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I assume that the term download was coined first and then similar terms as upload, downstream, upstream followed.

But why are servers up, while clients are down? Who coined (one of) these terms and when?

muru
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MarianD
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    The convention is reversed for PLCs, where "download" is PC -> PLC and "upload" is PLC -> PC. – shoover Nov 09 '19 at 22:52
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    @shoover, very good point. This is very counter intuitive for uninitiated. When dealing with PLCs, wrong selection between "download" and "upload" could create very undesirable consequences. – VL-80 Nov 10 '19 at 01:34
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    The situation isn't reversed, it's just the machines have different positions in the 'stream'. Sending info to a connected subordinate device is a download because you are now the server, therefore upstream of that device. – Tetsujin Nov 10 '19 at 09:37
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    I guess, the confusion comes from the fact that a user clicking button "download" expects a file (or information) to arrive from elsewhere to their computer/device, not to be sent out. But as was pointed out by @Tetsujin, it depends on the roles of systems in the transfer process. – VL-80 Nov 10 '19 at 16:15
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    Just like in the song: 'the Bronx is up, the Battery's down'. – user207421 Nov 11 '19 at 05:49
  • @shoover isn' just that you are controlling the PLC and that makes it the client? – beppe9000 Nov 11 '19 at 15:02
  • @beppe9000 Control is irrelevant. You can control both the server and the client at the same time. – Mast Nov 11 '19 at 18:02
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    [Same question from 2017 over on EL&U](https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/370830/in-download-where-does-the-down-direction-come-from) – smci Nov 11 '19 at 22:56
  • If your question is really asking *"What is the earliest recorded citation of each of 'download'/'upload'/'downstream'/'upstream' in a telecommunications context?"*, then best to edit the title. (*"Why are they respectively down or up?"* is really a lesser issue, and should be partially resolved once we find the etymological origin) – smci Nov 11 '19 at 22:58
  • @shoover It depends. Years ago I designed a PLC and protocol converter where the convention was upload new program and download existing program for the very reason that my users were used to the typical meaning of upload and download – slebetman Nov 12 '19 at 05:34
  • @smci - ELU is inconclusive. [Wiktionary](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Talk:download) : "pure speculation, but the origin could come from modem transfer where the phone wire was typically overhead and so a download was literally coming down a wire." .... [etymonline](https://www.etymonline.com/word/download#etymonline_v_31852) : "action or process of transferring from the storage of a larger system to that of a smaller one," 1977 – Mazura Nov 12 '19 at 08:50
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    @Mazura: I never said EL&U was right, I merely said this is a reasking of the same question. The most correct piece of information over on EL&U so far is my comment pointing out that [Google NGrams shows the words were around decades earlier. 'download'/'upload' were used even back in the 1940s, before satellites](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=download%2Cupload%2Cdownstream%2Cupstream&year_start=1940&year_end=2008&corpus=15&smoothing=0&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2Cdownload%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cupload%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cdownstream%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2Cupstream%3B%2Cc0)... – smci Nov 12 '19 at 08:53
  • ...(which directly rebuts one of the answers on EL&U). Also, the EL&U question has actual real citations (although they're decades later than the earliest ones that should have been cited), unlike this one which is kind of vague and just seems to be attracting conjecture without much research. – smci Nov 12 '19 at 08:58
  • If it's a question of language, I'd defer to John Lawler, who deems it an 'artifact of a metaphor constituent' : (and backed by etymonline) "UP is big, DOWN is small. Moving from the bigger to the smaller computer is downloading, and vice-versa." - We can wrongfully attempt to ascribe meanings, or submit to a disappointingly semantic answer. – Mazura Nov 12 '19 at 09:10
  • @Tetsujin There can be apparently conflicting literary meaning in some contexts leading to confusion. For example if stream objects are named from the perspective of the master in a given protocol specification, a slave application "reads" from a "tx buffer" or "downloads" from the "upload buffer". This can make it appear that functional and specified meaning is "reversed" from certain points of developing in the stack, while being consistent from a network POV – crasic Nov 12 '19 at 18:04
  • @crasic - you lost me in the first sentence. – Tetsujin Nov 12 '19 at 18:08
  • @Tetsujin Example, I develop a slave application for a PLC protocol/field bus. Because of the way network objects are specified (named), my application "reads" (downloads) from the "tx buffer" (upload buffer) which was so named from the perspective of the sender on the network, (master). There are situations where the language *appears* reversed depending on where in the stack you are working on. – crasic Nov 12 '19 at 18:09
  • @crasic - I think you're taking a simple question too seriously. That tends to happen when a question hits HNQ; what started as a simple 'ohh, what's this?' ends up under a far larger microscope than was initially envisaged. If you stretch any metaphor too far, it will break under the strain & be bound to bother someone, somewhere. – Tetsujin Nov 12 '19 at 18:27
  • Think of it as inbound (download) or outbound (upload) if you like. Download and upload are from the perspective of where you are. Servers, from the perspective of the server administrator, can, and do, download from the client. It is all a matter of perspective. – Ron Maupin Nov 13 '19 at 03:56
  • @Mast I meant literally... if I do `wget something` on a server it's a download – beppe9000 Nov 14 '19 at 22:57

