[HN Gopher] Telefunken Datenspeicher
___________________________________________________________________
Telefunken Datenspeicher
Author : cl3misch
Score : 133 points
Date : 2024-03-16 08:11 UTC (14 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (retrocomputing.stackexchange.com)
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| Telefunken also invented the first mouse.
| actionfromafar wrote:
| That ups "invented the first mouse" to at least three different
| inventors.
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "First" is always difficult, I agree, even the big bang might
| be second.
| xenonite wrote:
| Do you have a reference?
| KingOfCoders wrote:
| "First rolling-ball mouse"
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_mouse#Rollkugel
|
| https://www.e-basteln.de/computing/rollkugel/rollkugel/
|
| Engelbarts mouse didn't have a ball.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| It's so cool to see machines from an age when Germans still
| referred to technical things using their native language.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| It's still mostly the same in Germany today.
|
| My cousin in Germany is doing a 1-year long IT schooling course
| (going from how a PC works, how Win and Linux work, Shell/PS
| scripting to python and AWS) and the course material has all
| the technical terms in German: "Rechner", "Speicher", Ordner",
| "Betriebssystem", instead of Computer, Memory, Folder,
| Operating system.
|
| Almost nothing from the course material is in English, which
| was shocking to me as if you're searching online for solutions
| to issues or learning new concepts, you can't expect in your
| career to only Google things in German and find answers in
| German, but you'll have to know to use everything in English to
| broader your search and knowledge base, so forcing all the
| candidates and materials in German feels like an unnecessary
| crippling.
|
| So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative
| digital dinosaur underneath, pretending to be cool and modern.
| _" How do you do fellow Kinder?"_[1]
|
| My 0.02 Eurocents
|
| [1] https://youtu.be/fiOMbqPHFwo?si=CIbdpdTXnkQ6MyJs&t=28
| denotational wrote:
| > Germany is still a conservative digital dinosaur underneath
|
| Using one's native language as opposed to English is
| sufficient to make one a "conservative digital dinosaur"?
|
| I think your conclusion is correct, but I don't think this
| Anglocentric argument is the reason why.
| Unfrozen0688 wrote:
| In a way it makes it harder to then learn further on later,
| something required in IT.
|
| I studied IT in Sweden and all the course material is in
| English. MS books, Linux books, Cisco CCNA books etc.
|
| I imagine, as I can't compare, that this makes it easier to
| learn further in IT, and participate in communities such as
| this.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| _> Using one's native language as opposed to English is
| sufficient to make one a "conservative digital dinosaur"?_
|
| That's just my opinion based on personal experience, which
| can't be right or wrong because like I said, it's an
| opinion and not a fact.
|
| From what I saw, yes it kinda is. I'm from eastern Europe
| originally, and here we learn CS and everything IT related
| directly in English, even though we have our own words for
| the technical terms, nobody's using them and we just
| default to the English words. If you go to the Nordics or
| everything north of Netherlands including them, everyone is
| schooled in English as well when it comes to IT.
|
| It's mostly Austria, Germany, France and few other
| conservative countries who insist on using their local
| language for IT terms out of national pride or something,
| as using too much English is seen as an defeat/attack on
| their culture.
| Tainnor wrote:
| The US is the only country that insists on using systems
| of units that nobody else is using and that hasn't
| stopped it from becoming an economical juggernaut.
|
| > That's just my opinion based on personal experience,
| which can't be right or wrong
|
| I think yours is actually a (theoretically) falsifiable
| theory about cause and effect, so it can be right or
| wrong.
| schroeding wrote:
| I can't agree. It's not about national pride, IMO, but
| about the organic development of the language. Some of
| these terms date back to the pre-war period, think of the
| Zuse-1 era.
|
| Many IT words that used to be German _were_ replaced by
| English words _if_ they were shorter (
| "Direktzugriffsspeicher" => RAM) or easier to pronounce
| ("Hauptplatine" => Mainboard), and e.g. OS is a common
| abbreviation in German for "Betriebssystem" because it is
| shorter - but "operating system" is not, so why switch?
| There is no upside, so the language didn't evolve that
| way.
|
| Use Windows or Linux in German, directories are called
| "Ordner" - why would you teach "folder" instead if the
| course is in German?
