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A few days ago I came across a YouTube rip of a 1994 VHS I had owned as a kid. I enjoyed watching the video and the memories it brought back, but I hadn't paid much attention to the video credits before. This time I noticed that the crew included a position to manage Internet presence and marketing, and the position was called "On-line Editor." I hadn't seen this hyphenated version of the term in decades, and I'd almost forgotten it had existed in the first place.
Everyone is familiar with "online", and I think many people understand its origins, even those who have not used dial-up modems. "Online" is a shortening of the phrase "on the line", in reference to early networking and Internet access being performed over telephone lines. If your computer was connected to a modem and sending or receiving data, it was "on the line", or on-line. Soon the term was ubiquitous, to the point that the hyphen was dropped and the phrase became a single word.
The legacy of the term as two words remains in some subtle ways. The company AOL, originally short for "America Online", split the word in its acronym, even though it always wrote the full name without a hyphen. OL is still a common abbreviation for online, just as OFL is for offline.
Old technology fascinates me, but old names for technology are interesting in their own right. There was once a time when mobile phones were called "cel phones" with one L. Aircraft were once referred to as "aeroplanes" in the United States, a term still in common parlance in Commonwealth English. I still capitalize the word "Internet" when I write it, and I still hyphenate "e-mail"--two holdovers from a time gone by.
Even fairly recent terms have fallen out of style in the last few years. A prominent example is the word "phablet", referring to a smartphone whose screen diagonal measured more than about 12 cm, or 5 inches. When that term was coined in the early 2010s, most smartphones had screens measuring about 4 inches. The Samsung Galaxy Note, which had a 5.3-inch display, was derided as a phablet when it was first announced, and commentators doubtful that consumers would want a device that was almost too big to fit into a pocket. Today the average smartphone screen size is above 6 inches, rendering the "phablet" distinction useless, so the term has almost entirely disappeared.
What are some old tech terms you remember, or even still use? I'd love to hear about them.
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[Last updated: 2024-07-03]