Know Your Silly Tech Terminology: Blob-Level Tiering
I think it’s time someone started examining the weird terminology in the tech world.
We’re probably all inundated with both useless and useful tech buzzwords. New products wind up with absurd names thanks to domain availability. But if you go back in time, technology finds its naming roots in a little silliness because it was once an industry few people cared about. And so, we end up with a few fun terms that major companies now have to use in their advertising.
I received a promotional e-mail from Microsoft Azure today that included the following (verbatim):
Blob-level tiering coming to Azure Blob storage
Pricing | Blob storage webpage
With exabytes of capacity and massive scalability, Azure Blob storage easily and cost-effectively stores from hundreds to billions of objects, in hot or cool tiers, depending on how often data access is needed. Azure Archive Blob Storage Preview provides low cost data storage for rarely-accessed data and is a great choice for customers seeking a more cost-effective way to store large quantities of infrequently accessed data in the cloud while still maintaining data accessibility.
If you’re unfamiliar, a BLOB is a data type commonly used in database systems. It’s actually what looks like an attempt to not call it a BLO, as BLOB stands for Binary Large OBject (see here).
But, the history actually is pretty silly as Wikipedia points out:
Blobs were originally just big amorphous chunks of data invented by Jim Starkey at DEC, who describes them as “the thing that ate Cincinnati, Cleveland, or whatever” from “the 1958 Steve McQueen movie”,[1] referring to The Blob. Later, Terry McKiever, a marketing person for Apollo, felt that it needed to be an acronym and invented the backronym Basic Large Object. Then Informix invented an alternative backronym, Binary Large Object.
Blobs are important, useful tools for developers, but I doubt the pioneers of modern database technology anticipated email marketing from Microsoft with phrases like “blob-level tiering coming to Azure Blob storage.” That’s just the world we live in now. Many of these silly terms came about when nobody had a single thought about marketing because tech was so new.
But we still get product names like the Ogio Shling Bag and the Nabaztag Wi-Fi Rabbit (I actually owned one of those absurd devices at one point), so clearly they’re here to stay.
I think I’m happy about that.
