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by Eric Gunnerson.
Original Post: The persistance of nomenclature
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Yesteraday, I was struck by the fact that in a technological world, nomenclature
outlasts the items it refers to.
When I first joined Microsoft ("The year was 1994. The place was Redmond, Washington..."),
we used MS Mail for email, and for scheduling, there was part of it named Schedule+.
If you wanted somebody to schedule a time with you, you would ask them to "sched+"
a meeting with you.
That usage has persisted over the years, and just yesterday I found myself using it.
As I used it, I wondered if the person I was sending that message to had ever actually
used Schedule+.
There's a similar situation with our bug tracking software. For years, we used various
releases of an internal product named "Raid", and though we moved to Product Studio
(the "studio" term shows up a lot...), you still "Raid" a bug, and probably always
will.
When new people start and you have to explain this to them, you feel a bit strange
(don't worry about uncle Herbert. He does think that he's a plant and insist we water
him every day, but other than that, he's perfectly all right).
This morning, I was looking for more examples of this. Record/CD is one, though I
always use "album", and I think that's still true if you choose to buy your
music. Since IP pays for my motorcycle, my skiing, I buy all my music.
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