4 Answers4

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Water flows downhill. (I'm aware this is not new information ;)
The supply is at the top & the receiver [eventually the sea] is at the bottom.

Downstream is further from the supply, being supplied from upstream.
Upstream & downstream, or upriver/downriver are expressions probably as old as language itself to determine a direction in a stream/river without any need of compass direction.

Radio & television were one-way communications - so the broadcaster, ie the 'server', is upstream & all the listeners/viewers downstream of that.

Upload/Download simply follows that convention.

Addition after hitting HNQ list & attracting more attention than originally envisaged…

I think once you have the basic 'water-flow' analogy, from before we even knew what electricity was, let alone broadcasting or the modern cloud/server/CDN/client etc etc, everything else just follows logically. It only needed one person to make the initial connection - & we may never know who it was - back in the early days of radio, or even if radio was first to use it… it might be harder than who coined the term "broadcast" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_broadcasting - which does have an answer.

Tetsujin
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    I guess this also came up because of the positioning of clients and servers in charts and presentations, where the servers were typically positioned at the top of the chart and the clients at the bottom. Because there are often more clients than servers, this made up a shapely tree structure. (Side fact: the term "cloud" also came up because the ominous server structure was illustrated by a cloud symbol in presentations to the management by engineers who wanted to keep things simple.) – oddparity Nov 12 '19 at 09:01
  • There's also the aspect that in asynchronous communication technologies, such as ADSL and traditional modems, there is a ratio of downstream to upstream speed, just like trying to swim in a river where there's a tradeoff of effort of upstream to downstream. – tudor -Reinstate Monica- Nov 12 '19 at 11:13
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    Oddly enough, we now use the term "cloud" for remote storage and processing systems... So we _down_load from the cloud, which makes sense, as clouds are typically above us. Obviously this isn't the origin of the term, but it's interesting how it fits in. – Baldrickk Nov 12 '19 at 12:02
  • I think once you have the basic 'water-flow' analogy, from before we even knew what electricity was, let alone broadcasting or the modern cloud/server/CDN/client etc etc, everything else just follows logically. It only needed one person to make the initial connection - & we may never know who it was, back in the early days of radio, or even if radio was first to use it… it might be harder than who coined the term "broadcast" - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_broadcasting - which does have an answer. – Tetsujin Nov 12 '19 at 16:34
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    This explanation is probably right for "downstream" and "upstream", from the analogy of water (data) flowing in a particular direction. However these terms are unrelated "download" and "upload", which have a different etymology as described in the answer by @DavePhD – Nathan Griffiths Nov 12 '19 at 21:44
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Initially, "download" and "upload" were used in aviation, especially by the US military. "Download" meant to remove items such as weapons from the aircraft, while "upload" meant to load items onto the aircraft.

For example, the August 1963 Aerospace Maintenance Safety (a publication of the US Air Force) says at page 18:

Failure to follow written procedures and download the missiles...

(meaning failure to remove the missiles from the aircraft)

Then, within the US Air Force, the concept was extended to computers.

