Parallel Numbers
I got to thinking about serial numbers the other day. What really struck me was the name itself. Serial. The word essentially means “one after another”. Since, when assigning serial numbers to objects, you each number goes to one and only one object and you generally use the numbers one after another, this makes total sense. But why serial? Why not “sequential” or maybe “successive”? Suddenly, it occurred to me. Something came before the serial number…
The parallel number. Clearly, when people first tried to start assigning numbers to things, they went about it all wrong. They began assigning numbers in parallel. They probably just called them “id numbers” or something like that. Parallel number is clearly a retronym. It must have quickly become apparent, however, that this would not work. Say there is an issue with object with the number 239. You go to find 239, only there are 4 of them, yet only one is the one you’re looking for. So they abandoned the system and called the new identifiers “serial numbers” in order to distinguish them from the old. It all makes sense now.
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for all one knows, parallel and serial numbers might have come out parallelly.. one might have had a numbering format war
“1,2,3.. is more logical i tell you”
“no, 1,4,4,4.. is accepted world over, idiot”