h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

In the US (don't know if other countries do the same thing), the phone company's term for a telephone is 'POTS', meaning Plain Old Telephone System. It happens in every industry, it seems.

Further to earlier submissions, I note that a certain Harry McIntosh (in his book "Talk Java To Me") states that "Java" does not stand for "Just Another Vexing Acronym". (I'm sure it probably doesn't stand for a lot of other things too.)

Also, when the real-time language "Ada" was under development, there were many attempts (mostly humorous) to guess what it stood for, such as "Another Dreaded Abbreviation". (To those in the know, "Ada" stood for nothing at all, but was an allusion to Ada, Countess Lovelace, who assisted Charles Babbage with his neolithic number cruncher.)

On an aviation note, when the Tornado development programme was running behind schedule, some wit (in "Pilot magazine, I think) said that "M.R.C.A" (by which the programme was known) stood for "Must Refurbish the Canberra Again"... the Canberra being an antiquated british bomber !

Hmmmm? Well I've heard Windows reffered to as an acronym for Will Install Needless Data On Whole System, and Pentium as Produces Erroneus Numbers Through Incomplete Understanding of Mathematics...

Then again, ISDN is know to its friends as It Still Does Nothing...

A classic example, I think, is the Amstrad CPC 664 computer... the first CPC to have a disk drive, it was christened the IDIOT... Insert Disk Instead Of Tape. The 6128 was named Big IDIOT... it was slightly bigger, you see.

If I could think of any more (supposedly) humouous examples, I'd record them. But I can't so I won't.

And now, I'm off to play Starseige Tribes...

On the set of the original Star Trek, large interesting bits of machinery and pipes could be seen all over the place, many of the pipes being labelled with "GNDN" and a number. "GNDN" stood for "Goes Nowhere, Does Nothing." I was pleased to see that when the spinoff Deep Space Nine revisited the classic Tribbles episode, they included a scene in which Captain Sisko is pretending to work on a conduit labelled "GNDN."