Monthly Archives: August 2011

The secret origin of “log in”

History, Identity, Not Design

We do it dozens of times a day, every day, but why do we call it logging in?

“Log in” is one of those phrases that sounds weirder the more you say it. It’s ubiquitous in online life, though it does seem like it’s being slowly overtaken by “sign in” [note 1]. But where does the phrase come from in the first place?

Clearly, a job for the Oxford English Dictionary. Luckily you can usually access the online OED through your local public library site. Thanks, libraries!

Old_terminal
Representative terminal, not actually a CTSS terminal, CC LevitateMe

The OED’s earliest listed usage of “log in” in the modern sense of “to open one’s on-line access to a computer” is from the 1963 publication Compatible Time-Sharing System from the MIT Computation Center. [2]  I’m not sure if this is truly the first usage of “log in”, but it would make sense if it was, as CTSS, started in 1961, was arguably the first time-sharing operating systems, and so possibly the first system that you needed to log in to. (Before that we only had batch processing systems).

Whether it was CTSS or a similar system, I envision an engineer, probably at MIT, somewhere between 1959 and 1961, needing to describe a new user command for the system they were creating.We get a lot of neologisms from these situations, and it’s very possible log in dates from just this moment in history.

Ctss_login
CTSS Timeshare: A Programmer’s Guide, MIT press

It’s also possible that “log in” was used in a non-computer sense before time-share systems, but I haven’t seen it in print. But of course the “log” part, meaning to record something or someone, predates computers by hundreds of years.

Whaling_log
Ship’s log CC David Churbuck

That usage is in turn a shortening from entering something into a “log-book”, or ship’s log, (or captain’s log, if you’re in Starfleet) which the OED defines as:

A book in which the particulars of a ship’s voyage (including her rate of progress as indicated by the log) are entered daily from the log-board.

The first listed usage of log-book or  logbook is from roughly 1689 ( J. Moore’s  New Syst. Math). By travelling back 250 years in time, we’ve gone from identifying ourselves within a computer system to entering the speed of a sailing ship into a book.

But why was it called a logbook? Because of this apparatus here, variously called a chip log, ship log, or log:

Log_line_1
Chip log log line, & reel, CC Kate’s Photo Diary

A log! Or at least, a piece of heavy wood, attached to a knotted rope. Which you throw overboard and time how many knots go by for a set period of time, or, as Wikipedia describes it:

When the navigator wished to determine the speed of his vessel, a sailor dropped the log over the stern of the ship. The log would act as a drogue and remain roughly in place while the vessel moved away. The log-line was allowed to run out for a fixed period of time. The speed of the ship was indicated by the length of log-line passing over the stern during that time.

This is also why we still measure nautical speed in knots. So, when you next log in to Facebook or Gmail, think about big hunks of wood being thrown off the side of a ship to measure speed.

P.S. This was fun and entertaining for me to put together, but I’m sure there are holes and inaccuracies. If you know more about the origins of “log in”, please chime in with comments, and I’ll update accordingly!

Update 8/6/11: In a comment, Andrew Durdin points to some non-computer uses of “log in” from the 1950s. Awesome!

Note 1:  A couple of years ago I did a survey of top websites in the US and UK and whether they used “sign in”, “log in”, “login”, “log on”, or some other variant. The answer at the time seemed to be that if you combined “log in” and “login”, it exceeded “sign in”, but not by much. I’ve also noticed that the trend toward “sign in” is increasing, especially with the most popular services. Facebook seems to be a “log in” hold-out. Login_survey

If the whole “sign in” vs. log in” debate is interesting to you, there are some debates here and here. My personal feeling is that either is fine, but “sign in” is marginally more friendly and probably the preferred usage, though I’ll miss the nautical association. On the other hand, I feel strongly that “login” as a verb is an abomination and not to be tolerated under any circumstances.

If you’re really interested, you might start noticing where sites show their own evolutions and inconsistencies of usage. For example, Twitter’s web UI uses “sign in” but the URL says “login”. But now we’re probably reaching the outer limits of obsession and should stop.

Note 2. Here’s a PDF of a CTSS manual from 1964. There’s an underlined “log in” on page 6.
Interestingly, CTSS is also the system that gave us the first email system, as described by Errol Morris in his history of his brother’s role in the creation of that system. The Wikipedia history of CTSS is pretty fascinating stuff as well, and contains links to oral histories of the creation of CTSS and Multics (the precursor to Unix).

 

 

 

Moral panics & things that we know that aren’t so

Not Design

Poison candy image CC by Robbi Baba: http://www.flickr.com/photos/robbibaba/1818901960/

I’ve been thinking about moral panics. A moral panic is “the intensity of feeling expressed in a population about an issue that appears to threaten the social order.”

There were a series of moral panics that I remember from my childhood and adolescence. In some ways the 1970s and 1980s seem like a golden age for moral panics (D&D is satanic! Rock lyrics are dirty!) but there were a set that seemed different, in part because they had more specific trigger incidents, and so seemed more concrete.

I’m thinking of:

  1. The Central Park jogger case, predator youth, and “wilding” (1989)
  2. Satanic ritual abuse, especially the McMartin preschool trial (1983)
  3. “Crack babies” (1980s)
  4. Poisoned Halloween candy (1970s and 1980s)

All of these were the subject of endless sentationalstic media coverage. All became linked to larger narratives of how terrible our society had become. All resulted in significant legal and societal changes aimed at combatting these terrible scourges (or punishing the perpetrators of the scourges). Wilding was used as justification for harsher sentencing for juvenile offenders. Ritual abuse led to background checks and fingerprinting for daycare workers. Women who used cocaine during their pregnancy had their children taken away or were prosectuted and jailed. And anyone who grew up in the 70s and 80s knows how much fear of poisoned candy was instilled in our parents, leading many of them to stay up late checking our candy (and throwing away the homemade brownies from the nice old lady down the street).

And of course all of these things basically didn’t happen. A confession and DNA evidence from another (adult) suspect led to the vacation of the convictions of the teenagers (most of whom had already seved their sentences) in the Central Park jogger case. In almost all cases of alleged daycare abuse worldwide, either charges have been dropped or convictions overturned. Babies born of mothers who did cocaine while pregnant are nowhere near as badly off as predicted. And Halloween candy? Only one case every found, and not from a stranger (the kid’s father poisoned his candy).

We’re still living with the results of these moral panics. While many (though not all) of the individuals wrongly charged have had their names cleared, the laws passed and social habits formed haven’t really gone away. In part that’s probably because lots of people don’t know these stories have been falsified (falsification is harder to sensationalize), but I suspect that even if most people did know, societal inertia makes it hard to change things that have been normalized, and now seem common sense.

These are (relatively) straightforward cases. The convicted youths did not attack the jogger. Cocaine is no more (and no less) harmful to fetuses than other drugs (and probably less than alcohol). While some sexual abuse of children has no doubt happened at a daycare center, there were no Satanic cults, and no epidemic of abuse. No one has ever died from poisoned Halloween candy from a stranger. Most moral panics are probably not falsifiable; they may be triggered by a real incident but lead to overreaction.

Also, not all moral panics are about evil criminals. The 1980s also saw a backlash against “frivolous lawsuits”, and the most talked about frivolous lawsuit of all is the famous McDonald’s coffee incident. Which also may not be how it was represented at the time.


 

How do you know that something’s a moral panic when it’s happening? I’m not sure. For me, it helps to think about the things that I used to know were true, that I now know aren’t.

Poison candy photo CC by Robbi Baba