This content was published by Andrew Tomazos and written by several hundred members of the former Internet Knowledge Base project.

Acronyms

We love to abbreviate stuff, MBR, IDE, SCSI, ATA, ultra ATA, PHP, MySQL, awk, nawk, snawk, HAL (which is of course IBM with 1 subtracted from each letter), AIX, BSD, IO.

And the reason we love to use MLAs (Multi-Letter Acronyms :) is functional: No one sufficiently advanced in any area would be able to even get through the day using all the full terms necessary; it's just too much. And long, complicated terms are necessary, in order to be precise ("No, I mean the _other_ thingy!") - especially, again, in any sufficiently advanced setting; there's
no time for imprecision.

So we use acronyms and we actually get things done without (usually) going insane.

Of course, for some, there's also no denying that nice clubby feeling. :)

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