« Bimbophonics, Bubbles, and 2.0 | Main | Blogs and Biz » "Wireless Fidelity"While researching a spread on Wi-Fi for the WorldChanging book recently, I saw instances where Wi-Fi was referred to as an abbreviated form of "wireless fidelity," which I thought was pretty weird. Fidelity to what? "Hi-Fi" meant "high fidelity," a 50s term for better sound reproduction on records... I always figured Wi-Fi was a play on that abbreviation, a pun, not meant to convey a similar literal meaning. Cory Doctorow writes about this in boing boing... [Link] Last week, I wrote in passing about how WiFi doesn't "stand for" wireless fidelity. It's a pun on "Hi-Fi" and "wireless fidelity" doesn't mean anything. Innumerable correspondants wrote in to say that the Wi-Fi Alliance said different. I disagreed -- and still argue that a litmus test for whether a given article on WiFi is likely to be ill-informed is whether it takes pains to utter the nonsense, non-instructive phrase, "WiFi (short for 'wireless fidelity')"... jon posted this at 12:50 PM |
read weblogsky! latest posts: |
Comments
Great point! I never really understood why the term was created and it nice to have a litmus test for all the b.s. going around about wifi.
Posted by: jack | November 9, 2005 10:35 PM