[TUHS] Names of famous, historical UNIX machines?

[Tim Bradshaw]

I am not sure if I remember this or if I was told it later, but mcvax was a very important machine for people in Europe (like me) as it was a big gateway (for usenet? I forget).  Its name was in lots of people's heads and probably lots of scripts &c.  So at some point they got a new machine which, obviously, was a Sun.  So, at that point they had two choices:

- keep the old name, even though it wasn't a VAX any more;
- rename it to something which was platform-neutral so the pain would only happen once.

And they took the third option: rename it, but wire-in the platform *again* thus causing pain now and more pain later.  Oh dear.

On the subject of hostnames, has anyone mentioned prep / prep.ai.mit.edu?  All the GNU software came from that in the mid 1980s, anyway.  I think 'prep' meant 'document preparation', I don't know what it was.

--tim


> On 1 Feb 2017, at 22:54, Jacob Goense <dugo at xs4all.nl> wrote:
> 
> - mcvax, mcsun
> Suitable for anything related to europe.