30 Jan
2013
30 Jan
'13
5:06 a.m.
On 2013 Jan 29, at 5:36 PM, William Donzelli wrote:
Ngram is the determining authority?
Ngram is neat but it may have it's own skew to results. A new or 'in-
vogue' term like midicomputer may show up more in trade rags than
published books in comparison to more established terms like
minicomputer and mainframe. Ngram says they normalise results for
number of books published in a year but it's not clear how valid
comparitive results will be are across different categories of
publications.
I Ngrammed 'midicomputer' and 'bubblehead' (a 'popular' term that
I
figure wouldn't show up so much in published books) and they come up
with comparable percentages (at different times).
-
We also seem to have forgotten "superminicomputer" (or supermini) in
this discussion.
Didn't the term come in around the early 80's, as machines like the
780 and Eclipse established a new category of machines?
Actually, didn't supermini kind of take over from midi, as midi just
seemed a little awkward and a designation that no one really wanted
to apply to their machine?
As I said, it
*was* the 70s. Love beads, Nehru jackets, leisure
suits and
other things were in vogue, along with orange shag carpeting,
bright primary
colors for indoor furnishings and "midicomputer".
You miss my point. "Midicomputer" was *not* in vogue. If it was, it
would have a larger presence in Ngram, especially relative to
"minicomputer" (I will exclude mainframe, as it was a far more common
word amongst non-computer people).