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A books.google.com search found "fire an event" in the 1979 "La Conception des systèmes répartis" (p.115) at http://books.google.com/books?id=1VogAQAAIAAJ&q=%22fire+an+e... . The quote snippet is:

"Control refers to any set of rules describing conditions under which processes may fire an event or switch to a new state."

Other sources confirm that there is a 1979 book with that title. (Google Books sometimes has a dramatically wrong year.) However, I don't have access to the book to verify it for myself.

There's also a interesting reference from particle physics; "Figure 6 shows the number of tubes that fire an event vs. the number of photo- electrons.", Proceedings of Workshop on "Weak Interactions and Related Topics", December 13-15, 1979. While not the same, it feels like a similar construction.

Otherwise, the only relevant hits for that phrase are post-1990.



Cool! That is very interesting, thank you for that research.

I guess I can't really claim to be the true originator of that term then. But it still makes a good story...


Yes, it does!

BTW, here are a couple of rule-base references of firing an event, in:

1) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.81.... -- "An event can fire, i.e. it is active, ..." -- Representing procedural knowledge in expert systems: An application to process control (1985).

2) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.12.... -- "The object manager identifies fireable events, and fires the rules of each of the participants of the event." -- Using Objects to Implement Office Procedures (1983).




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