We use “online” to refer to just about everything nowadays, but how did the expression “to bring [something] on line”, in the sense of making it operational or active, get started?
Obviously it’s a pre-computer usage, as you can see from this 1974 reference to bringing on line a new high performance water tunnel or this 1969 reference to a pumped hydro unit brought on line.
But the phrase must be way older than that. How old is it, and what exactly was the “line” originally referred to?
Well shoot me. The OED seems to think it’s not way older than 1969, since they cite this occurrence from 1968 (in the related form “came on line”) as first in the list.
Apparently the more-or-less synonymous “on stream” is a few decades older.
What line? What stream?
This has the origin as 1945-1950. That makes sense in terms of computer usage.
Your own cite above shows usage in 1950. Were you looking only for non-computer usage?
Yes. The similar term “on stream” apparently goes back at least to 1930, so I’m betting that “on line” as applied to power plants and so on long pre-dates the computer era. You could bring a power plant “on stream”, and presumably also “on line”, long before computers were being “directly connected to a peripheral device”.
But I can’t seem to find a specific origin or approximate earliest use for it in the context of pre-computer industrial technology.
Thanks, btw!
In the airline business “the line” refers to the complete daily flow of aircraft over routes. When a new crew member or new aircraft is first put into service they are put “on the line”. Usually not just “on line”, but that terminology would still get the idea across. When an aircraft is taken out of service for maintenance it’s sometimes said to be “taken off the line.” Lkewise a crewmember going into management or the training department.
That term (along with a host of others) was borrowed from the railroad industry. Which in turn borrowed from the steamship industry.
In the electrical power industry generators are refered to as “on [the] line” or “off [the] line” as well. I’d bet they even use those terms to describe various segments of the grid, e.g. “the north-south interconnect is offline today.”
I’ve also read WWII-era books which used the offline / online terminology to apply to boilers or turbines in ship powerplants.
So I’m going to say “on [the] line” or “off [the] line” as terms for “in operation” or “not in service” date back to the early 1900s if not earlier. I’d say the advent of early steamships or early electrical distribution systems would probably be the limit on the earliest use of the terms.
Both “online” and “onstream” can refer to electrical power or to railway systems, so it may be a bit older than computers.
What about in the context of warfare?
Bringing troops or ships to the line or on the line?
Line
29.
a. A formation in which elements, such as troops, tanks, or ships, are arranged abreast of one another.
b. The battle area closest to the enemy; the front.
c. The combat troops or warships at the front, arrayed for defense or offense.
d. The regular forces of an army or a navy, in contrast to staff and support personnel.
e. The class of officers in direct command of warships or of army combat units.
f. A bulwark or trench.
g. An extended system of such fortifications or defenses: the Siegfried line.
Bringing a generator or power plant “on line” is as old as generators and power plants. My brother was a power plant supervisor and I remember him talking about that back in the 50s.
Actually that proves nothing, because computers had already come into existence by WW2. Primitive yes, but they were computers that could be brought online.
BANG
I decided to take a quick look, and that seems to be the case:
The book was Railway Reminiscences, a reprint of a 1909 book that was published before 1923 and it was quoting a report with rules and a system that used the telegraph to signal the train status that was made for the British railways in 1854.
So were the relays in electrical machines and early computers being equated with junctions on railway lines?
My guess would be the expression “on line” goes back to the early 1900’s when Ford utilized the assembly line in auto production. Any unit in the active production stage would be on line.
This was my immediate thought. Once the concept of a production line is established with all various manufacturing or assembly stations being part of the critical path, the the importance of bringing something “on line” makes perfect sense.
Being “online” in terms of connection to a network feels like a separate and different use of the same term.
It is somewhat. In computers ‘online’ can mean operating, ‘offline’ not operating. But ‘online’ can also mean operating with a direct communications connection between two or more operating components, and ‘offline’ meaning those components are operating without that connection. In ye olde days of the horse-drawn computers a printer might be ‘online’ and directly connected to a computer, or ‘offline’ where a 9-track tape was created by a computer, and then carried to a stand-alone printer with it’s own tape drive for ‘offline’ printing. Just to keep things confusing that printer was likely to have an ‘online/offline’ button to start and stop the printing.
This is all very interesting and informative, thanks! So it looks like this is a pre-computer industrial production term that was just transferred to computer systems. Would still love to see an early use of it, though!
Puzzling point: If “on line” derives from a production line and may go back as far as the early 1900s, why does the approximately synonymous “on stream” seem to be attested earlier? Did people speak of a “production stream”?
The term may have had its origins in the navy, where the ‘line’ is a line of warships facing the enemy. I guess if part of the line broke, then another vessel would be brought on line and into battle.
The ‘line’ seems is also an army term, for much the same sort of thing.
I suspect it may also have been used in telegraphy, a technology that is much older than the production line and electricity distribution and, of course, it involves a physical wire.
However, looking at the Oxford English Dictionary, the oldest reference seems to be 1926. Referring to coal mines connected by railway lines.
Sounds pretty plausible.
Thanks filmstar, yes, that OED cite is the same one I linked to in post #2. But I’m not quite convinced that that’s the same expression as the “bring/come on line” that I’m talking about.
The 1926 usage is for definition A.1.a of “on line”, and I’m asking about definition B.2. It’s not clear that the latter is directly derived from the former.
I don’t know but waterwheel power was the mainstay of the early industrial revolution and it could be the source of the term. The word ‘line’ in these uses probably wouldn’t have made sense prior to the electrical era.
Just popping in, battered and bloody, to remark that MY GOD DOES GOOGLE ADVANCED BOOK SEARCH SUCK SWEATY HAIRY DONKEY BALLS OR WHAT. I can find plenty of sources that contain the phrase “on line”, but attempting to restrict them by publication date seems to have no discernible effect. Google Scholar isn’t much better in that regard.
The Ngram viewer gives an idea of the emergence of the phrase “come on line”—although how they can be sure of the date range when Google Book Search seems incapable of correctly identifying publication dates is not clear to me—but doesn’t let you see which books it’s getting the date from.
In short, although there are lots of early-20th-c. references to equipment or configurations being “on line” as in “in line”, i.e., lined up, and to locations “on line” meaning “on a particular railway line” or “on a particular power line”…
…the concept of “to bring on line” or “to come on line” in the sense of “to make or become operational”, said of some complicated system or component, appears to be a primarily WWII-era idiom.
I still would like to know more details, though. (But it’s become apparent that I won’t be able to find them via Google Book Search. Man, that thing sucks so bad.)
Thanks to all!
On-line with computers refers to being connected to something else. Pre-networked computers like the minis I used to use were not on-line. You’d log into them, but but not go on-line.
One thought - though I haven’t looked this up. If you have ever visited a very old machine shop, the tools are run by a belt which connects up to a shaft hung from the ceiling which turned. To start up your machine you used something to put your belt on the shaft, which would get your machine, a lathe say, turning. I could see that being called bringing the machine on-line.