jwgli...@gmail.com (John Gilmore) writes: > Did the phrase come first, followed by its acronym? Or did the > acronym come first, followed by the construction of a more or, often, > very much less felicitous phrase to serve as its imputed its origin?
aka some claims that spool comes from spool/reel of tape which came from spools in looms ... which then generates phrase (unit-record front-end done by manually moving tape between the backend processor and the front-end handling unit record). from science center ... GML were the initials of the three people that invented GML at the science center in 1969 ... then needed to come up with the phrase generalized markup language. also from science center ... charlie invented compare&swap while working on fine grain locking on cp67 multiprocessor. CAS are his initials which then resultetd in compare&swap. initial attempt to get compare&swap added to 370 was rebuffed, the 370 architecture owners saying that the POK favorite son operating system people claimed that (360) test&set was sufficient. the challenge from the 370 architecture owners was to come up with a non-multiprocessor specific use for compare&swap. thus was born the examples (that still appear in principles of operation) for using compare&swap in multithreaded/multiprogramming applications (independent of whether running on single processor or multiple processors). compare&swap was so useful that in the 80s it shows up on many other processor architecture and used by just about all large, high-thruput, DBMS implementations. -- virtualization experience starting Jan1968, online at home since Mar1970 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
