About a week ago, our Good Word was dongle. I received a response from a master of (at least) two languages who knows more about the history of dongles than I, Pierre Laberge, so I thought I would share it with everyone here it is:
“Well, that was a dongulational discussion of the word dongle!
Of course, dingling your dongle would be obscene….
And naturally, you would want to dongle safely, although I do not know if you would use a condom, or some anti-whatever program.
The first “dongle”, was a single chip, called the BPI chip, which was installed by plugging this 8 legged little creature into the game port (a female chip mount) of an Apple ][+ computer. With the chip, this early accounting program would work when you stuck the 5.25 inch PROGRAM floppy disk into the “A” drive, and the DATA disk into the “B” drive. Without it, the software would not work. The chip contained machine language software that did sorting and other intensive CPU work. Remember that these early computers ran at about 3 MHz. Certain routines would take forever to run in BASIC or some other human interface language.
I think you have now been sufficiently dongulated into the history of creative and useful dongling. Besides I have exhausted my imagination on the topic.
I have also abused the English Language to the point where many would like to dongle me at the end of a short rope, over a long drop….
You may feel free to post this, delete it, or make a paper airplane out of the email (printing required, first…).
Sincerely, Pierre M. Laberge”
I am still trying to convince Pierre that he should join the Alpha Agora and share these flashes of brilliance with others of the same inclination.