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The Swedish name is “dator”, isn’t it? Its root is certainly “data”, but I like it better than the more cumbersome Norwegian word “datamaskin”.
by hanche 7y ago
The Swedish name is “dator”, isn’t it? Its root is certainly “data”, but I like it better than the more cumbersome Norwegian word “datamaskin”.
- nemetroid 7y agoYes, it's "dator". The word was initially proposed based on the same Latin -tor suffix as in e.g. doctor and tractor, so the word would fit just as well into English as it does in Swedish.
- asjo 7y agoAnd in Danish we had "datamat", which has a nice ring to it. But everybody says "computer" instead.
- Ma8ee 7y agoI’ve always thought that dator was just a short form of datamaskin. But some other comments suggested otherwise, so I had to look it up. Apparently, dator is a made up word from 1968, from data and parallels the words tractor and doctor.