[TUHS] Names of famous, historical UNIX machines?

Clem Cole clemc at ccc.com
Thu Feb 2 08:06:38 AEST 2017


On Wed, Feb 1, 2017 at 4:20 PM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at 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
> ​ ​
> called Faraday, Gauss, etc, while Purdue had Fermat, Newton, etc; U-Texas
> had
> ​ ​
> Disney characters, BBN had fish, U-Washington had South Pacific islands -
> the
> ​ ​
> 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
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20170201/f1f47b24/attachment.html>


More information about the TUHS mailing list