When I was at university and my electronic engineering student association got an internet connection at the very end of the 80s, we named our servers. In the early 90s we had Utelscin (a mix of the (sub)domain names for the uni, faculty and association), and Bettie. Bettie was the mail server, short for Bettie Serveert, ‘Bettie serves’, after a Dutch alternative rock band (the band in turn was named after the title of a book on tennis by Dutch tennis player Betty Stöve).
Just now I was going through some papers on language and thinking by Dr. Evelina Fedorenko at MIT’s EvLab, where I came across a statement they name the lab’s hardware after scientists and engineers in history who did not get sufficient credit for their contributions. I like that.
Maybe we should do something like that in our company too, for undercredited people in the fields we are active in.
@ton one of my devices is called Lattes for similar reasons.
When I took over managing the servers for the provincial elections office, I named them Edward and Wallis, after the abdicated king and his lover.
For servers of my own, I’ve leaned heavily on the names of my grandparents, so there have been ada, ross, nettie, and dan.
I like the idea of naming servers after the under-recognized, in part because it dovetails with a physical world feeling I’ve had for a long time. Here in Charlottetown we have many public statues, almost 100% of them of men (the exception being one of Queen Elizabeth, and one of Peter Pan, who I’ve always thought of as gender-fluid). We have public buildings named mostly after men too. And the statues and buildings honouring men are honouring soldiers, politicians, business tycoons. All this to the point where we need an affirmative action plan for memorization—a few decades at least where we honour the people we’ve forgotten.