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From CRT to cybrarian

Jon Skillings Editorial director
Jon Skillings is an editorial director at CNET, where he's worked since 2000. A born browser of dictionaries, he honed his language skills as a US Army linguist (Polish and German) before diving into editing for tech publications -- including at PC Week and the IDG News Service -- back when the web was just getting under way, and even a little before. For CNET, he's written on topics from GPS, AI and 5G to James Bond, aircraft, astronauts, brass instruments and music streaming services.
Expertise AI, tech, language, grammar, writing, editing Credentials
  • 30 years experience at tech and consumer publications, print and online. Five years in the US Army as a translator (German and Polish).
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Jon Skillings

One hundred years ago, the cutting-edge tech to watch was the CRT.

Yes, the history of the technology inside your TV and your desktop monitor reaches back at least to the days of Teddy Roosevelt's administration.

What was up with the cathode ray tube in 1905? That's the year the word first showed up in print, according to the dictionary folks at Merriam-Webster. The underlying science reaches back even further. Now in its second century, the venerable technology is still going strong, even as new acronyms from LCD to OLED threaten to jostle it aside.

The high tech of the first decade of the 20th century wasn't just in electronics. Merriam-Webster also lists that year as the first sighting of the word "automaker." (The excellent book "Seabiscuit," though mostly about horses and horse-racing, offers an interesting vignette on those pioneering days of automobiling. It was in 1905 that Seabiscuit's owner, Charles Howard, opened the Buick dealership in San Francisco that gave him his fortune.)

But gadgets and gears weren't the only new things back then. The year 1905 also ushered in the words "jelly bean" and "devil's food cake."

Looking to the future as well as the past, Merriam-Webster also identifies terms getting serious consideration for entry in one of its dictionaries. From the world of tech: "cybrarian," a person whose job is to find, collect and manage information available on the Web.