From: ats@offog.org
Lawrence D’Oliveiro writes:
> Henry Spencer was a name I found cropping up frequently back in the
> heyday of Usenet.
He's also responsible for saving the early history of Usenet, through
utzoo's tape archive. Searching his archive (which I keep a local copy
of, indexed using notmuch) for "performant" finds about 30 examples from
1985 to 1991, the first few of which are:
Dec 1985 - "expert system which can be very performant", French poster
Aug 1986 - "most price-performant products", US poster
Nov 1986 - "[Ethernet] cards ... quite performant", French poster
Dec 1986 - "FTAM implementations ... performant or otherwise", US poster
Aug 1988 - "performant hardware", French poster
Dec 1988 - "seems to be quite performant", French poster
Mar 1989 - "performant software", US poster
Mar 1989 - "more performant packages", US poster
So there does seem to be some influence from French usage there...
archive.org's full text search also produces some results. Unfortunately
the vast majority are OCR errors for "performance" and similar words,
but there are a few earlier examples, such as "try to make
[planification methods] more performant" in a 1972 Belgian paper:
https://archive.org/details/practicalapplica0000inte/page/342/mode/2up
And J. B. Sykes' "Technical Translator's Manual" from 1971 discusses it
in the context of borrowing between languages:
https://archive.org/details/technicaltransla0000unse/page/100/mode/2up
> One such example is /performance/ from an old French /perfournir/,
> which is now well established in modern French and has
> characteristically gone on to make an adjective /performant/ which the
> English parent could never hope to produce.
--
Adam Sampson
--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)
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