[TUHS] Names of famous, historical UNIX machines?

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Thu Feb 2 08:16:00 AEST 2017


    > From: Clem Cole

    > my printers have often been named after chainsaws

Yeah, MIT (or was it Proteon, I forget - a long time ago :-) had that theme
going for a while for printers...

    > @ DEC we were pretty free to use what we wanted and some were themed,
    > most were boring.

Hah! I do have a cosmically great computer naming story from DEC, though.

So DECNet host names were limited to N characters (where N=8, or some
such). So one day they get this complaint from some DEC user in the UK:

"Grumble, grumble, grumble, N-character limit in DECNet host names, we want to
name our host 'Slartibartfast'."

So, this being before a certain radio play had hit the US from the UK, the
people at DEC were like:

"What's a 'Slartibartfast'???"

Instantly, the reply shot back (and perhaps some of you saw this coming):

"Boy, you guys are so unhip it's a wonder your pants down fall down!" :-) :-)

      Noel



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