| holri wrote:
| > It's mostly Austria, Germany, France and few other
| conservative countries who insist on using their local
| language for IT terms out of national pride or something,
| as using too much English is seen as an defeat/attack on
| their culture.
|
| I think it is more awareness of the fortune of cultural
| diversity.
| numpad0 wrote:
| No offense but that's just American centrism at play.
| Lingua franca of computing is English, everyone should
| just learn "the human language" and it'll save everyone's
| times, computer runs in English, everything should
| translate clean from English, etc etc.
|
| There's nothing wrong in using local languages. Speaking
| not-English is not bad. Many go for English because
| there's a lot of money to chase in the market, not
| because it's objectively right by some truth of this
| universe.
| Tainnor wrote:
| "Rechner" and "Computer" are interchangeable and probably
| used equally frequently, as are "Hauptspeicher" and "RAM",
| etc. Some words do seem to be mainly referred to by their
| German names ("Betriebssystem", "Datenbank"), while for many
| others, I'm not aware of any German equivalent in common
| usage ("event sourcing", "operations", "pull/merge request",
| "branch", ...).
|
| Sometimes, in university courses I've seen German names for
| things I had only ever heard the English term of. I suspect
| almost nobody in the industry actually uses these German
| terms.
|
| So, not everything is in German. I guess it's probably mostly
| the stuff that's been around a long time that has acquired a
| German name, but newer tech is typically referred to by
| English terminology.
|
| I also agree with my sibling commentor that dismissing a
| culture because they don't exclusively use English
| terminology is silly. The German language certainly didn't
| stop Niklaus Wirth (who was from Switzerland and spoke
| German) from winning the Turing Award.
| Kwpolska wrote:
| I have a degree in CS, from a Polish university, and
| virtually all the course material was in Polish. That's a
| legal requirement, since I signed up for a degree taught in
| Polish, and I can't be expected to speak English, even though
| I would be useless in real life if I didn't. An English
| version would be available, but it would probably be painful,
| considering how bad some of the teachers are at short
| phrases, let alone a semester's worth of lectures.
|
| Similarly, all my direct coworkers speak Polish, and that's
| the language we use to talk about technical matters. We do
| use English words randomly, and our code (comments and
| variables) and docs are in English, but nobody is complaining
| about people using their native language.
| FirmwareBurner wrote:
| You're confusing two deferent things. I was talking about
| the language of technical IT terms, not which language you
| use at the course/school/university as of course that will
| almost always be the local language out of legal
| requirements.
|
| In your Polish courses do you use translated Polish words
| for all the IT technical terms, or the original English
| ones?
| p_l wrote:
| It's a mix. General terms will be usually in Polish, in
| some older textbooks or other materials you can encounter
| really different terms that relate to different era.
|
| Things like "Zbior danych" (or just "zbior") instead of
| "plik" - which translate to "data set" Vs "file"
| eternauta3k wrote:
| What are examples of technical IT terms you use in
| English instead of translating them?
| tetha wrote:
| I have one memory from university just burned into my head
| and will most likely never forget it. During a course on
| operating systems, I got increasingly confused by the prof
| talking about "Speicherkacheln", which translates to "memory
| tiles" - i.e. small tiles you'd glue to a wall in a bathroom.
|
| It took me a hilarious amount of time to realize he was
| talking about mem pages. Many things about that lecture fell
| into place once that clicked.
|
| Later on, especially the newer courses, had no qualms about
| just keeping english terms around, or at least made sure to
| include the english terms though. All of the interesting
| research happened internationally anyway.
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| > My cousin in Germany is doing a 1-year long IT schooling
| course (going from how a PC works, how Win and Linux work,
| Shell/PS scripting to python and AWS) and the course material
| has all the technical terms in German: "Rechner", "Speicher",
| Ordner", "Betriebssystem", instead of Computer, Memory,
| Folder, Operating system.
|
| Those are established popular terms with nearly half a
| century of usage. Newer or less popular terms are often just
| English.
|
| > Almost nothing from the course material is in English,
| which was shocking to me
|
| Maybe you don't see it? What about shell, cloud, webservice,
| etc. Is there something about router, switch, smartphone,
| microservice, AI? Ai is a pretty funny case, as there is a
| German term for it (KI), but in the new hype now, it's barely
| used at all, even in academics.
