Computers I have known
Sep. 18th, 2010 09:34 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
marnanelMy family bought a BBC Micro model B in 1982. Its name was albert, arbitrarily and not after Einstein.
In 1987 they bought an XT, i.e. an IBM-compatible 8086 PC. It was made by Opus Technology, and so its name was felix, It was eventually upgraded to be a 386.
When felix began to fall apart we ended up with a computer called sif and, later, roska. This meant that there were fewer arguments about who got to use the computer (albert was long gone, sadly). There were a couple of other bitsers and second-hand machines knocking around after a few years, but I forget their names.
In 1997 I bought my first computer of my own, whose name was ratatosk. ratatosk was a 386 later upgraded to a Pentium. He served me well right up until 2002 when I emigrated. In the meantime I also picked up a number of second-hand computers: njal, bergthora, and hrut.
Meanwhile there was also pinkstuff, the server, which started out as a project from the summer camp I used to be a helper on. At that camp there was (and presumably still is) a pudding called pinkstuff, and that's how the server got its name.
When I started seeing Fin, who already used a naming scheme of colours, I started harmonising my naming scheme. So the next second-hand computer was apricot, which was actually an Apricot.
After I moved to the US, the computer green was already around. Money was a little tight, but I saved up for a while and bought Fin another computer as a birthday present, which I named spectrum (as a joke: it wasn't a Spectrum). green and spectrum had static IPs at the time, which was rather fun. (They survive as CNAMEs of the current web server. Once upon a time, the content that's served from them was served directly from the computers under our desks.) It ended up that spectrum was my computer and green was Fin's, though. The original green was painted dark green, and is still in our basement.
Then I went to work for Pobox and they gave me a Mac laptop, which I named lavender. When I stopped working there I gave the laptop back, so I was without a computer for a while. I forget what I did about it: possibly I dug out green again. When I started working for Solutions for Progress, there was a benefits plan that let you save up for a new computer, so I bought a Dell laptop named charcoal, on which I started fixing Metacity bugs. There's another whole story buried there.
Shortly after Alex moved in, he bought me the current laptop, haematite, as a Christmas present, because charcoal was old and slow by this stage. Alex's naming scheme at the time was saints, and we took a while to come to an agreement on a saint we all liked enough to name the webserver after, but in the end it became dorothy after Dorothy Day. dorothy was decommissioned a year or so ago, and things are now running on a new webserver, which doesn't appear to have a name other than web; I think of it as new-dorothy, but I don't know whether there's anything official. The mailserver is yamantaka, after Yamantaka.
In 1987 they bought an XT, i.e. an IBM-compatible 8086 PC. It was made by Opus Technology, and so its name was felix, It was eventually upgraded to be a 386.
When felix began to fall apart we ended up with a computer called sif and, later, roska. This meant that there were fewer arguments about who got to use the computer (albert was long gone, sadly). There were a couple of other bitsers and second-hand machines knocking around after a few years, but I forget their names.
In 1997 I bought my first computer of my own, whose name was ratatosk. ratatosk was a 386 later upgraded to a Pentium. He served me well right up until 2002 when I emigrated. In the meantime I also picked up a number of second-hand computers: njal, bergthora, and hrut.
Meanwhile there was also pinkstuff, the server, which started out as a project from the summer camp I used to be a helper on. At that camp there was (and presumably still is) a pudding called pinkstuff, and that's how the server got its name.
When I started seeing Fin, who already used a naming scheme of colours, I started harmonising my naming scheme. So the next second-hand computer was apricot, which was actually an Apricot.
After I moved to the US, the computer green was already around. Money was a little tight, but I saved up for a while and bought Fin another computer as a birthday present, which I named spectrum (as a joke: it wasn't a Spectrum). green and spectrum had static IPs at the time, which was rather fun. (They survive as CNAMEs of the current web server. Once upon a time, the content that's served from them was served directly from the computers under our desks.) It ended up that spectrum was my computer and green was Fin's, though. The original green was painted dark green, and is still in our basement.
Then I went to work for Pobox and they gave me a Mac laptop, which I named lavender. When I stopped working there I gave the laptop back, so I was without a computer for a while. I forget what I did about it: possibly I dug out green again. When I started working for Solutions for Progress, there was a benefits plan that let you save up for a new computer, so I bought a Dell laptop named charcoal, on which I started fixing Metacity bugs. There's another whole story buried there.
Shortly after Alex moved in, he bought me the current laptop, haematite, as a Christmas present, because charcoal was old and slow by this stage. Alex's naming scheme at the time was saints, and we took a while to come to an agreement on a saint we all liked enough to name the webserver after, but in the end it became dorothy after Dorothy Day. dorothy was decommissioned a year or so ago, and things are now running on a new webserver, which doesn't appear to have a name other than web; I think of it as new-dorothy, but I don't know whether there's anything official. The mailserver is yamantaka, after Yamantaka.
no subject
Date: 2010-09-19 05:35 am (UTC)Also fun reading your computer names.
I don't think any of my computers has had a proper name - a couple were called PNE-PC but that's more of a description than a name. The current one is "alma", which I suppose is a name, but I never really think of it so either I chose it badly or I'm really not into naming computers.
At work, on the other hand, my computer got progressively uglier names as our company was bought by progressively bigger companies. At first, it was PC119 (guess what the last octet of its IP address was), then HAMWPNE1 (Hamburg - workstation - PNE), and now DDEX0083 (I have no idea how that name came about).
Similarly with our main file server, which used to be HAMSRE01 (Hamburg - server - not sure about the RE but possibly "resources"?), now QDEH0F (a name only an automatic inventory system could love). Oh, and right at the beginning it was "notix" - our Unix machines were based on an Asterix naming scheme, and the Novell Netware (later Windows NT) file server was "not" running Un"ix", hence "notix".