Back at the UCI Artslab one of my co-workers opened a CD-ROM and the disc kept spinning and flew out at him (though it didn’t actually hit him). I was on the other side of the room and just missed seeing it.
Tag: college
Creative Computer Names
I remember back in college we had interesting naming schemes for computers. The ICS labs had the Guilder and Florin Macintosh networks with servers Westley and Buttercup. There was also a Solaris network where each machine was named after a Roman emperor, with names like Aurelian, Caligula, Gothicus, Hadrian, Pacatian, Saloninus, Trajan, etc.
The lab I worked at over in the School of the Arts started naming their Windows NT servers after renaissance artists: Leonardo, Raphael, Michelangelo, Donatello… well, that’s what we told them the origin was, anyway! The first SGI box (for 3D modeling) we got we named Trippy, and then when we got several in we started naming them Happy, Sleepy, etc.
Then we got in a whole mess of computers, expanding our NT network from 3 machines to 14. We were trying to come up with a theme to name them, and started in with names like Pepsi, Mountain Dew, etc. I had to leave after we set up the first 3 or 4 of them, and the next morning I received a mass e-mail stating, “The Artslab liquor cabinet is stocked.” The message went on to list the new computers’ names: Absolut, Alize, Bacardi, Baileys, Bombay_Sapphire, Captain_morgan, CuervoGold, Glennfiddich, Jagermeister, Jimbeam, Midori, Remmy_Martin, Seagrams, and Wildturkey. Soon after, we got a pair of Mac G3s and named them BlackLabel and BlueLabel.
The names stayed at least as long as I did, and may be there still. It was funny, though, to get reactions from people – students who had actually used the machines, or faculty and staff opening up Network Neighborhood – as they realized they were all alcoholic drinks!