Like many industries, IT has a host of shorthand terms that are thrown around to the point where they are commonplace, at least for the IT professionals using them. For more casual users these terms are gibberish. I have been working with and on computers most of my life, and I’m often having to look up new terms or relearn old ones simply because there are so many. In this blog we are going to talk about some common ones, and some with interesting origins.
BUG
The basic meaning of this term is probably understood, or at least familiar in the context of computers to many people. What it actually means and how it came to be is less widely known. The term “bug” implies that somewhere there is a piece of code that is causing an error in a computer application. This usually happens during the development of the program, or when it is released into the wild and ends up interacting with another application that it was not designed to play nice with.
The origin of this term comes from an era when computers were mostly mechanical instead of microcircuits. The first actual computer bug was recorded on September 9th, 1947 in a computer called the Harvard Mark II Aiken Relay Calculator. It was a moth with a 2-inch wingspan that had to be removed to allow the machine to function properly. This machine weighed 23 tons and took up most of a building in a US navy facility in Virginia. It produced a tremendous amount of heat. Working late into the night, a member of the team working on this machine decided to open a window to let in some fresh air, and the moth became attracted to the lights and heat. Here it met its demise, however its story will live on, its body taped to a researcher’s logbook that now resides in the Smithsonian.
USB
Universal Serial Bus is an industry standard class of cables, connectors, and protocols used to transfer power and data. Primarily for peripherals such as printers, keyboards, and mice. In some cases, it can be used to connect your machine to monitors as well. The first word in the acronym is self-explanatory. A serial connection refers to the interface through which information is transferred in or out, one bit at a time (as opposed to a parallel interface which transfers multiple bits simultaneously). The term bus simply refers to a path along which data travels.
O365/M365/365
Office 365 and Microsoft 365 refer to subscriptions that can include a suite of cloud and desktop applications, depending on what type of license is purchased. On April 21st, 2020, Microsoft decided to further confuse their customers by rebranding most personal and small business subscriptions as Microsoft 365 subscriptions, leaving their enterprise subscriptions branded as Office 365. Since people already weren’t asking “what exactly is Office 365?” enough, they decided to make the answer even more obfuscated.