THE computer industry has a long and proud history of contributing senseless and needless initials and acronyms to our long-suffering language.
Anyone who can read BYTE magazine cover-to-cover and understand every bit of it probably understands more computer jargon than the average person understands actual words.
And a joy it is, too, skimming through pages littered with gems such as WANs, LANs and LONs, to say nothing of the classics, such as UNIX, XENIX and POSIX.
But the evil mind which spawned the absolutely impenetrable PCMCIA has taken things too far.
The term is used to describe those nifty little credit-sized ROM and RAM cards (two more acronym classics that have entered the language). These cards look like becoming standard personal computing features, which, unfortunately, means users are going tohave to get used to the PCMCIA tongue-twister.
For those who don't know what PCMCIA stands for (that is, most of the computing population), Compaq Computer's pen-based systems director Steve Malisewski offers the following. From now on, PCMCIA stands for ''People Can't Memorise Computing Industry Acronyms''.