Fun with Acronyms/Science and Technology

Much of the scientific and information technology communities seem to have the most fun with Acronyms.


 * The UK's main police computer system is the Home Office Large Major Enquiry System, or H.O.L.M.E.S. Whether whoever named it knew about the High-Optional, Logical, Multi-Evaluating Supervisor in Robert Heinlein's The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress is unknown.
 * Many computer geeks make use of the meta-recursive TLA -- which stands for "Three Letter Acronym" -- in reference to all the three letter acronyms that seem to come up whenever one discusses technology.
 * The acronym "GNU" stands for GNU's Not Unix. This one was arguably inspired by "XINU" - XINU Is Not Unix - which earns special points for being not only a recursive acronym, but also the word Unix spelled backwards. And a backronym, to boot.
 * And, for all the four letter acronyms, there is the Extended Three Letter Acronym - which is a four-letter acronym itself.
 * Not to mention More Than Three Letter Acronym.
 * While studying telecommunications, this troper has come up with many names for his practices that have a hidden reference to The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya:
 * Hamming Algorithm Recovery Unit for Harnessing Information (H.A.R.U.H.I.)
 * Modulated Input Keying Unmodulator for Radio Unicasting (M.I.K.U.R.U.)
 * Network Addressing Gateway Application for Tunneling Operations (N.A.G.A.T.O.)
 * Automated Self-Activated Killing of User Requested Applications (A.S.A.K.U.R.A.; emphasis on the "killing" part!)
 * Studies conducted at The Institute for Genomic Research often make use of Basic Local Alignment Search Tool. When a genome is worked out, it may be posted to the Genome Online Database
 * Unix gives us the Bourne-Again Shell
 * The eccentric UK pop-science magazine New Scientist had a laugh at the expense of the Thin Layer Unimorph Driver and Sensor, which is very tenuously acronymised as THUNDER.
 * Beginner's All-purpose Symbolic Instruction Code.
 * This is a true backronym; it was originally just "Basic", the words were added (unofficially at first) because the public simply expected computer-language names to be acronyms.
 * The computer that selects the numbers in Britain's monthly Premium Bond prize draw (actually the latest in a long line of computers) goes by the disarmingly quaint name of E.R.N.I.E. (Electronic Random Number Indicator Equipment)
 * The underwater pipeline that supplied the Mulberry harbours with fuel for the D-Day landings had one of the simplest and most elegant acronyms ever: P.L.U.T.O. (Pipe Lines Under The Ocean.) (Although strictly speaking the English Channel is not an ocean. That's okay, Pluto isn't, strictly speaking, a planet.).
 * The encryption algorithm Cipher Organized with Cute Operations and N-Universal Transformation 1998 (C.O.C.O.N.U.T. 98).
 * There's a type of Escherichia coli called the Growth Advantage in Stationary Phase phenotype.
 * The Remote Authentication Dial In User Service (R.A.D.I.U.S.) protocol; its successor is called D.I.A.M.E.T.E.R.
 * Found on That Other Wiki:
 * Weakly Interacting Massive Particles, which links to
 * MAssive Compact Halo Object, which links to
 * Robust Associations of Massive Baryonic Objects, at which point you notice the astronomers were just having Fun with Acronyms.
 * Based Upon Related Sequence Types, an algorithm for assigning bacteria to groups based on their DNA sequences.
 * In a 2007 article in Chemical Communications, the unfortunate effect of abbreviating copper (Cu) nanotubes in that way was lost on the Chinese authors.
 * The hacker phrase "Waste Of Money, Brain And Time (W.O.M.B.A.T.)
 * The PCMCIA standard does not stand for People Can't Memorize Computer Industry Acronyms. But it ought to.
 * The computer language Perl (not 'PERL') is accepted by Word of God to stand for Pathologically Eclectic Rubbish Lister, as well as the more formal Practical Extraction and Reporting Language.
 * It's probably coincidental, but there's a town in The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind called Suran, and during the 80's there was a project for a packet-switched radio network called Survivable Radio Network (SURAN).
 * The "codenames" of computer science research prototypes are rife with these. The most egregious example I've seen is Rich Wolski's "EUCALYPTUS - Elastic Utility Computing Architecture for Linking Your Programs To Useful Systems."
 * COBOL stands for Common Business Oriented Language.