Computer science is comprised entirely of this kind of dork.
There was a benchmark program called Whetstone, named after a rock for sharpening blades. It was all about floating-point math. So most people used the integer-heavy version, Dhrystone.
There’s a debugging-symbol format called DWARF that I assumed was the name of some archaic debug program until I found out it only works on ELFs.
MIT developed the Compatible Time-Sharing System for mainframes. Their AI lab didn’t like it. So they developed the Incompatible Time-Sharing System.
The first Soviet mainframe was named the “Little Electronic Calculating Machine.” It filled sixty square meters.
Nicholas Metropolis, a Manhattan Project alum, was tired of acronyms like ENIAC and EDVAC. He christened Los Alamos’s big-iron machine MANIAC. Nobody got the joke. They all thought he’d made the trend even worse.
IBM refactored some PowerPC mnemonics circa 1994. The developers gave very convincing rationale. So officially, there’s no particular reason the Enforce In-order Execution of Input / Output command became EIEIO.
There’s an early programming language called A Programming Language. It’s sadly unrelated to the B programming language, but B did lead to C… later inspiring C++ and C#. Both names mean ‘one step further,’ but for different subcategories of dork.
Computer science is comprised entirely of this kind of dork.
There was a benchmark program called Whetstone, named after a rock for sharpening blades. It was all about floating-point math. So most people used the integer-heavy version, Dhrystone.
There’s a debugging-symbol format called DWARF that I assumed was the name of some archaic debug program until I found out it only works on ELFs.
MIT developed the Compatible Time-Sharing System for mainframes. Their AI lab didn’t like it. So they developed the Incompatible Time-Sharing System.
The first Soviet mainframe was named the “Little Electronic Calculating Machine.” It filled sixty square meters.
Nicholas Metropolis, a Manhattan Project alum, was tired of acronyms like ENIAC and EDVAC. He christened Los Alamos’s big-iron machine MANIAC. Nobody got the joke. They all thought he’d made the trend even worse.
IBM refactored some PowerPC mnemonics circa 1994. The developers gave very convincing rationale. So officially, there’s no particular reason the Enforce In-order Execution of Input / Output command became EIEIO.
There’s an early programming language called A Programming Language. It’s sadly unrelated to the B programming language, but B did lead to C… later inspiring C++ and C#. Both names mean ‘one step further,’ but for different subcategories of dork.
These are amazing