The July 1968 IMPLEMENTATION OF THE USAF STANDARD BASE SUPPLY SYSTEM: A QUANTITATIVE STUDY says:

ADC provided a three-man team, which visited the bases some 30 days prior to conversion and conducted a full-scale download of the 305 and upload of the 1050, requiring 10 to 15 days.

where "305" means IBM 305 RAMAC and "1050" means the UNIVAC 1050

The terms "downstream" and "upstream" were used independent of "download" and "upload" in the early days of cable television.

For example see the November 1971 Interactive Television, Prospects for Two-Way Services on Cable which has a nice explanation:

One-way cable television systems distribute signals from a central point -- the headend -- to many subscribers over a party-line or "tree "network (Figure la). Everyone receives the same "downstream" signals on his cable at the same time.
...
Two-way cable television services require information flow "upstream" from the subscriber to the headend or among subscribers themselves.

DavePhD
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    This is the most likely explanation for "download", from the sense of moving something from from A to B or removing something from a place. Just as in the military sense of material being downloaded off a transport (or uploaded on to it) we get the computing sense of a download of *data* from a computer or an upload of data *to* a computer. Despite the similar prefixes these terms are unrelated to "downstream" and "upstream", which come from the analogy of water (or data) flowing in a particular direction. – Nathan Griffiths Nov 12 '19 at 21:41
  • See also https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/370830/in-download-where-does-the-down-direction-come-from – Nathan Griffiths Nov 12 '19 at 22:06
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These terms are leftovers from the times of elementary client/server computing. You and many others were using a PC-like-thing, at best, and they communicated with a big/huge server somewhere, often a mainframe at first. The server was assumed to be 'up', as in 'uphill' or more exactly 'above you'. The server had almost total control of what was happening in the application, so it definitely had a superior status, hence the 'up'.

Plus you know, we really needed a convention used by everyone talking about this stuff, much like which side of the road to drive on.

George M Reinstate Monica
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Download means to transfer a file (or data) to your computer from somewhere "out there". The internet is often represented as a cloud, and clouds are in the sky. So transferring data to yourself from the cloud is to bring it down to where you are.

Charles Burge
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    The up/down terminology predates the "cloud" metaphor by decades. It may even predate the Internet, with stuff like dial-up modem or hardwired serial terminal upload/download (e.g. xmodem). This answer might be useful as a mnemonic / memory aid for modern users but it's definitely nothing to do with the origin of the terms. – Peter Cordes Nov 10 '19 at 02:33
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    @PeterCordes PSTN has been drawn as a cloud since X.25 days, at least. I agree, this etymology is still a bit dubious though. – richardb Nov 10 '19 at 09:39
  • @PeterCordes yeah, I was downloading files from BBSs long before I'd heard of the Internet (and most BBS sysops probably hadn't heard of the Internet, either). – RonJohn Nov 11 '19 at 04:22
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    @RonJohn: When I said "predates the Internet", I was including [its origins in ARPANET back in the 1960s](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet). Not just the 80s / 90s when people in general started to hear about the Internet after BBSes were a known thing. I was forgetting that early computer networks weren't called Internet until later. – Peter Cordes Nov 11 '19 at 12:36
  • @PeterCordes my point was that people didn't just start using it when they discovered the Internet. – RonJohn Nov 11 '19 at 13:58
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    @RonJohn: Right, agreed. And "the cloud" as a term came much later than the Internet for many people. In early days, you still had all your data on your desktop. I was just saying that we both agree up/down terminology goes back a *long* way, like early 80s at least, probably much earlier. – Peter Cordes Nov 11 '19 at 14:02
  • Earliest reference I can find is 1977: Data Base Directions, the Conversion Problem: Proceedings of the Workshop of the National Bureau of Standards and the Association for Computing Machinery, Held at Fort Lauderdale, Florida, November 1 - 3, 1977 – MSalters Nov 12 '19 at 00:32
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    In ~1983 a coworker expressed puzzlement that transfer from the big computer downstairs to his desk computer upstairs was called ‘downloading’! – Anton Sherwood Nov 12 '19 at 02:59
  • Very interesting) Your answer was downvoted from the clouds :) b.t.w. I like your _internet cloud_ and the sky allegory, but decades ago nobody thought about internet like a cloud (it was a net or something) – rook Nov 12 '19 at 13:38