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Animated even and the code looks hand-drawn. I <3 it.

Fun fact: I worked at a nuclear engineering consultancy in the 90's. That's the not the fun fact. The hostnames of the computers were all Simpsons' character names.

   rsh blinky

   ftp homer


I went to a university where the authentication servers were named after nuclear accidents.

  tokaimura.doc.ic.ac.uk
  chalk-river.doc.ic.ac.uk
  three-mile-island.doc.ic.ac.uk
An older server was sellafield, but it had been decommissioned.


So that's where the Sun 2 box was UUCPing email from. ;) Decomm... that sounds painful.

One of their main products, CORETRAN, was a Monte Carlo reactor simulator written in millions of lines of FORTRAN by nuclear engineers over ~60 years. I helped port to Win32 and sped it up 300% by disabling swap (128 MiB of RAM in 1997 was a lot).


I work at a place now that uses USS Starship names for projects.

Really brings home the old adage about the hardest parts of computer science being naming things when the decision comes down to a discussion of the philosophical implications of a TV episode from 1994.


A long time ago I was a sysadmin for a company that gave us a Windows client desktop, and a desktop running Windows Server. The rule was that you had to name the server after a brewery. I'm not a beer drinker, so I named mine A&W. Spelled as "Ayeanddubya." (Aye and dubya) That was fun for a while, people would call it names like "Abbadabba." I later switched it to Duff.

During that time our manager, who wasn't that bright, rushed over and exclaimed. "There is a rouge server on the network!"

We did some looking around and discovered that she had seen my coworker's server, named after Rouge Brewery.


I worked at a place once where we were told to pick a naming system for the releases. We chose "Genesis" as the first one.

Our boss, whom we didn't know was religious, says, "that's fantastic! Books of the bible, yes?! Next release is 'Exodus'?"

"Er, no it's Start Trek, next release is gonna be called 'Picard'."


My first work encounter with Unix (SunOS, Solaris) had a weather phenomena naming scheme, "lightning", "thunder" and so on, all very exciting. When I and the other new hire called ours "overcast" and "mizzle", the older coders were nonplussed, but couldn't really complain about our sarcasm.


I used Animaniacs characters at one job. That worked really well until I used Dot.




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