Checking out Jon Titus' blog on DEVmonkey - the resource site for all things Development Kit - my eye caught the post 'Thanks for the Memories' (We continue to misuse the acronym RAM. Can we get it right or are we stuck with it?)
"I've put on my curmudgeon hat this weekend to jump into the touchy subject of nomenclature," he writes
When we say a computer has 4 Mbytes of "RAM," we actually mean it has 4 Mbytes of read/write memory. So why don't we say "read/write" or "R/W" memory? Beats me, except that somewhere along the line RAM stuck. It's easy to say and people can remember it. That doesn't make it correct. I prefer R/W, because it succinctly notes the type of memory in use, but I won't try to RAM it down your throat.
Speaking of which, a case of mis-labelling that comes to my mind involves USB - specifically, the USB 2.0 specification. The promise of higher data transfer speeds held by the '2.0' creditation seemed groundless when it was revealed USB 2.0 was nothing but a superset... Unless a device declared itself "Hi-Speed", USB 2.0 as a nomenclature was meaningless. Everything conforming to USB 1.1 was already part of USB 2.0
Officially the USB 2.0 Specification encompassed a range of USB data transfer speeds, including 'low' (1.5Mbit/sec), 'full' (12Mbit/sec) and 'high' (480Mbit/sec) implementations. The organisation supervising USB - the USB-IF (Universal Serial Bus Implementers Forum) - said it was important that vendors clearly indicate the exact type of product on the packaging and in marketing materials. But of course, it is not always in the vendor's interest to clarify.
As a tech journo, I stopped referring to USB 2.0 as a feature unless they explicitly declared "Hi-Speed", otherwise it was a meaningless distinction...
Here is what I wrote a few years ago: USB org moves to clarify status of USB 2
