The great British public doesn’t know it’s “Baas” from its elbow when it comes to technology, according to a survey that found one in four UK adults thought RAM was a farmyard animal.
A study of technology terminology by MyVoucherCodes.co.uk revealed a series of knowledge gaps that would make Larry the Luddite look like a full-time GNU guru.
To be fair, a ram obviously is a woolly mammal with a reputation for promiscuity, but we still love the idea of a packed Rambus pulling up in front of the fuzzy logic head-quarters.
Only 32% of the 1,500 Britons surveyed could identify RAM as random access memory, in multiple choice answers.
Still, RAM faired better than that minor component, the motherboard. Only one in ten respondents identified it as the ‘central printed circuit board’ of a computer, with more than half thinking the term referred to some sort of space craft from the Star Wars films.
George Lucas got another acknowledgement, too, with the MP3 file format wrongly identified as a robot by 22% of respondents, while one in ten thought the term referred to a “secret service agent”.
Indeed, there was a surprising tendency for personifying technology, with one in five thinking Megabyte was a comic book hero, presumably the Scrappy Doo to Peter Byte’s Scooby.
USB was believed by 14% of those surveyed to be some sort of American soldier, while 12% thought a monitor was some sort of Draconian workplace overseer.
Such foolishness – enough to leave them feeling, er, sheepish.
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