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MHz = "megahurt"?

vwestlife

vwestlife

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On YouTube I've come across several computer enthusiasts who pronounce MHz (megahertz) as "megahurt"... as in "a 25 megahurt CPU." What's the deal with that? I'd be willing to pass it off as a regional thing, just like the Pittsburgh-area dialect of "needs fixed," "needs cleaned," etc., but one guy saying "megahurt" is from New England and another is from the Midwest.

Or am I naïve in assuming that everyone into computers should know what "MHz" stands for and how to pronounce it correctly? I've also come across some people who refer to the entire system unit / CPU tower of their computer as the "hard drive," but in that case they are novices who just aren't familiar with the terminology.
 
vwestlife said:
I've also come across some people who refer to the entire system unit / CPU tower of their computer as the "hard drive," but in that case they are novices who just aren't familiar with the terminology.
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In some cases, highly-trained professionals. I've actually seen college-level textbooks that taught people that the big boxy-looking thing on the desk is called the hard drive.

--T
 
Yea, I remember back in the 80s our IT department in user documentation referring to users' systems as consisting of keyboard, monitor,... and either "hard drive" or "CPU" for the big, square heavy thing the monitor sat on and keyboard plugged into.

I think people started calling them "CPU cases" or " Hard drive cases" and it just got shortened.

Tez
 
Actually, the situation is even worse. Almost all my normal person, non computer types call everything "memory". If they need more space for files, it's "memory".

Before I get too smug, I don't think I could pull off a trachiotomy with a steak knife in the restaurant. Different people have different knowledge and skills.
 
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chuckcmagee said:
Actually, the situation is even worse. Almost all my normal person, non computer types call everything "memory". If they need more space for files, it's "memory".
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To be even more pedantic, this isn't even wrong. All storage mechanisms used to be called memory: core memory, drum memory, transistor memory. It wasn't until later that the dichotomy between the very fast, volatile SRAM/DRAM "memory" and the much slower, persistent "drives" of "storage" became common.

And in the modern world, we're getting muddled again. NAND flash is slow, does not support random access, and is persistent; yet it is called "memory", not "storage" owing not to the fact that it is produced in a semiconductor process that "looks" more like DRAM than a magnetic disk. Unless, that is, you put the flash into an SSD, when it becomes a "drive" again. Sigh.

The point being that the terminology is and always has been a mess. Asking non-experts to understand essentially meaningless jargon isn't going to work. The clear English interpretation of "memory" (and in fact the one originally used by the experts!) clearly encompasses storage devices too.
 
Dr_Acula said:
Triple pun alert: I wonder, to get to the heart of the matter, Heinrich Herz would be quite hurt?
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If Hertz's hurts were multiplied many times over, those hurts could add up to become megahurts, causing him to be megahurt. I wonder how many hurts the memory can store before it melts down and the user does a 12-gauge reboot?

--T
 
AndyR71 said:
To be even more pedantic, this isn't even wrong. All storage mechanisms used to be called memory: core memory, drum memory, transistor memory. It wasn't until later that the dichotomy between the very fast, volatile SRAM/DRAM "memory" and the much slower, persistent "drives" of "storage" became common..
Click to expand...

When semiconductor memory started taking the place of those ferrite rings, we still called it "core". Habits of a lifetime are hard to overcome.

Officially, we called the mechanical spinning stuff "RMS" for "Rotating Mass Storage". If the contents of a disk can be accessed randomly rather than consecutively ("sequentail" merely implies an unspecified sequence of access), why isn't it also called "Random Access Memory"? We certainly talked about opening an RMS file for random access.
 
Technical terms are bound to be misheard, misunderstood and misused. Its just the nature of things.

As for RAM/ROM/RMS/secondary storage/core, maybe we should just call it tape in the turing machine sense :)
 
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