The Secret Histories of Those @#$%ing Computer Symbols

Where do you guys come up with this stuff? I think you are a little confused on Bluetooth ... from what I understand, it was named "Bluetooth" because when looking at the waveform on an oscilloscope (with blue phosphor obviously), it looks like little blue triangular "teeth" and not the typical sine wave you usually see in radio communication. Yes, the geeks named this one, and I'm sure they didn't care about some 10th Century Danish King!

Umm, just search for "Bluetooth Name Origin" or something similar. You can even find old articles from when Bluetooth was still being developed, and read quotes from the creators of the tech. The transmission protocol is named after Harald Bluetooth, who unified Denmark. It is so named to reflect the ideal that Bluetooth would allow lots of devices to work together, like the Danes did, after unification. It was named that way by engineer geeks from Ericsson in Sweden, a fellow Scandinavian country. They would care about a 10th C Danish King because that is the sort of thing that geeks care about, stuff which nobody else knows anything about. And these are geeks from right across the water. They may have been looking for a B name thanks to oscilliscope output (I don't see any references to that), but they didn't name it "Balls" or "Baglady".

It's the internet guys. Anything written on the internet should be treated as fact. ;)

Iowa is a state located in the Midwestern United States, an area often referred to as the "American Heartland. It derives its name from the Ioway people, one of the many American Indian tribes that occupied the state at the time of European exploration.

European geeks do. As a Brit I am still living with, and complaining about, what was done here a thousand years ago by an eleventh-century Norman king whose land-grab still means I can't afford a decent house with enough lab space to do my development work properly.

And my people are still complaining about some German vagabonds who came in and took over - just about when those pesky Romans were finally leaving. Of course, we still had those refugees that Julius pushed out of Gaul - and to think they named our island after them (worthless brits).

The SBBOD symbol originated with NEXTSTEP. When Steve Jobs left Apple he formed NeXT Computers. The company was later changed to NeXT when they started selling more software than hardware and the OS went through several capitalization changes and a version called OpenStep that ran on Solaris , HP-UX, AIX and other OSes. But I digress...

The original NeXT Computer (the hardware not the company) was shipped with a removable optical disk and no hard drive as I recall. When the system was accessing the optical disk the cursor would change from the standard pointer to the colored, spinning symbol. The symbol was intended to look like a spinning optical disk with the visible light refracting off the spinning disk's surface. Thus, the symbol was an actual representation of the process the computer was executing at the time.

In those days, the spinning optical disk symbol, as it was known, was not a sign of impending doom, rather it was a sign of normal operation.

When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, or should I say when Apple bought NeXT along with Steve Jobs, the NeXTStep OS was morphed into Mac OS X via the Rhapsody project. Many of the NeXTStep actions, methods, menus and symbols were integrated into the Mac OS including the spinning optical disk symbol.

Today, the spinning optical disk symbol seems to indicate any time the system is busy enough with some task that processing has been suspended. Sometimes whatever has caused the system to suspend operations will time out or will be completed so processing continues merrily on its way and the spinning optical disk return to a pointer. The netinfo daemon was notorious for this behavior. When the daemon timed out processing would resume.

The older Mac OS used a spinning beach ball. Mac OS X uses the NeXTStep spinning optical disk. Beach balls died with Mac OS 9.

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