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Back to the Future did introduce the general populace the proper way to pronounce the ‘Giga’ prefix :-) Edit - Wikipedia has a whole section on pronunciation,
by jeffwass 5y ago
Back to the Future did introduce the general populace the proper way to pronounce the ‘Giga’ prefix :-)
Edit - Wikipedia has a whole section on pronunciation, and its not unambiguous, but the original German language proposal for ‘giga’ suggests a hard G, but in the USA in 1960’s the National Bureau of Standards settled on the soft G.
When I worked as an EE back in the 90’s I regularly heard older engineers quote frequencies as “Jiggahertz”. I think once consumer-level hard drives approached GB capacity, and the prefix came to public usage, the hard G became popular again.
- scollet 5y agoThe GIF war continues
- milesvp 5y agoThat’s interesting. I grew up with this movie and for years just thought jiggawatts was just an absurd high number. As I got older and made the connection to gigawatts I still just assumed it was a comedic choice to use hard G. It’s certainly within character for doc Brown to use a less common pronunciation. Never occurred to me that this prefix might have commonly been pronounced this way.