good names which end in an ‘a’ and sound like a run-down of the models and concept cars from last year’s auto show.
I say the profession has forgotten its roots. Whatever happened to the original world of acronyms, numbers and letters that knit together a whole community ? It makes you hark back to the good old days when computers were named after the street number of the founder’s house!
MG