|
| > So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a
| conservative digital dinosaur underneath
|
| It's not conservative to have your own culture and history.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> It's not conservative to have your own culture and
| history._
|
| Relax, nobody's saying to take your beer and Lederhosen
| away, but why force your own translations to established
| industry technical words onto students?
|
| It just creates confusion and hampers further self learning
| and cooperation as the lingua franca of IT is Englisch
| anyway.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| TBH, if a student lacks the brain capacity to translate
| German technical terms to English in a course that's held
| in German language then I would question the fitness of
| said student for a technical job in general.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| It's not a job, it's a course. Not everyone attending
| such a course is fluent bilingual.
|
| But that's beside the point.
|
| The original point we if the vast majority of the
| technical IT jargon is English anyway why do you also
| need to change them to German for a course or industry?
| Why not keep those words in English?
| Tainnor wrote:
| I don't think you understand how languages work. Nobody
| sat down and "decided" to use German words instead of
| English ones (maybe that's what happened with the
| Academie Francaise, but that's a different topic). Those
| German terms have been in use for decades.
|
| Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall and
| cookie, too?
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| _> I don't think you understand how languages work. _
|
| I'm not talking about languages, I'm talking about the
| specific words of IT jargon which all originate from
| English.
|
| _> Are you going to force UK speakers to say truck, fall
| and cookie, too?_
|
| No, because those words are not universally used
| technical IT words bound together by a common language.
|
| With your logic then every country should translate the
| mnemonics of the programing languages from English to
| their local languages too, no?
|
| So the "while()" loop will be "wahrend()" in German
| version of C and "pendant()" in French version of C.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| Devils advocate, but I code using US spelling for
| variable names, and avoid using Imperial terms to US
| English speakers because if they can't wrap their minds
| around me being in the southern hemisphere and my summer
| being their winter, they won't be able to cope with
| "capsicum".
| PurpleRamen wrote:
| What confusion? There are now multiple generations who
| have learned those terms, somehow nobody ever seems to
| have a problem with them.
| Rinzler89 wrote:
| What about the generation learning it now from scratch?
| interloxia wrote:
| KI is used by the media, including by a kids focused radio
| station, Toggo Radio, that my kids love.
|
| They have well written news segments where it comes up
| relatively frequently at the moment. I don't have cause to
| talk much about AI to my kids yet so time will tell which
| terminology they adopt.
| LAC-Tech wrote:
| _So despite the new clothing, Germany is still a conservative
| digital dinosaur underneath, pretending to be cool and
| modern. "How do you do fellow Kinder?"[1]_
|
| It's funny to me how German speakers thing it's cool and
| modern to use English words throughout their German. But when
| I as a native English speaker read Denglish, it looks about
| as cool as socks w/ sandals.
| _trampeltier wrote:
| Siemens S7-300/400 PLCs manuals used german words (Akku,
| Doppelwort ..). Also AWL (something like Assembler for PLCs)
| used german mnemonic by default. It just changed with the new
| S7-1200/1500 TIA generation. Now they use english words
| everywhere and AWL mnemonic is english by default.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| As a German I use browsers in English because when I have to
| google things it's much easier and you don't need to translate
| back and forth in your head. Also I prefer technical
| documentation such as on Microsoft's developer pages or AWS in
| English. It's just so much easier with the lingua franca.
|
| It's true that in the past there were much more German words in
| "IT" starting with EDV (Elektronische Datenverarbeitung,
| essentially that is IT). Favorites are "Datensichtgerat"
| (Monitor) with companies like Siemens (Nixdorf) or NCR that
| actually built Datenverarbeitungsgerate.
| mr_mitm wrote:
| Same here. I love the creativity (and am impressed by it) it
| takes to invent new German words for things, even though I
| agree that it is impractical for the reason you pointed out.
|
| Sadly, terms like "Klapprechner" for "laptop" or
| "Verklemmung" for "deadlock" never caught on.
| ofrzeta wrote:
| Now that you say it ... some professors stubbornly seem to
| stick to "Verklemmung" :)
|
| https://os.inf.tu-
| dresden.de/Studium/Bs/WS2021/V07-Verklemmu...
