Has MSE gone American ?

Own_My_Own

Why are we going to experience downtime ?

Why is the site not just down from 7pm Friday ?

All seems a bit too American to me.

Old_Wrinkly

Rather more a case of Computerese rather than American English, though of course it found its way into Computerese from American English back in the 50s/60s.

Own_My_Own

Old_Wrinkly wrote: »

Rather more a case of Computerese rather than American English, though of course it found its way into Computerese from American English back in the 50s/60s.

So what your saying is, downtime is an American phrase.

Old_Wrinkly

If you want to look at it that way, then yes.
But it is becoming harder and harder to make such distinctions.

The term apparently originated in the USA in the late 1920s in relation to production-lines of major industries, and therefore was in reasonably general use there before the rise of the computer industry in the 1950s & '60s.

That rise meant numerous additional terms were required to cope with all the different aspects.
Sometimes new words were created. Sometimes existing words were given related new specialised meanings, as in this case.

I'm sure the UK used terms such as available/unavailable at one stage to describe a computer system's status, but it somehow became easier to say "the system is up" or "the system is down" and it was a short step from there to 'uptime' and 'downtime'.

The expressions "system is up/down" in a UK context have been around for at least 30 years or more, since "Computerese" (the specialised language that Computer techies use) is essentially a unified language across the English (and wider) speaking world.

The term 'downtime' might only have filtered into everyday UK speech relatively recently (probably via increased numbers of computer users) but it has been in the UK for quite some time.

defairmans

Own_My_Own wrote: »

Why are we going to experience downtime ?

Why is the site not just down from 7pm Friday ?

All seems a bit too American to me.

Sorry, but let me go a bit American on you....are you for real? You started a thread because an MSE message used the word "downtime"?

....

Surely this phrase is an expression of how the MSE team member uses language and nothing to do with an Americanism.