Raymond, who maintains the Jargon File, an online lexicon of hacker slang.' Examples Copy protection Linguist Ben Zimmer noted that the claim was likely a by-product of their 'tongue-in-cheek' marketing style, and 'was so egregiously false that the company happily owned up to it as a marketing ploy when pressed by Eric S. Ī 1992 Byte magazine advertisement by Rainbow Technologies claimed that dongles were invented by and named after a person named 'Don Gall', which spawned an urban legend. Schneck stated that the origin was unclear, but that it was possibly a corruption of the word 'dangle' (since these devices 'dangle' from a port on a PC). There are varying accounts on the etymology of the word 'dongle' in a 1999 paper, P. small form-factor digital media players that plug into HDMI ports (most commonly described as a 'media player dongle' or 'media player stick').USB flash drives (more commonly described as 'USB stick' or 'USB key').USB wireless adapters for standards such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.adapters that convert ports to handle different types of connectors (such as DVI to VGA for displays, USB to serial connection, and in modern computing, USB-C to other types of ports, and Mobile High-Definition Link),.The term has since been applied to other forms of devices with a similar form factor, such as: In computing, the term was initially synonymous with software protection dongles-a form of hardware digital rights management where a piece of software will only operate if a specified dongle-which typically contains a license key or some other cryptographic protection mechanism-is plugged into the computer while it is running. A Bluetooth dongle that enables Bluetooth functionality on a computer without built-in BluetoothĪ dongle is a small piece of computer hardware that connects to a port on another device to provide it with additional functionality, or enable a pass-through to such a device that adds functionality.

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