A true story:
The J1708 protocol states that after 3 collisions a random delay is to be applied before transmission is attempted. That way one of the colliding entities will get out first and hold the other off - beautiful isn't it.

Now I had 2 devices, both using the Keil rand() pseudo-random generator. They collided and for every attempt applied identical delays because the two "random" sequences were identical. For that reason the collision never got resolved.

So many discussions (including this) use the phrase random number generator when the name is pseudorandom number generator.

Using the name without "pseudo" is misleading, misinformed and absolutely wrong.

Erik