The ghosts of technology in today’s language (2018)
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“Balls out” and “balls to the wall” are two different technological metaphors with the same general idea though (going at top speed).
Twitter can often times be an unpleasant place and he's always a bright spot in the noise: https://twitter.com/mwichary
> from Latin album, which in classical times was a board chalked or painted white, upon which public notices (the Annales Maximi, edicts of the praetor, lists of senators, etc.) were inscribed in black, hence "a list of names." This Latin word was revived 16c. by German scholars, whose custom was to keep an album amicorum of colleagues' signatures; its meaning then expanded to "book with blank leaves meant to collect signatures and other souvenirs."
> Latin album is literally "white color, whiteness;" it is a noun use of the neuter of the adjective albus "white"
It morphed into the modern Alba for Scotland, stemming from the same source, but I'm not sure quite of the overlap from Albion to Alba.
That may be their bets being hedged. :)
Hard to beat “calculate”, which is about finding numerical answers by moving pebbles around a counting board.
Computing via moving pebbles could easily be a surprisingly recent idea ~500 BCE, but again it’s very difficult to date this stuff.
By the 5th century BCE, Herodotus was writing about how Egyptians and Hellenes used their counting boards in different ways; by that point the technology was apparently widespread and taken for granted.
It’s hard to judge when a counting board with an explicit place-value system (where the tokens could represent different quantities depending on position) first arose, but I’d guess no later than like 2000 BCE, and possibly much earlier.
If you allow “pebbles” to also include little clay counters, and counting with them to include piling them up and changing units by trading one type of counter for another, then we have physical examples from 7500 BCE.
We have much older evidence still of counting via tally marks, because as archaeological evidence those are relatively easy to interpret. If people longer ago were counting with pebbles there’s almost no way we’d know it.
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> burning the midnight oil refers to oil lamps that date back at lest, 15,000 years ago
I take this phrase to mean doing some kind of scholarly work (reading/writing) late into the night. Apparently comes from Quarles (1635), Emblemes: “Wee spend our mid-day sweat, or mid-night oyle; Wee tyre the night in thought; the day in toyle.” So while burning stuff to make light is an old technology, this is not too old a metaphor.
Can you think of sailing metaphors which etymologically arose thousands of years ago, in forms still used? Obviously literal words like “ship”, “mast”, “row”, “sheet”, “wind”, “knot”, etc. are very old.
Also, sailing is a technology still in use. :-)
What’s your source on that? I would be really interested in checking it out.
I do remember it from back when we used to mail reel-to-reel magtapes around.
Kubernetes/Cyber/Gubernotorial/Governor means rudder.
It’s just a dead word for a dead technology.
Those were the only type people in the broader public ever knew about. Otherwise, the word “modem” both before and since is just niche technical jargon, ignored by laypeople.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_modem
Your LAN ends at your router. Your WAN begins at your modem. Your modem is the thing the ISP gives that gives you access to the Internet.
While it doesn't do the heavy lifting of converting digital traffic to/from analog signals anymore, it makes a very good nominative identifier for the particular purpose of identifying the piece of hardware that still fulfills the role of enabling connectivity with the world at large.
Now laypeople don’t have a “modem”, they just have “that internet box the ISP technician plugged in when I signed up”.
The word modem went out of popular currency too fast for it to ever spawn the kinds of more general metaphors we are talking about in this discussion.