We had a discussion at work the other day, and again on IRC recently, about what to name our computers. At first this might sound like a silly thing, especially to people who use a single home computer, but for people with more than one at home or who use computers every day at work, it’s something that you probably end up thinking about at some point.
All of my computers at home are named after “characters” in books. This computer is Defiant, named after a spaceship in Bill Baldwin’s Galactic Convoy novel. My file server is Naruto after the manga character, and my notebook is named Runcible, after a much higher-tech device that is the center of the Neal Stephenson novel The Diamond Age.
I tend to be pragmatic about my server naming because there are just too darn many of them to remember, but many people and organizations give them more fanciful names. For example, A Small Orange uses characters from the show Lost to name their servers, as I noticed when editing some of my content on Hurley.
I’ve heard of some (extremely geeky) people using Star Trek ship classes and Star Wars planet names as computer names. One of the criteria, I suppose, for choosing a set of names is that you have enough for your entire network, because you don’t want Moe, Larry, Curly, and Fred. The Seven Dwarfs might work well if you only have seven machines, but certainly doesn’t work for twelve.
I wonder if anyone has any more imaginative name sets for their computers. Even if it’s just one, you know you have to name it.
