This is fun. Over at Crooked Timber they're remembering names that have been given to computers they've used. Samples include Star Wars characters, Oz characters, trees, lemurs, and beers.
My contribution? At the Honolulu Club we named our IBM S/34 Phred; it stuck throughout the nine years the machine was in use. We even put the name on the outside of the office until the stuffy damned auditors (Ernst and Whinney, as I recall) panicked.
Who's got similar stories?
Posted by Linkmeister at April 4, 2007 02:55 PM | TrackBackMany years ago I named the gas chromatographs in our lab Fred, Barney, Wilma, and Betty. That lasted about a year until my boss decreed the names should be less colorful. Now they (or their replacements) are named Unit 1, Unit 2, etc. So boring.
I use Phred a lot for game names, and for at least one fictional character. No one can raze a hamlet like ol' Phred.
Posted by: DXMachina at April 5, 2007 01:37 AMOh, our systems have had computers named after the Star Trek crew (obvious); we had one named waffle, I think; another named frostee; we definitely had one named smaug. We just recently shut down one called wookiee. But bureaucracy has won, and now computers have dull names that tell you where they are. Sort of.
Posted by: hedera at April 6, 2007 07:29 PM