[Ads-l] Antedating of "force quit" v.

[Grant Barrett]

 There are a few antedatings and other 1991 citations at Internet Archive.

1986 Dec. *UNIX in a Nutshell: A Desktop Quick Reference** (Berkeley
Edition)* 4-4: Force quit and ignore changes.
https://archive.org/details/unixinnutshellde00newt/page/n127/mode/2up?q=%22force+quit%22

It’s also in the 1990 edition:
https://archive.org/details/unixinnutshellbe00orei/page/n5/mode/2up?q=%22force+quit%22

The Unix meaning is a bit different than the Mac force quit, which is
usually a hard dump of a bit of software that is stuck. But the common
definition of “terminate (stalled) software without saving” is still there
(and closer to what the OED definition should be), as you can see in this
citation:

1991 Michael Russo *The New User's Guide to the Sun Workstation* p.
59: Force Quit file without saving (Example, use when the file has been
edited since opened, but you still want to quit without saving the changes)
https://archive.org/details/newusersguidetos0000russ/page/58/mode/2up?q=%22force+quit%22

Other 1991 citations:

1991 June, Craig Danuloff, Aileen Abernathy *MacUser* “All You Need to Know
about System 7.0” p. 106: Crash recovery: If you crash in any application
under System 7.0, you can usually recover to the Finder by pressing
Command-Option-Shift-Escape and clicking on OK in the resulting Force Quit?
dialog box. To be safe, you should then immediately close all applications
and reboot your machine.
https://archive.org/details/MacUser9106June1991/page/n99/mode/2up?q=%22force+quit%22

1991 Lon Poole *Macworld Guide to System 7* p. 75: Emergency quit Sometimes
you can recover from a system error — or the related problem of a hung or
frozen system — without restarting your Macintosh. Pressing
Command-Option-Escape may bring up a dialog box asking whether you want to
force the Finder (or some other program) to quit ... If so, click the Force
Quit button and cross your fingers. If you get to the Finder, immediately
save all open documents and restart the computer.
https://archive.org/details/newusersguidetos0000russ/page/n7/mode/2up?q=%22force+quit%22

1991 Craig Danuloff The System 7 book p. 195: The Force Quit dialog box.
https://archive.org/details/system7bookgetti0000danu/page/194/mode/2up?q=%22force+quit%22

The latter citation includes an image of the Mac force-quit dialog box.

GB


On Sep 8, 2024 at 22:18:51, Hugo <hugovk at gmail.com> wrote:

> Added in this quarter's update, the OED's earliest for the verb "force
> quit" is 25 October 1994:
>
> https://www.oed.com/information/updates/june-2024/new-word-entries/
>
> Here's a three-year antedating:
>
> 1991 May 26, Kiran Wagle, “Re: Good Stuff & Bad Stuff about System 7”, in
> comp.sys.mac.system‎[1] (Usenet), retrieved 8 September 2024:
> Works real well :) on an si... i even got a buzzing video box for a cursor
> when i tried to 'force quit'...
>
> [1]
>
> https://groups.google.com/g/comp.sys.mac.system/c/RNdEv0NqT3o/m/vSrRRbwua1IJ
>
> Also added to https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/force_quit#Verb
>
> Hugo
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
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