Goodness me – not another TLA

Well, are you mystified already. Some will be and be wondering what the Boffin is on about, others who know will smile. A TLA is a Three Letter Acronym, something computer geeks and NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) are rather fond of. NASA tends to use a lot of acronyms, some wonderfully contrived to make words. I got told off last month for using DSLAM short for Digital Subscriber Line Access Multiplexer, a mechanism at a phone company's central location that links many customer DSL (Digital Subscriber Line) connections to a single high-speed ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) line. One favourite of mine is the GNU project, which stands for GNUs Not Unix, which is quite true. It rather combines a bad pun, self-reference and a good computer in-joke all in one (and All-in-One was a DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation) a computer manufacturer which has now disappeared).

Some of these computer words are in fact abbreviations or condensations such as modem (MOdulator-DEModulator). The same is true for codec (COmpressor-DECompressor). A NASA spacecraft is called MESSENGER which stands for MErcury Surface, Space ENvironment, GEochemistry, and Ranging which does describe the mission of the space probe, but is convoluted to say the least.

For a very good site to help you find out more, do visit http://www.webopedia.com/ which has a very good collection of the computer terminology and acronyms. So if you need to sort out you Megabits, Kilobytes and manometers, it is a good place to start. You might learn one or two new ones to baffle your friends.

So until next month – TTFN.

John Kimberley