From Wikipedia…

A dongle is a small hardware device that connects to a computer, often to authenticate a piece of software. When the dongle is not present, the software runs in a restricted mode or refuses to run. Dongles are used by some proprietary vendors as a form of copy prevention or digital rights management because it is much harder to copy the dongle than to copy the software it authenticates. Vendors of software protection dongles (and dongle-controlled software) often use terms such as hardware key, hardware token, or security device in their written literature. In day-to-day use however, the jargon word "dongle" is much more commonly used.

The term has been somewhat generalized to describe specialized connectors that convert one type of port to another, for example an 8P8C modular jack that plugs into the edge connector on some kinds of PC card Ethernet adaptors, as well as small devices such as USB flash drives or wireless networking adapters. In addition, author Douglas Adams, in a 1990s column for the US edition of MacWorld magazine, used the term "little dongly things" to describe plug converters necessary for adapting US power cables to international plugs.[1] These usages are not universally accepted.

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Now… maybe it's just me but I can never take a word like dongle seriously. Visualizations range from the comical to the anatomical. The dongle term has been popping up on QRZ.com a lot lately, usually in connection with D-Star. I guess it doesn't help that I'm not a D-Star fan. It probably contributes to the comical visions I attach to the word.

Now I must admit I'm technologically out of date. I took the old Cleveland Institute of Electronics (CIE) Electronics Technology course and the Capital Radio Engineering Institute (CREI) course over 30 years ago. Most of that data has faded away since I never worked in the electronics industry. And besides, there wasn't a dongle to be found back then.

So, you dongle-ites, I don't mean to be disrespectful, but the term cracks me up!

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