Understanding computer jargon, from floppy disks to glitches

Sometimes computer terms are whimsical and other times downright odd, making one wonder if they are leftover terms from yesteryear – like “dialing” a number.

People start computers with a boot and end a session with a shutdown. Now shutdown I get, because it means “Turn off the lights; the party is over.” But we could have said “Turn off the computer” or “Power off.” Shutdown brings images of a nuclear power plant.

Then there’s the floppy disk – a term you probably haven’t heard in a while. So named because the media (I’ll get to that in a moment) was in the form of a flexible plastic disk. If you held a floppy in your hands and shook it, you could make it “flop” around. Hence the name.
Now about “media,” a term typically used in radio, TV, newspapers and such. In an attempt to define the storage of news, articles and eventually applications for playback or delayed distribution, computer designers thought about the printed word and called it media. It means any storage device.

Commodore Grace Hopper used the term “bug” in 1946, when the U.S. Navy was first exploring computers. Hopper, who had a Ph.D. in math, was in charge of evaluating computer feasibility. Her computer was about 15 feet wide and 7 feet tall, called a UNIVAC (Remington Rand Corp). It had 64k of memory, about the size of today’s email.

She was attempting to calculate a string of numbers when it malfunctioned. Back in the day, large cabinets housed vacuum tubes that created a great deal of heat. It happened that a moth flew into the cabinets and died. When the bug fell on electrical connections, it fried a circuit and caused the malfunction. So, computer malfunctions and failures became known as “bugs.”

So now you know more “a-boot” computer terms. That reminds me: What is a boot anyway? The term comes from bootstrap. Author Rudolf Erich Raspe coined the term bootstrap in the book about the fictional German nobleman Baron Munchausen (1785). The baron was said to have pulled himself out of a swamp by his bootstraps. Thereafter, the term boot meant to pull yourself up or start. The imaginative movie remake, directed by Terry Gilliam of Monty Python fame, is hilarious, by the way.

Did you know astronaut John Glenn’s 1962 book “Into Orbit” popularized the Yiddish word glitsh (sic), meaning “slippery place”? So that glitch in your computer may be a spike or change in voltage when a load is applied, like firing up a hard drive. But today’s computer meaning is “Something went wrong and I don’t have a clue what it is.”

When your computer freezes from overheating, maybe there is a glitch in the “thingamabob” causing the buggy output. So just shutdown and reboot’n’strapn.

William Claney is an independent tech writer and former owner of Computers USA in the Clayton Station. Email questions or comments to willclaney@gmail.com.