(written '87?; Webbed 3\/98)<\/p>\r\n\r\n
With apologies to T. S. Eliot<\/i><\/p>\r\n\r\n The naming of Vaxen is difficult, risky,<\/p>\r\n For there can be n<\/i> different names for a Vax;<\/p>\r\n And at first you may think that I\u2019ve had too much whiskey<\/p>\r\n When I tell you that\u2019s one among many odd facts.<\/p>\r\n First of all there\u2019s the name that the mailers send mail on,<\/p>\r\n Such as Swatsun\u2014except that that isn\u2019t a Vax\u2014<\/p>\r\n Such as CAMPUS or SWARTHMR or SWAT colon colon;<\/p>\r\n All of them helping the mailers leave tracks.<\/p>\r\n There are names for the smaller machines, and the sweeter;<\/p>\r\n Some for the PCs and some for the Macs:<\/p>\r\n Like SE, PC\/AT, NeXT, or Amiga\u2014<\/p>\r\n There\u2019s silliness there that a Dec machine lacks.<\/p>\r\n I tell you a Vax needs a name that\u2019s sensational,<\/p>\r\n A name for a server, a name without peer;<\/p>\r\n Else how can it keep up its tasks operational,<\/p>\r\n And log in its users from nodes far and near?<\/p>\r\n There are names that are numbers (don\u2019t use them for fun),<\/p>\r\n Names like those used by some Internet hacks:<\/p>\r\n \u201cOne thirty dot fifty-eight sixty-four one\u201d\u2014<\/p>\r\n Names that never belonged to more than one Vax.<\/p>\r\n But nine new computers arrive soon, I tell you,<\/p>\r\n And they all need names too\u2014it\u2019s really a mess;<\/p>\r\n Domains like \"dot campus dot swarthmore dot edu\"<\/p>\r\n Just don\u2019t sound that great (though they work, I confess).<\/p>\r\n When you can\u2019t get a prompt from your lagging Decstation,<\/p>\r\n The reason is sure to be always the same:<\/p>\r\n Its users are locked in mad argumentation<\/p>\r\n On the type, and the sort, and the kind, of its name.<\/p>\r\n Its relevant, spellable,<\/p>\r\n Widely diversible,<\/p>\r\n Pleasing-to-everyone, singular Name.<\/p>\r\n<\/div>\r\n\r\n I think it was around the beginning of my sophomore year at Swarthmore when the computing center obtained a set of Dec workstations. There was much debate over what to name the machines; it was the major topic of discussion on the computing center\u2019s electronic bulletin boards for a while. I wanted to name the systems after cats from Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats<\/cite>, and figured the best way to sway people to my opinion was to write it up in verse... (After the above verse, I included a list of cat names from that book.) Alas, my suggestion was ignored.<\/p>\r\n\r\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"parent":19769,"menu_order":10,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-5478","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5478","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5478"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5478\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20625,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/5478\/revisions\/20625"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/19769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Notes<\/h2>\r\n\r\n