Did you
know?

Did you know?

The original use of the computer term is for a copy protection device that attaches to an I/O port of a computer. When a program is run, it checks for the presence of the dongle on the port. The software could be distributed freely, but people had to pay for the dongle to make it work. The concept, while clever, seems to have been a market failure.

In 1992, a company called Rainbow Technologies, which manufactured dongles, claimed that the term was named for its alleged inventer, a certain Don Gall.

This is not true and no such person existed (I think); it was simply a fabrication of the marketing department.

Recently, a more general use of the term come to my attention (in a conversation with my boss where she asked to borrow my dongle) meaning an interface cable on a notebook computer.

The origin, and this is a guess but one that I am pretty confident of, is that it is a combination of "dong" and "dangle:" a thing that hangs off the computer like a penis.

David Wilton in “Wordorigins”