I have two hard drives. One is a master, and one is a slave. I am told that these are offensive terms to some. I have a hard time accepting that, because these aren’t words which are slurs, they are words which have specific meaning, accurate and applicable to the situation: One entity is able to act, but only with direct instructions from another entity, never independently. The other entity directs operations, both of the subordinate entity and of the system as a whole. So this sounds like a slave and a master to me.
I am told I should now call my hard drives primary and secondary. This is non-offensive but inaccurate. A secondary entity should be able to take over if the primary fails; a second-in-command takes over if the captain is incapacitated. If my “primary” hard drive fails, I’m SOL, because the “secondary” has no ability to substitute for the primary. It’s non-promotable; it remains, let’s face it, a slave. I need a new master (or mistress, I guess, but I think hard drives plug into slots, and in the language of hardware, that makes them male).
Arthur says it trivializes a tragedy of history to use the language cavalierly, about computers. I say it is never trivial to use language accurately.
Meanwhile, my motherboard died, but Gary tells me I shouldn’t call it a motherboard, I should call it a mainboard. Except, every time we spoke to a vendor about buying a replacement, the conversation went:
Gary: “We need a mainboard.”
Vendor: “Do you mean motherboard?”
So it’s an idea whose time has not yet come.
Anyway, since when is “mother” sexist? It is gendered, yes, but I am wracking my brains and failing to come up with a way that this demeans either gender. I like that my computer has a primary female part (especially what with the masters and slaves running around inside—presumably with collars and whips and such).
I never particularly liked the “master-slave” terminology myself, and being a geek I need to point out to you that your logic is faulty. “Master” and “Slave” refers only to whether a drive is alone on a controller or whether there is a second drive present. If a second drive is present one drive must be configured as “Master” and the other as “Slave”, but either drive can have the operating system and boot sector on it. In fact I have a system at home that has 4 drives on it – two hard drives, a CD drive, and a DVD drive. On one controller the “Master” is the drive with the boot partition on it and the “slave” is the DVD drive. On the other controller the “Master” is my data drive and the “Slave” is the CD drive. The operating system and boot sector can reside on either a “Master” or “Slave” drive, however if there is a bootable partition on both drives the “Master” will be booted from because it is the first addressed drive on the bus.
“Primary” and “Secondary” are actually pretty good terms – a Primary can exist without a Secondary, but a Secondary will not be recognized by the system with a Primary on the controller as well. Two Primaries can exist on different controllers but not on the same one. It’s all about addressing at the hardware level.
I’ve never heard anyone use the term “Mainboard” as opposed to “Motherboard”, and cards that plug into the Motherboard used to be referred to as “Daughterboards”. I haven’t heard that phrase in years…..
Okay, I think I just learned more about drives than I wanted to know.
That’s only IDE drives….. don’t even get me started on SCSI…… 😉
I shall try to remember, Ken, not to get you started. 🙂