Word origins (mnensia and mnemosyne)

Hans Nilsson hans@REDACTED
Thu Jan 2 12:06:25 CET 2003


About Mnemosyne:  it is from a search on the net for the word "amnesia".
The search machine happend to be such one that also lists "near misses"  
so it suggested a couple of articles about something called "mnemosyne".  
One of the articles was about greece mythology.  Mnemosyne was the mother
of the Muses.  She was also considered some kind of goddess of the memory
(suitable for a DBMS called amnesia, isn't it?).  Mnemosyne was also some
kind of goddess of the speech (perfect for a query language).  That's the
reason.

/Hans


On Mon, 30 Dec 2002, Klacke wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 30, 2002 at 04:35:43PM +0100, Daniel Dudley wrote:
> > I'm curious about the origins of the words mnensia and
> > mnemosyne. A search in web dictionaries gives no answers,
> > so I assume the words are concocted by the creators of the
> > mnensia and mnemosyne applications -- but on what basis?
> > 
> 
> 
> I initially nicked the db to Amnesia. In those days, Mnesia was
> a ram only db. The idea was that when the power is shut down, the
> db forgets everything, amnesia.
> 
> Once the OTP kit was getting ready for prime time, a couple
> of serious suits came into my little research cubicle, closed
> the door and said - Klacke, we must do something about this
> non-proffesional-sounding name of the OTP database.
> 
> I dropped the A. 
> 
> 
> /klacke
> 




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