List of computer term etymologies

A

• ABEND — originally from an IBM System/360 error message, short for "abnormal end". Jokingly reinterpreted as German Abend, because "it is what system operators do to the machine late on Friday when they want to call it a day."
• Ada — named after Ada Lovelace, who is considered by many to be the first programmer.
• Apache — originally chosen from respect for the Native American Indian tribe of Apache. It was suggested that the name was appropriate, as Apache began as a series of patches to code written for NCSA's HTTPd daemon. The result was "a patchy" server.
• AWK — composed of the initials of its authors Aho, Weinberger, and Kernighan.

  B

• B — probably a contraction of "BCPL", reflecting Ken Thompson's efforts to implement a smaller BCPL in 8 KB of memory on a DEC PDP-7. Or, named after Bon.
• biff — named after a dog known by the developers at Berkeley, who – according to the UNIX manual page – died on 15 August 1993, at the age of 15, and belonged to a certain Heidi Stettner. Some sources report that the dog would bark at the mail carrier, making it a natural choice for the name of a mail notification system. The Jargon File contradicts this description, but confirms at least that the dog existed.
• bit — first used by Claude E. Shannon in his seminal 1948 paper A Mathematical Theory of Communication. Shannon's "bit" is a portmanteau of "binary digit". He attributed its origin to John W. Tukey, who had used the word in a Bell Labs memo of 9 January 1947.
• Bon — created by Ken Thompson and named either after his wife Bonnie, or else after "a religion whose rituals involve the murmuring of magic formulas".
• booting or bootstrapping — from the phrase "to pull oneself up by one's bootstraps", originally used as a metaphor for any self-initiating or self-sustaining process. Used in computing due to the apparent paradox that a computer must run code to load anything into memory, but code cannot be run until it is loaded.
• bug — often credited to Grace Hopper. In 1946, she joined the Harvard Faculty at the Computation Laboratory where she traced an error in the Harvard Mark II to a moth trapped in a relay. This bug was carefully removed and taped to the log book. However, use of the word 'bug' to describe defects in mechanical systems dates back to at least the 1870s, perhaps especially in Scotland. Thomas Edison, for one, used the term in his notebooks and letters.
• byte — coined by Werner Buchholz in June 1956 during the early design phase for the IBM Stretch computer.

  C

• C — a programming language.
• C++ — an object-oriented programming language, a successor to the C programming language.
• computer — from the human computers who carried out calculations mentally and possibly with mechanical aids, now replaced by electronic programmable computers.
• cookie — a packet of information that travels between a browser and the web server.

  D

• D — a programming language.
• daemon — a process in an operating system that runs in the background.
• Debian — a Linux distribution.
• default — an initial value for a variable or user setting.

  E

• Ethernet — a computer networking technology.

  F

• finger — Unix command that provides information about users logged into a system.
• foobar — from the U.S. Army slang acronym, FUBAR. Both foo and bar are commonly used as metasyntactic variables.

  G

• Gentoo — a Linux distribution.
• Git — a distributed version control system.
• GNU — a project with an original goal of creating a free operating system.
• Google — a search engine.
• Gopher — an early distributed document search and retrieval network protocol on the Internet.
• grep — a Unix command line utility

  H

• Hotmail — free email service, now named Outlook.com.

  I

• i18n — short for "internationalization".
• ICQ — an instant messaging service.
• ID10T - pronounced "ID ten T" - is a code frequently used by a customer service representative to annotate their notes and identify the source of a problem as the person who is reporting the problem rather than the system being blamed. This is a thinly veiled reference to the CSR's opinion that the person reporting the problem is an IDIOT. Example: Problem reported caused by ID10T, no resolution possible. See also PEBKAC.

  J

• Jakarta Project — a project constituted by Sun and Apache to create a web server for Java servlets and JSPs.
• Java — a programming language.
• JavaScript — a programming language.

  K

• Kerberos — a computer network authentication protocol that is used by both Windows 2000 and Windows XP as their default authentication method.

  L

• Linux — an operating system kernel, and the common name for many of the operating systems which use it.
• Lisa — A personal computer designed at Apple Computer during the early 1980s.
• liveware - computer personnel.
• Lotus Software — Lotus founder Mitch Kapor got the name for his company from 'The Lotus Position'. Kapor used to be a teacher of Transcendental Meditation technique as taught by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.

  M

• Macintosh, Mac — a personal computer from Apple Computer.

  N

• Nerd — A colloquial term for a computer person, especially an obsessive, singularly focused one. Originally created by Dr. Seuss from his book If I Ran the Zoo.

  O

• Oracle — a relational database management system.

  P

• Pac-Man — a video arcade game.
• PCMCIA — the standards body for PC card and ExpressCard, expansion card form factors.
• PEBKAC - an acronym for "Problem Exists Between Keyboard And Chair", which is a code frequently used by a customer service representative to annotate their notes and identify the source of a problem as the person who is reporting the problem rather than the system being blamed. This is a thinly veiled reference to the CSR's opinion that the person reporting the problem is the problem. Example: PEBKAC, no resolution possible. See also ID10T.
• Pentium — a series of microprocessors from Intel.
• Perl — an interpreted scripting language.
• PHP — a server-side scripting language
• Pine — e-mail client.
• ping — a computer network tool used to detect hosts.
• Python — an interpreted scripting programming language.

  R

• Radio button — a GUI widget used for making selections.
• Red Hat Linux — a Linux distribution from Red Hat.
• RSA — an asymmetric algorithm for public key cryptography.

  S

• Samba — a free implementation of Microsoft's networking protocol.
• shareware — coined by Bob Wallace to describe his word processor PC-Write in early 1983. Before this Jim Knopf and Andrew Fluegelman called their distributed software "user supported software" and "freeware" respectively, but it was Wallace's terminology that prevailed.
• spam — unwanted repetitious messages, such as unsolicited bulk e-mail.
• SPIM — a simulator for a virtual machine closely resembling the instruction set of MIPS processors, is simply MIPS spelled backwards. In recent time, spim has also come to mean SPam sent over Instant Messaging.
• Swing — a graphics library for Java.

  T

• Tomcat — a web server from the Jakarta Project.
• troff — a document processing system for Unix.
• Trojan horse — a malicious program that is disguised as legitimate software.
• Tux — The penguin now commonly regarded as the most famous logo of the Linux Kernel and its deviants.

  U

• Ubuntu Linux — a Debian-based Linux distribution sponsored by Canonical Ltd.
• Unix — an operating system.

  V

• vi — a text editor,
• Vim — a text editor.
• Virus — a piece of program code that spreads by making copies of itself.

  W

• Wiki or WikiWiki — a hypertext document collection or the collaborative software used to create it.
• Worm — a self-replicating program, similar to a virus.
• WYSIWYG - describes a system in which content during editing appears very similar to the final product.

  X

• X Window System — a windowing system for computers with bitmap displays.

  Y

• Yahoo! — internet portal and web directory.

  Z

• zip — a file format, also used as a verb to mean compress.