• Dizzy Devil Ducky@lemm.eeEnglish
    37·
    4 months ago

    My personal favorite acronym like that definitely goes to AROS (Amiga Research Operating System) that if I remember correctly had to - for legal reasons - change the name. Rather than come up with a completely new name, went with AROS Research Operating System.

    Edit: name change was apparently to avoid any trademark issues with the Amiga name.

    • Zannsolo@lemmy.world
      6·
      4 months ago

      I wrote a rule engine for processing data called ORE - ORE Rule Engine I wanted to call it Odoyle Rules Engine. It had a QueryTracker, that had a RulesAppliedQueue aka a QT with a RAQ. This is what happens when you have 4 friends from college working in a 4 pack office.

    • 4am@lemm.ee
      22·
      4 months ago

      It’s a cheeky play on “WINdows Emulator” as well as “WINE’s Is Not an Emulator”, but I think for both legal (trademark) and logistical (it really isn’t an emulator) reasons, you’ll never officially see that bit sanctioned

      • dan@upvote.au
        6·
        4 months ago

        It’s a cheeky play on “WINdows Emulator”

        It’s not an emulator though. That’s literally what the name is explaining!

    • Evil_incarnate@lemm.eeEnglish
      7·
      4 months ago

      Pine was already taken by an email reader. One of the early ascii email readers was called elm, for ELectronic Mail. Pine was made after elm and it stands for Pine Is Not Elm.

      • skulblaka@sh.itjust.works
        4·
        4 months ago

        I’m starting to get the impression that most software older than me is defined more by what it isn’t than by what it is.

    • VonReposti@feddit.dk
      22·
      4 months ago

      Not really. It is just translating the Windows system API calls into Linux system API calls. It’s not emulating Windows, it’s an entirely different implementation that doesn’t necessarily match that of Microsoft’s implementation. It had it own workarounds to make buggy code work.

      You wouldn’t call a Java Virtual Machine an emulator of another JVM either, they’re just different implementations of the same specification.

      • Blackmist@feddit.ukEnglish
        10·
        4 months ago

        Thing is, I do kind of think of a JVM as an emulator for a processor that doesn’t exist.

        WINE kind of blurs the line of a traditional emulator by having the executable run natively on the target machine’s CPU, but everything it does in regards to dealing with the host OS, the display, disk access, etc, is emulated as far as I’m aware.

        A theoretical PS4 or Xbox One emulator running on x86 hardware could be just as much of an emulator as WINE is.

        • Gakomi@lemmy.world
          3·
          4 months ago

          Yes but an emulator emulates both the CPU and GPU of the consoles and in the case of PS4 even thought the CPU is x86 the biggest difference I can think of is the GPU drivers.

        • bitfucker@programming.dev
          2·
          4 months ago

          Maybe depending on how far you take it. A CPU instruction is different from hardware to hardware, but a function signature would stay the same no matter the underlying architecture. If we want to go through that logic then an interpreter can be thought of as a form of emulator.

  • admin@sh.itjust.works
    14·
    4 months ago

    My favorite software acronym is PINCE, the reverse engineering tool that’s similar to Cheat Engine in Winblols, that stands for PINCE Is Not Cheat Engine.

  • don@lemm.ee
    10·
    4 months ago

    GNU Hurd.

    It’s time [to] explain the meaning of “Hurd”. “Hurd” stands for “Hird of Unix-Replacing Daemons”. And, then, “Hird” stands for “Hurd of Interfaces Representing Depth”. We have here, to my knowledge, the first software to be named by a pair of mutually recursive acronyms.

    – Thomas (then Michael) Bushnell