On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 4:20 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu> wrote:
I know other places had similar name sets, but I can't recall the themes of
any of them - although looking at an old HOSTS.TXT, I see CMU had systems
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called Faraday, Gauss, etc, while Purdue had Fermat, Newton, etc; U-Texas had
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Disney characters, BBN had fish, U-Washington had South Pacific islands - the
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list just goes on and on.

​Indeed....​

​UCB's CSRG was naming ​after dead artists .. Monet, Degauss,  etc..
The CAD group was a beverages theme: Cone, Sprite and Pepsi for the 3 780's - then the workstation were named after beer we drank.

Masscomp used the Rogue monsters to start (until we ran out of the original 26 - then it was sort was all over the place).  Yeti was the build server, Eye was the system we did the original MP UNIX work on, and Xorn was mine own [I've forgotten the names of the others].  In fact, when I got married by English-Lit major brother-in-law thought the idea of naming computers was so cute he wrote a song for Xorn in the key of the cowboy's horse losing its master to another more important person.

And the monster theme was kept on my home network to this day, although my printers have often been named after chainsaws [for chewing up wood], and first color laser was called crayon for my then young daughter who used it to print her artwork.

@ Stellar I had astronomical index of stars on the top of my file cabinet and people to come to me to get names.  We keep that pretty consistent for all the SW systems for the first 2-3 years.  I even reduxed the index at Ammasso a few years later.



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

But I'm sad to say, Intel seems to have little sense of humor with regards to what name I might set the system too locally.  I can set to anything I want, but  the moment I connect it to the internal network, the IT network gods rename in the form:   {WWUSERNAME}-{SYSTEMTYPE}{GENERATION#} - no exceptions.    My new system due in a sometime this spring will named: ctcole-mac05     

So an arp on my home network shows all these interesting names, then one really, boring one ... and its mine.  sigh.... so, so, sad....  

Clem