| qznc wrote:
| Enjoy this pdf of nearly 400 pages:
| https://www4.cs.fau.de/DE/~wosch/glossar.pdf
| honululu wrote:
| The second I started reading this thread I was wondering
| how long it would take for a Wosch document to show up!
| Thanks for making my day :)
|
| I took his OS class in undergrad and I remember
| distinctly being annoyed at "Faden".
| gumby wrote:
| ,,Verklemmung" is actually a better word for it than
| "deadlock".
| jabiko wrote:
| This reminds me of the time I worked for a local
| telecommunications company and wrote software to interface
| with EWSD (Elektronisches Wahlsystem Digital) switches.
| Honestly, working with telecommunications systems was the
| best time I had in my entire career.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| I agree that English as lingua franca of computing makes
| sense, especially when communicating with non-(German)-native
| speakers. But one important reason why German is no longer
| viable for this is the terrible state of translation from
| English to German. Instead of using the "established" German
| terms, English terms are usually translated word-by-word to
| German without context, either by machine translation, or bad
| human translators who don't have a technological background
| (for instance for a long time, "link time code generation"
| was called "Link Zeitcode Generierung" in MSVC's German
| documentation, which doesn't have anything to do with LTCG
| even though it is correct German and a (mostly) correct word-
| by-word translation of the English term).
|
| And instead of this butchering of the fine German engineering
| language, just switching to English is indeed the better
| alternative (and less painful).
|
| My favourite trivia btw is that the 'else' in 'if-else' is a
| "bad" translation from German into English ;)
| (https://github.com/e-n-f/if-then-else/blob/master/if-then-
| el...)
| formerly_proven wrote:
| The upside is that English comprehension correlates
| extremely well with technical ability for non-graybeards.
| Curiously german hiring managers haven't caught onto this
| at all, though that might be because they themselves
| largely lack the required language skills to test
| candidates for this.
| flohofwoe wrote:
| The same effect correlates with overrating the technical
| skills of job candidates who are native English speakers
| in German companies though ;)
| lb1lf wrote:
| I held onto my former job for another couple of years
| longer than I had expected precisely because of the fine,
| German engineering language.
|
| It turned out that a supplier of a critical subcomponent in
| some of the systems we were designing and building, had
| terrific German-language documentation.
|
| The English docs? Not quite as great, packed with
| ambiguities which simply weren't there in the originals.
|
| Seeing as I was the only one on the team who could read
| German almost fluently, I simply pulled the 'Who's going to
| read the docs if I am let go?' card during every downsizing
| process for years. It worked until someone realized we
| hadn't supplied any systems with that particular component
| in it for years and I, alas, had typed up excellent
| documentation for our service department, covering their
| needs.
| usrusr wrote:
| Even as a kid still going through that phase where English
| lessons at school consist of very simple descriptions of
| family life that add some new words each week, I felt
| betrayed by GW BASIC documention referring to some concept
| with the cryptic letters "E/A". When I realized that they
| were talking about "I/O", translated as Eingabe/Ausgabe,
| suddenly it all made sense.
|
| There really needs to be some way for language preferences
| to include quality in some way. No, I probably don't want
| an English dub of something Asian when there's also a
| German dub. But I certainly also don't want some machine or
| lowest bidder translation that only exists to serve people
| with no foreign language skill at all (or that's not even
| remotely as good as the company that commissioned the
| translation thinks.
| maweki wrote:
| > There really needs to be some way for language
| preferences to include quality in some way.
|
| In theory, there is. It's called content negotiation.
| With your browser request you already send a list of
| preferred languages, like "Accept-Language: da, en-
| gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7". RFC9110 states that such a
| quality/weight is assigned to different representations
| of a resource.
|
| So all the server needs to do is multiply their quality
| with your preference and return the one with the highest
| value.
|
| So the technology for that is already in place. It just
| isn't done.
|
| See: https://www.w3.org/International/questions/qa-lang-
| prioritie...
| bee_rider wrote:
| If translated back into English, would
|
| > Link Zeitcode Generierung
|
| be best understood as something like "Link time-code
| generation," rather than, "Link-time code generation," or
| something like that?
| numpad0 wrote:
| > Link Zeitcode Generierung
|
| Just for clarification, this says "Link Timecode
| Generation" where it's supposed to be "Link-time Code-
| generation"?
