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What is your least favourite acronym?
(lemmy.nz)
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this post was submitted on 07 Jan 2024
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Do you remember before we had usb devices, our laptops had credit-card-sized PCMCIA slots?
I love that word. What's it mean? People can't memorise computer industry acronyms. ;-)
Oh wow! I knew about TWAIN (technology without an interesting name), but that takes the cake!
Sorry to ruin the fun but it stands for "Personal Computer Memory Card International Association"
There is a joke around the name, as you said, though :)
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Computer_Memory_Card_International_Association
Nothing ruined :) I knew that, and wanted to share the fun version first. Thanks for providing the true version, of course.
Another real acronym with a funny story (maybe only to old geeks like me) is STONITH.
Back when "high availability" meant two servers with shared storage and a "heartbeat" network connection, if one of the servers failed, the second one would notice there was no more heartbeat from the first and pick up the traffic so users would never know.
However, if the servers lost the network connection, there'd be no way to tell if the other server was still running and if both continued accessing the shared storage, they could corrupt the application data. So each server could take over if it noticed the other wasn't available by executing STONITH (Shoot The Other Node In The Head) basically sending a power down signal to the PDU, making sure the other node couldn't corrupt data.
That is amazing! Thank you for this!
My dad is from the punch card era and he had stories like this. But that one is new to me!
Installing linux drivers / modules for PCMCIA wifi cards :(
That’s the neat part, you don’t
Happily it started being known as PC-CARD.