TLA

Three Letter Acronym.

TLA is the most popular type of acronym in computing terminology.

There are 26³ = 17576 possible acronyms, and probably most of them are already used. If we allowed numbers, special characters, or were case-sensitive, many more TLAs could be created.

Many TLAs have more than one meaning. There even are TLAs with more than 10 meanings (for example: SDI has at least 11 meanings). Many acronyms have more than one full-form with the same meaning. For example GCC was first 'GNU C Compiler', and later 'GNU Compiler Collection'.

Because on DOS only 3-letter file extensions (on DOS extension usually marked file type) were allowed, many longer acronyms were shorten to 3-letters (for example JPEG to JPG, HTML to HTM).

One big source of acronyms are short forms of Usenet groups. For example pra for pl.rec.anime.

Popular TLAs:

• corporations: IBM, DEC
• file types: PNG, GIF
• hardware: CPU, FPU?, RAM, ROM
• licences: GPL, MPL?
• operating systems: GNU, BSD, DOS
• other standards: UTC
• programming languages: SQL
• protocols: FTP, IRC
• software: GCC, Gtk
• time zones: GMT, UTC

See also: vera?