The one amusing thing with my user name (this was back in the JHU eight letter usernames) is I came in to the machine room where we had a log book of all the times the system went down (normally/abnormally) and what you did to bring it back up (this was in the old icheck/dcheck days before FSCK). It was common when you came in look through the book to see what went bump in the night, so to say. I found the entry: “Took the system down. First nine characters of the accounting file were corrupted.” I’m saying to myself, “I think I might know how that happened.” The system manager says “We figured you did. The characters were your username followed by a colon.”

My login name story has many fewer characters. At Bell Labs, it was common for people to use their initials as their login name. Dennis was dmr, I was scj, Mike Lesk was mel, etc. (Ken was an exception--he was ken). When Bjarne Stroustrup joined the company, he chose the login name bs. Several of us tried to tactfully suggest that this might not be the best choice, but he stuck with it...

I heard that Bob Morris was asked for his initials, he said “rm”, they insisted on a middle initial, which he didn’t have, so he supplied “h”, hence “rhm”. This looks right: wikipedia does not mention a middle name, and Fred Grampp used to tell stories such as: They asked me for a social security number. I told them I dont’ give that out. They said, “Sir, I need a number.” He replied, “Okay, 123456789.” “No, sir, that number is no good…” It’s definitely something Bob would do, but I can’t imagine that 1127 would have some rules about this. As for me, I had been known for 20 years as “BC.” When I got to the labs, Barbara Chambers had beaten me to letters, hence “ches”.