I think you know what APIs are, CSERIAC is the Crew System Ergonomics Information Analysis Center, SDI is the Strategic Defence Initiative, and COTS means Commercial Off The Shelf, as in literally buying equipment from regular commercial vendors rather than doing the whole massive DoD contract thing.
About acronyms, I remember a company that won a bid for a company I worked with. Part of the reason they won is that their proposal was very clear, and one of the stated reason was the lack of acronyms.
To this day, I try to avoid using acronyms as much as possible. I also remember an argument at another company, someone was complaining of problems on the "VMS", the other was calling bullshit. It took a few minuted before they realized they were talking about two different things with the same acronym. There are only 17576 3-letter acronyms, if 200 of these are used, the chance of a collision is about 2/3 (see: birthday paradox), and that's assuming a uniform distribution, in reality, it is worse. Misunderstandings are inevitable.
Itβs even worse tham that. Many letters can easily be confused for different letters, hence the reason for phonetic alphabets. I had one company who had an external system known as OAS, and some manager who maybe should have known about OAS, but had never worked with it decided to create an acronym OIS. Luckily the two systems were rarely talked about in the same context, but it still took me lots of mental effort to know which of the 2 systems various individuals were talking about in meetings when either were mentioned.
