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GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
I had a professor at university who said that the sentence “click the icon with your mouse” would have been completely incomprehensible to people half a century ago—and he had a point.
We use terms for our computer hardware every day without ever considering why they have the names they do. So here are the often strange origins of computer parts that you’ve probably never thought of.
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Mouse
A mouse is called a mouse, because the people who made the early prototypes thought that’s what it looked like. Douglas Engelbart’s team at SRI nicknamed their 1964 pointing device a “mouse” due to its small rounded shape and the cord sticking out like a tail.
Engelbart later admitted, “I don’t know why we called it a mouse. It started that way, and we never did change it”
Of course, today, computer mice don’t have their “tails” anymore and come in all shapes, sizes, and designs. So it’s not entirely obvious why it’s called a mouse. We all just accept it. Actually, looking at the original prototype in the Computer History Museum, it still doesn’t look like a mouse to me—so perhaps we all call them mice today because someone needed glasses!
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Motherboard
The motherboard is the big circuit board that all the other computer components connect to and allows them to communicate with each other. Calling it a motherboard makes some intuitive sense, but the other name for it—mainboard—makes even more sense and doesn’t have the weird familial connotation. It made more sense when the term “daughterboard” was still in common usage, but no one talks about buying a “graphics daughterboard”, so we’re just left with this vestigial term.
It predates modern computing, based on this English Stack Exchange discussion, with the earliest mention of the term popping up in 1956. The term “baby-board” is also there, which seems to predate daughterboard. Maybe the baby grew up?
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Bus
In a computer system, the physical path that data follows from one place to another is referred to as a “bus”. That’s what the “B” in USB stands for, and it’s not just “PCI” it’s the PCI bus. The word is actually a shortened form of the Latin word “omnibus” which just means “for everyone”, which was the word used to describe public coaches in the 1800s. Today, we still use the words for self-propelled vehicles that do the same job.
Electrical engineers use the term “bus bar” to describe conductors that distribute electricity, and in a computer that’s pretty much what a bus does. It’s just that the electric pulses also happen to carry information. I like to think of little one’s and zeros commuting from one place to the next.
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Keyboard
The name “keyboard” has had a long and twisted journey. The word “key” here started off in the musical sense—musical notes in a key. Then, eventually, the actual mechanisms on an instrument to make different notes became known as keys. In pianos and organs, these keys are laid out on a board—like a keyboard. From here, it makes sense that typewriters and other similar devices took on the name, because they have a superficial resemblance to these instruments. According to Etymology Online, the first recording of the term was in 1926.
It’s one of those words that just makes sense somehow, except when you stop to think about it, the “key” part doesn’t make sense, until you find out it was all about hitting the right note.
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Dongle
Well, we all know about dongles. Especially if you’re a MacBook user, but where does the word come from, and what does it even mean? The truth is that no one seems to know. It was first recorded somewhere between 1980 and 1982, and it looks like it has always referred to a device that plugs into a computer and hangs off it. My first experience of a dongle was some software my dad brought home from work, which used a hardware dongle plugged into the serial port as a form of copy protection.
No one seems to know what the origin of the word is, but a popular theory is that it comes partly from the word “dangle” and from a slang word with some rather phallic connotations. Of course, that could just be a post-factual joke. One thing I am sure about is that the word dongle makes me chuckle every time.
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Wi-Fi
You’d think that the “Wi-Fi” in “Wi-Fi router” is short for “Wireless Fidelity”. Like the term “Hi-Fi” is short for “high fidelity”—but it’s not!
In fact, it seems that it doesn’t stand for anything at all. Instead, this term is the deliberate product of some of the best marketing in history. After all, “IEEE 802.11” isn’t very catchy. So the idea was to evoke “hi-fi” which is something everyone would know at the time, but it never stood for wireless-fidelity.
Given that Wi-Fi is a part of just about every person’s vocabulary on Earth, I think that marketing team deserves whatever the marketing equivalent of an Oscar is.
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Joystick
THE400 Mini and THECXSTICK in front of a television.
It’s not a mystery why computer joysticks are called that, because they obviously take their name from the flight control sticks in airplanes. The real question is why they’re called joysticks in the first place.
The main person this term is attributed to is French pilot Robert Esnault-Peltiere, but there are other claimants, such as Robert Loraie, who used the word in his diary in 1909. Why “joystick” though? There are theories, such as the stick being the source of joy in flight, but no one really knows for sure.
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Bluetooth
Have you ever stopped to wonder why this universal wireless connection standard is called Bluetooth of all things? When I was younger, I thought it had something to do with those Bluetooth yuppie headsets everyone wore for a while. The actual origin is way weirder.
In 1997, engineers from Intel, Ericsson, and others were seeking a code name for a new short-range radio technology uniting mobile phones and PCs. Intel’s Jim Kardach, inspired by reading about Vikings over beers with colleagues, suggested “Bluetooth” after King Harald “Bluetooth” Gormsson of 10th-century Denmark.
The story has something to do with uniting the tribes of Norway and Denmark, which seems appropriate for a technology that connects disparate devices. Even the logo consists of runes representing Harald’s initials—neat!
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Chassis
OK, this isn’t that mysterious. The word “chassis” is French for “frame” and it’s the term the automotive industry uses for car frames. So it’s not that surprising that some people started to refer to PC cases as PC chassis. It’s driven by the same motivation behind calling a PC your “rig”, letting some of that cool engineering machismo rub off on the computer hobby.
So when someone says they need to clean out their rig’s chassis, it can mean taking a truck to the wash, or dusting out a gaming PC. Isn’t language fun?
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GPU (Graphics Processing Unit)
You probably think nothing of calling your GPU, well, a GPU. After all it makes perfect sense, The Graphics Processing Unit is for graphics as the Central Processing Unit (CPU) is to processing things centrally.
Except, once again, this is a marketing term that a company thought up to differentiate their product from the competition. It was NVIDIA that came up with “the world’s first GPU” to describe their GeForce 256. Before that, we called them graphics cards, graphics adapters, and later 3D accelerators.
NVIDIA defined a GPU as “a single-chip processor with integrated transform, lighting, triangle setup/clipping, and rendering engines that is capable of processing a minimum of 10 million polygons per second”.
It’s pretty convenient that NVIDIA got to define what a GPU was, and it just so happens only their graphics chip complied with that definition, but if we’re being honest, the term GPU could have applied to graphics chips that have come before if you used a more general definition, such as a processor specifically designed to process graphics. Funnily enough, these days people will refer to graphics chips that predate the GeForce 256 (such as old console graphics chips) as “GPUs”.
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That was just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to computer parts with interesting names and origins. If you start digging into software terms like Grok or Daemons, the rabbit hole goes ever-deeper. Oh, and I forgot to add, that apparently computer “bug” came from a literal moth getting into an early computer and messing things up.
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