I'll add a cautionary, yet amusing, anecdote related to the use of the parent/child metaphor with OS processes. Of course, the terms are indeed very descriptive and naturally follow their use in the hierarchical relationship in trees. However, even in an office full of engineers, exclaiming "My children are dying in the wrong order" will get you some pretty concerned and questioning looks. It's even worse when you talk about killing them... Yes, I did learn to use less dramatic phrasing after that. BLS -------------------------------------------- On Wed, 5/24/17, Paul N. Edwards <pne@umich.edu> wrote: Interesting discussion. OED does not speculate on this connection; first use of “motherboard” it lists is 1965. It’s worth noting that some of the gendered terms in engineering are very clear and literal metaphors, not specifically human though definitely mammalian. “Mother ship,” like “motherboard,” refers to a larger thing from which smaller, but similar dependent units (smaller ships, subsidiary circuit boards) are launched, to which they are attached, and from which they draw sustenance (fuel, electricity).  “Female” and “male” connectors refer to sockets and plugs respectively, also quite literal, also not particularly human but mammalian. This is not to say that such metaphors aren’t sometimes deployed in objectionable, human-oriented ways, but it would be silly to ignore their value as readily understood descriptors of physical structure and/or relationships. Best, Paul On May 24, 2017, at 9:43 , mike willegal <mike@willegal.net> wrote: My guess is that the term, Motherboard, was derived from the term Mothership, which is still in common usage by the general population, and according to several online dictionaries originated in the 19th century.  Note that when techs and engineers refer to Motherboards, they normally use the gender neutral pronoun, "it". cheers,Mike Willegal On May 23, 2017, at 1:51 PM, Mark Priestley <m.priestley@gmail.com> wrote: Hi Caitlin, I'm not sure if this is the sort of thing you're looking for, but some CS pioneers were rather keen to use the master-slave metaphor to talk about human-computer relations. Eg: Jack Good reported that: "Turing used to refer jocularly to people who are forced to do mechanical operations as slaves." Bardini quotes Engelbart: "Think ahead to the day when computer technology might provide for your very own use the full-time services of a completely attentive, very patient, very fast symbol-manipulating slave who has an IQ adequate for 95% of your today's mental tasks." And there's this unfortunate Newsweek caption about Harry Huskey. I think probably links back to earlier tropes about robots: eg in Capek's RUR, the rebellious robots are precisely slaves. I've got an unpublished conference paper I wrote a few years back about this which I could dig out if you're interested. Cheers, Mark ...