One of my favourite books is a little thing called ‘Glossary of basic computer terms’, published by ICL Training in 1978. Every now and then I will dip into it to see how much of it is still even remotely relevant, and every time there is less that means anything in contemporary computing. It is also a good way to get a wave of nostalgia for how we used to do things. I was not involved in computers in 1978, but a lot of this book still applied in the early 80s when I started out.

A couple of entries that caught my eye today:

Write (permit) ring: a plastic ring that must be attached to a reel of magnetic tape before the hardware will permit data to be written.

Actually that concept still remains on modern tape cartridges.

Floppy disc: an exchangeable disc made of flexible plastic material, usually about seven inches in diameter, coated in magnetic recording material and packaged in a card or plastic envelope to protect the surface.

Seven inches? I can remember eight-inch discs and 5.25-inch discs, but not seven.

Overpunch: a hole punched in the zone area of a punched card to qualify the data in that column or field. For example, to indicate the sign of the field starting in that column.

Pardon? I was fortunate to just miss out on punched cards. It meant that I never had to use them, but there was a plentiful supply of them knocking around the office to use for making notes on.

Collate: to sort into order

At last – something that still makes sense!

Interblock gap: the gap between physical blocks on a magnetic tape, needed to be able to start and stop the tape between blocks.

Not sure that I ever had to start and stop tapes between blocks, but then I was never an operator.

The thing is, you can’t flick through this book and ridicule how old-fashioned it all is. A lot of the lower-level stuff in it still goes on, but we are insulated from it as users by several layers of operating system and application. It is now possible to be quite an expert in computing without knowing much, if anything, about the low-level operations described in the book For all I know there are still interblock gaps on tapes, but they are only used by a tape drive’s operating system under instructions from backup software as a result of a user clicking on a pretty picture on-screen.

The other reason to not be too dismissive of it all is that a current book about computing might well be just as disconnected from reality in thirty years time. Imagine in 2038 telling disbelieving youngsters about when you used to control a thing called cursor on a screen with a mouse and having to explain what all three of them are/were.

Having said that, some things never change; this definition is in the 1978 book and not only does it still apply today, but I’m pretty confident it will still be just as valid in thirty years. Plus ça change, plus ça la même chose…

System failure: a situation in which a computer system becomes unable to perform according to the requirements normally expected.