Acronyms aren’t exclusive to technology, but technology seems to generate them at an alarming rate.

One of the first acronyms I was exposed to in my IT (Information Technology) career was COBOL - COmmon Business Orientated Language. It didn’t take long for me to get bored with programming in COBOL. Many years and a few programming languages later, I could still pick up the language again in a couple of days, it is one of those things you can’t forget, no matter how much you try. Little did I know then that I would eventually be developing in Visual Basic - BASIC being an acronym for Beginner’s All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code, which explains why many BASIC compilers are named with the word BASIC in Capitals, for example BCX BASIC, QuickBASIC and PowerBASIC.

The latest version of Visual Basic is included in Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 Standard.

 

Another industry which seems to generate acronyms is the mobile phone industry. The mobile phone technology which the Apple iPhone uses is GSM, which stands for Global System for Mobile communications. There are about 2 billion GSM mobile subscribers worldwide. GSM phones use SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) cards. The other mobile phone technology with a large base in the United States, CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access), makes use of an ESN (Electronic Serial Number) instead of a SIM Card. CDMA has over 400 million mobile subscribers worldwide.

This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to acronyms in programming and mobile phones.

Posted on March 6th, 2008 by mervyn