|
| I always assumed English-German MT must be somehow
| serviceable, I wonder if that had been true but limited to
| its syntax and did not apply to vocabulary, or if German MT
| is just as useless but German computer users are just
| patient.
| Semaphor wrote:
| > As a German I use browsers in English
|
| I think we are a pretty small minority. Even Germans that are
| very fluent in English tend to use everything in German. And
| for that matter, though my sample size is far smaller there,
| so seem other countries. The few French Canadians I know all
| have their software in French.
|
| I'm the only one of my friends I know who has everything set
| to English, some of them even watch German dubbed shows and
| movies. And that's despite most of them being fluent in
| English.
| Ylpertnodi wrote:
| Dubbing is awful (and awful for learning a language) - eg
| Arnold doesn't ever sound like Arnold; people's voices
| don't always match their physique but voice is a very large
| part of someones/ a character personality.
| Semaphor wrote:
| My understanding (I watch in English, after all) is that
| for them, the dubbing actor is actually an important part
| of the character.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| This is true, but in French Canada it's a point of pride to
| do everything in French. I think if your kids cannot speak
| English at all you get a merit badge and higher social
| status. I don't believe it's quite the same in Germany
| Semaphor wrote:
| With me not speaking French, I'd assume those are a bit
| happier with English, considering that I can talk with
| them ;)
| jaflo wrote:
| Regarding documentation: my pet peeve is Google's developer
| docs which default to showing docs in your account language
| with no way to change that. It would be fine if the
| translation was decent, but Google insists on using their
| awful machine translation and I would much rather just see
| the docs in English. But there's no way to set that as the
| default as far as I could tell.
| tass wrote:
| I don't know if the default can be changed, but Firefox
| makes it easy to load a tab in a different account with
| containers.
|
| You could by default load the documentation domain with an
| account set to English.
| H8crilA wrote:
| My pet peeve in English terminology is the very word
| "computer". It should have always been called something like
| "the mathematical machine", computation is just one of them!
| The French l'ordinateur is much better.
| dxdm wrote:
| > computation is just one of them
|
| I always thought that, apart from moving bits around,
| computation (in the sense of performing calculations, like
| the people that used to be called "computers" before) is
| the only thing a computer actually does. It just so happens
| that the computations have many practical applications and
| results.
|
| I don't quite understand the versatility of "ordinateur"
| that you mention. Maybe it's because I only know a little
| bit of French (and a tiny speck of Latin), but it sounds
| like it refers to something that puts things in order, like
| sorting. And that seems to be only a subset of what
| computation can do.
|
| In short, I'm wondering how my interpretation of these
| words differs from yours.
| addandsubtract wrote:
| It's kinda sad that we have to use US keyboard layouts as
| well, to make us of all the keyboard shortcuts targeting it.
| Best example being the slash chars, which are not dedicated
| keys, so any shortcuts envolving them don't work.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| I feel like in German, you can tell someone a name of tool or
| other device and they will instantly understand what it is.
| Translate "Skill Saw" to German and it is completely lost.
| That being said English has a lot of short form hacks that
| make communication, faster...
| unwind wrote:
| Skil [1] is a brand of circular saws, which I believe they
| invented.
|
| [1]: https://www.skil.com/
| fuzzfactor wrote:
| At one time there were places that had engineers and just plain
| inventors would could dream up new vacuum tubes in their sleep.
|
| Plus come up with factories that could mass-produce the products
| at commodity prices.
|
| I always thought it was cool to see what happened when people
| like that got a hold of _programmable_ electronics, especially
| solid-state.
| 486sx33 wrote:
| I feel like closing that loop was actually bad for innovation.
| When we designed analog tubes, there could be some exciting
| piece to make/invent. Now everything is programmable and we get
| stuck on "why" or "what" we are trying to make before we even
| start.
|
| A bit like computer software, no one just messes around to make
| pong or hello world anymore, they are spending 6 months white
| boarding the thing before they write any code. (Or maybe they
| aren't, but in hardware we do)
|
| So ... nothing super amazing in my sleep anymore. Waking up in
| the middle of the night to design a circuit to provide a
| constant -5vdc for a 555 timer while the rest of the circuit is
| +\\- something or another, just doesn't happen anymore.
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