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by mhb 4328 days ago
Why is 'shield' more appealing than 'daughterboard' anyway? Gender neutrality?
1 comments

Linguistic economy.
Maybe not if you take into account all the people who will need an explanation of why this item is called a 'shield'.
"Card" is two characters less than "shield", and has a long history in computing denoting a circuit board that is plugged into another circuit board. (Whereas "daughter" is usually not redundant in "daughterboard", it can almost always be dropped from "daughtercard".)

Examples: network card; disk controller card; video card; SD card.

"Shield" is such an entrenched term in electronics, from long before computing, that it's completely stupid to try give it another meaning. It's also not from some specialized sub-domain whose rare terminology can be reused; shielding is employed in all kinds of devices.