From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cym224 at gmail.com (nemo nusquam) Date: Wed, 1 Jul 2020 17:42:41 -0400 Subject: [COFF] The Muffer In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <2d3f4920-7085-e619-e126-1147ea18a098@gmail.com> In 1966, Engineers at IBM invented a method of speeding up execution without adding a lot of very expensive memory. They called their invention the muffer. The name did not catch on so they picked another name and submitted an article to the IBM System J. The editor noted that their second name was heavily overused and suggested a third name, which the engineers accepted. The third name was cache. (Muffer was short for memory buffer.) This from "IBM's 360 and Early 370 Systems", MIT Press. I found this an amusing tidbit of history -- hopefully so may others. N.