i can't go to hell - i'm all out of vacation days. i watch space rocks and yell at computers for my day job. probably too old for any of this

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i think i might be burned out on internet social. it's hard to keep doing it. it's hard to even maintain the amount of attention i'm already giving it

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i am the cause of most of my own problems

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furthermore, capitalism must be destroyed

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birdsona: ?????

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๐ŸŒŽ Ontario, Canada


webbed site
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cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

Got a comment I've been waiting for for a long time:

I don't think we called programs "apps" back in the day

I know it feels that way. It really does. But it's not true; the word is ancient.

In print, you can find it in various magazines going back to 86 here and there. Since it's a pretty obvious abbreviation for the fairly lengthy word 'application' it got independently invented many times. But in '89 Dvorak (seemingly) coined "killer app," and pretty much overnight it became a common term in publications, PC Mag uses it heavily throughout the early 90s.

Among nerds however it seems to go back much further; I tried a Google Groups search for "before:1989/01/01 "apps" " (apps in quotes) and found, for instance, one Scott Miller opining in November 1984 that "Some [UNIX] apps will in fact port just by recompiling." There are tons of other hits from the mid to late 80s; this was absolutely A Thing. And why wouldn't it be? Do you want to spell out Applications over and over and over? Abbreviations are a universal element of natural language.

I think the reason that it feels like a neologism is because prior to the smartphone explosion, most people simply didn't talk or think about computer software. Those who did were nerds, and we used a mix of terms: "applications", "programs", "apps", "software." Up through the 2000s however most end users thought of everything their PC could do as inherent functionality, and didn't really distinguish between the computer, the OS, and the programs running within it, so they had little reason to use any of these terms.

Smartphones made the practice of installing new software on a device a vastly more common experience for the everyday user, and at the same time they taught everyone that the only name for these things was "apps." It's not a new word by any means, but a lot more people are using it now, and it's the only term they use because they've never heard any of the others. As a result it feels like it came out of nowhere, and (probably more importantly) for nerds like us who think of themselves as old heads, it's very easy to knee-jerk-associate it with The Unwashed Masses.

"oh, that's the term that Lusers use, they don't know it's called a Program."


cathoderaydude
@cathoderaydude

I got got by the fungibility of fucking websites.

The above image is from here, which was timestamped 2006 - but last updated 2013. sure enough, the original post had no image, and ubuntu did not in fact have an app store until 2009.

I was explaining this post to Daria and I started to say "and then the app store was introduced by-" and she interjects "-Ubuntu, yeah."

and there's just a long pause

and i google it

ubuntu, 2006. that is an app store. and i think it's the first one.

to me, "app store" means "icons on a grid." everything that existed before that was "a cnet", and you know exactly what I mean. the exact format of visually-baffling Download Website that is still being mimicked by malware distributors. linspire supposedly had an early "app store" but that too was a cnet. this is an app store. look at the icons. look at the grid. it says "apps."

i have no doubt that apple is the reason the word is in the mouths of billions, but it's incredibly weird that the format and terminology may have originated in God's Most Unloved Linux


SomeEgrets
@SomeEgrets

another place you see this linguistic lineage is the evolution of Application -> App -> Applet

it's fallen out of favour a little bit, since we're not embedding java in stuff left and right anymore and that was probably one of the most common vectors by which you'd come into contact with the term

most surviving java launchers moved to something using JLNP like Java Web Start (or Open Web Start) as far as i can tell. maybe there's some of the old magic surviving in the Deep Eldritch Places of corporate IT, but certainly nothing facing everyday users

some vestiges of the term remain in "system tray applets" although they're more commonly referred to just as "icons" especially on the user side

but still, the term saw a lot of use in the 90s and early to mid 2000s when the prospect of a write-once, run-anywhere embeddable program that could live inside your browser and just be part of the internet was a bold and exciting new idea!


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in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

It was really inevitable that we settled on "apps" for smartphones, since Apple had been using "Applications" since System 7 at the absolute latest (I'm too lazy to dig deep on this). Why would they mix it up for the iPhone?

What I mean to say is that Apple has been using "applications" as its term of choice for decades, it'd make sense that they'd continue using it for the iPhone, which we'd all colloquially reduce to "apps" for the reasons Gravis outlined above.

and didn't really distinguish between the computer, the OS, and the programs running within it, so they had little reason to use any of these terms.

even then, when users needed something specific, they called it by name or used it as a synonym. Like, it's not "please install a graphics editing program on my pc", it's "please install Photoshop on my pc"

I feel that it was the same thing on the Classic Mac OS side, from having tried out recently a Macintosh which had a Tetris version installed that had a "DA" version, which I imagine stands for "Desktop Applet". Maybe the System 7 (the OS version installed on this Macintosh) manual also talks about the built-in tools (calculator, puzzle, Chooser, etc.) as (desktop) applets?

Bit of a British/ARM thing:
The original ARM desktop operating system, RISC OS, released in the late 80s (87/88) and had two supporting discs with programs that were called "Apps 1" and "Apps 2".

Later in 1992 with the release of RISC OS 3, these were moved into ROM and accessible from the icon bar.
So if you google images of RISC OS 3, you'll see in the bottom left, icons for the hard drive, floppy drive and then an "Apps" icon.

From a later version (I think from RISC OS 3.5) the Apps icon would also include any applications from the primary hard disc that were in a top level directory called "Apps". This was effectively the equivalent of Window's Start Menu at that point (although all this was before Windows 95).

The OS also generally called program "Applications", using a special directory to contain all the various files (creating any directory starting with a ! would make it an "application directory) and the default icon for such a directory has "APP" written on it.

So parts of computing were calling them 'apps' two decades before App Stores were a thing.

Some Classic Mac OS applications had smaller versions and I believe that they were referred to as "DA" or Desktop applet Desk Accessories. I have tried out a Macintosh which had a version of Tetris that had two programs (excluding the colour version): Tetris and Tetris DA. The DA version was lightweight, had no music or advanced graphics and thus used less RAM, and ran in a window which allowed multitasking (if you ran it on System 5 or later, with MultiFinder).

in reply to @cathoderaydude's post:

i wish that was a screenshot of ubuntu when it was good. you know, when it was gnome 2 and the live cd worked but a hard drive install didn't? that's when i used it, and i had no idea there was an app store then

wait, but the image on screen isn't 2006 vintage ubuntu, it's at least 2011-vintage, since the shell on screen is Unity-derived. The actual way ubuntu's "app store" looked in 2006 was like this:

lmao, the original article from 2006 ends with "get it while it's hot" and the update immediately continues with "We have come a long way ever since the news that Ubuntu 6 had been released. Today, in 2012, Ubuntu is still alive and kicking". SEO updates to articles at their finest.

In the 80s and 90s in the UK, they were invariably called "Computer Programmes", with that exact hideous spelling. Later in the 2000s, the spelling would change to "Programs" to differentiate from an itinerary, and other phrases like "Package", "Application" and "Software" would become common. The difference between software and computer was well understood due to the massive popularity of 8-bit home computers and the BBC Micro program in schools.

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