Millionaire.
Originally, a term denoting practically unlimited wealth: at the time of its origin, a million USD would today be something like 100 million USD.
In 2014, a million USD might still be “rich” depending on where you live, and what your situation is. On average, it’s about what people ca. 1800 would have called comfortable, prosperous, etc.
No gnus is good gnus … from Adrift in a Boneyard, by Robert Lewis Taylor
Bob
The IBM AT (Advanced Technology) PC (Personal Computer) is so primitive nowadays that I imagine that the Amish are considering buying a few.
The Industry Standard Architecture PC bus is no longer followed by 99% of computer manufacturers.
In a way, NT is still around. There used to be two almost entirely different product series that were marketed as “Windows” - the old DOS-based Windows that lasted until the infamous Windows Me and included the famous Windows 95 and Windows 3.1 operating systems, and Windows NT, which included, among others, Windows NT 3.5 and the famous Windows NT 4.0. NT 5.0 was in the rumor stages for a long time (I remember the talk), and did eventually come out…as Windows 2000. They dropped the name but not the basic technology. Windows XP is actually Windows NT 5.1. Don’t believe me? Load up an old copy of XP, pull up a command prompt, and run “ver”. It will say 5.1. The old Windows doesn’t exist anymore, except in our memories. Everything is NT now. Except we don’t call it NT anymore, because that’s all there is.
How high is Uber Hyper Mega Ultra Super High Frequency?
And the wonderful irony is that geologically it’s probably the oldest river on the continent—it predates the rise of the Appalachian Mountains, which is why it cuts across the mountains going the “wrong” way.
Then there’s New Thought, which started around 1860. The New School (for Social Research) in New York, founded 1919. Art Nouveau, which started circa 1895. I get why naming something “new” has its appeal, but to do so is remarkably short-sighted, and I wonder that more namers don’t consider that.
Four states of the American union have names that start with “New”. And while I get why “New York” might have seemed like a good idea, by the time they got around to admitting New Mexico, in 1912, they must have been aware that “New” wouldn’t be new forever.
According to this, the New River is the oldest river in the western hemisphere, and the third oldest in the world.
A hundred years later, it’s still the newest Mexico out there.
D-sub, a type of electrical connector, stands for D-subminiature. I don’t know if there was a “miniature” connector that was larger, but anyway, the “subminiature” name is very much obsolete. It’s one of the larger connectors used these days.
The Very Large Telescope is still very large, but in 10 years it will be dwarfed by the European Extremely Large Telescope. Sadly, the even larger Overwhelmingly Large Telescope was/is not funded for construction.
Well New Mexico is and will continue to be newer than old Mexico. So I the New is OK, but still calling it Mexico is a little off.
As far as the goes the whole modernist movement is almost 100 years old, and was updated with post modernism Which I always felt should be left to science fiction. When that ended they tried to settle the whole matter by calling the current art contemporary, until some bozo came along and started arguing that we are post contemporary (whatever that means). Pretty soon of course that will be seen as old hat and they will have to come up with some other term To say that this is newest and this time we really mean it.
Energy class A (actually even A+) is now the worst one still assigned to refrigerators and washing machines.
I must say that I disagree with your examples, although certainly lots of obsolete descriptors do exist. Minicomputers didn’t somehow become larger over time and thus outgrow their moniker; they were physically big right from the start – witness, for instance, the DEC PDP-1 first produced in 1959 and arguably the first minicomputer – it was huge! (The DEC PDP series pretty much defined what a minicomputer was; other companies’ offerings were basically knock-offs.)
It was only later that some models became relatively small – the PDP-8/S was about the size of a dresser drawer. The concept of “mini” really referred to their relatively low cost and relatively low processing power at the time, to distinguish them from the mainframes of the day. The term “microcomputer”, which was used before IBM coined “PC” and which gave Microsoft its name, is actually a good deal more ironic. They were originally called that because they were even cheaper and even less powerful than minicomputers, but today some of the most powerful mainframe architectures are based on massively parallel arrays of chip-based processors that owe their ancestry to “microcomputers”.
“High definition” TV is still perfectly valid as it’s the highest resolution defined in broadcast standards and distinguishes it from the still-common standard definition. 4K TVs exist but hardly anyone has one; 2K and 4K are mainly standards for digital cinema. And “heavy duty battery” is just a marketing term.
It isn’t like there were any smaller credible computers at the time, but there are people who peg the PDP-8 as the first minicomputer, for the reasons you mention. Interesting page on the subject.
True; I was a bit vague on my size range, but my point stood: A CPU the size of a piece of furniture all on its own is hardly mini by our standards, now that all non-antique CPUs are single chips which fit comfortably on one finger, and we can even etch whole systems into a single die.
Actually, I’m pretty sure the name came from the fact they were all built around single-chip microprocessor CPUs, instead of CPUs which were assembled from multiple integrated circuits or, as was done in the late 1950s and early 1960s, discrete components with no integrated circuits in sight.
And microcomputers owe some of their ancestry to minicomputers, in specific the idea of building a usable, working CPU out of a seriously constrained number of components (and the simple fact early CPU designers had had some prior experience with minicomputer ISAs) and even mainframes, at least to the extent that a lot of them inherited the eight-bit byte as the smallest addressable unit of RAM from the IBM System/360. My point is, one, ideas spread from era to era, same as people, and, two, not using the most integrated fabrication process available to build your system would be perverse unless you have something other than performance uppermost in your mind.
On the other hand, your “fullscreen” DVDs no longer fill the screen of your now-standard widescreen HDTV, unless you don’t mind watching distorted, fat people.
But compare to all the confusion between Georgia on the East Coast and Georgia in Asia. I have a friend who did her doctoral dissertation on Georgian chant and it was always confusing when she posted to Facebook. Calling ours New Georgia would have prevented all that.
We could just rename old Georgia in English. The Georgian people don’t actually use that name anyways. We could start calling it Sakartvelo or Kartvelia.
US Georgia can’t be “new” Georgia, because it isn’t named after Georgia the country. US Georgia was named after King George II.
