I Just Learned That Before The Internet, 'online' Actually Meant...
Back in the '80s, "up" meant "online" BUT THERE WAS ALSO "ON-LINE!!!"
Words change meaning at lightning speed in the modern memetic internet era; if you're over the age of 30 and not terminally online, Gen Z / Alpha lingo is probably going to lose you somewhere between "cap" and "six-seven." Slang may spread faster these days, but on the flip side, here's a piece of trivia that is probably outright brain-melting for anyone born after the dawn of the internet:
What the heck, right? I'm old enough to have used my dad's PC to play games a few years before we got a dial-up internet connection at home, but I'm still too young to have ever internalized what "online" meant before the world wide web. Reading a recent blog by longtime Windows developer Raymond Chen, I realized that when '80s computer geeks used the term, its meaning was completely flipped.
"The term 'online' originally meant 'immediately available on a computer," Chen wrote, explaining why Windows 3.0 (which was released in 1990) included WinHelp, a program built for browsing "online" help files. Chen's explanation continues:
"If you are working on a system with hierarchical storage, the 'online' files are the ones that are accessible right now, and the 'offline' files are the ones that have been archived to tape and will take some time to retrieve and make online. The term 'online help' refers to the fact that the help files are readily available on your computer. You don't have to go dig through your shelves looking for a manual."
Okay, now for the really heady part: if "online" meant "offline" back then (or, more accurately, "available locally,") what was the '80s word for online? Windows 3.0 may have predated the internet as we know it, but computers were still being connected across networks long before 1990. ARPANET dates back to the late 1960s, and nerds were flaming each other on BBSes and Usenet by the 1980s.
"Back in the day, a computer that was accessible via a network or some other remote connection was generally called 'up,' rather than 'online,'" Chen wrote. "Officially, 'up' referred to whether the computer was running at all, but since these types of computers (mainframes or timesharing systems) had as their sole purpose to be connected to by other computers, being 'up' was useless if they weren’t also open to connections."
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I'd say this use of "up" still probably makes sense t
Source: PC Gamer
