I work for Red Hat, where I lead JBoss technical direction and research/development. Prior to this I was SOA Technical Development Manager and Director of Standards. I was Chief Architect and co-founder at Arjuna Technologies, an HP spin-off (where I was a Distinguished Engineer). I've been working in the area of reliable distributed systems since the mid-80's. My PhD was on fault-tolerant distributed systems, replication and transactions. I'm also a Professor at Newcastle University and Lyon.
Sunday, May 03, 2009
What ever happened to the Jiffy?
Back in the 70's when I first started to use computers we were told that computer time was measured in Jiffys (a 60th of a second back then). It was still a commonly used term when I started at university in the 80's (I even ran into it in physics). But since then it seems to have vanished from everyday use, at least in my field.
"I'll be back in Jiffy" could either indicate a return an exaggeratedly short space of time or else the intention of returning in a padded paper bag.
ReplyDeletePerhaps we should add this to WS-Policy for SLA's measured in jiffys. Then we could have "I'd like the Pricing Service that can delivery prices in a jiffy" :-)
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