What’s in a name?

Back in February, IBM Systems Magazine ran an article “The Name Game” by Neil Tardy.

Yours truly was quoted in the article … but Neil only mentioned the names of my wife and my laptops (lorien & rohan respectively).

For the record: The main mail server that runs midrange.com is named ‘rivendell’ and the primary web server is named ‘gondor’. There used to be a 3rd system in the mix, named ‘theshire’, but it’s been since retired.

Neil mentioned that I even named the System/36’s that I worked with in a previous job. He neglected, however, to give the names of those systems.

They were Colossus & Guardian (from Colossus: The Forbin Project by DF Jones.

When I worked at SSA, we had boring system names … SSAUSCH1, SSAUSCH2, etc, but we gave them a little spice by changing “SSAUSCH” to “Sausage” … so we referred to systems as “Sausage 1”, “Sausage 2”, etc.

At MKS, we also have boring names for our systems … IL400SV0, IL400SV1, etc … but there’s no fun adaptation we can use.

So, in the comments below, tell us how you’ve named your systems and why they are named that way.

[tags]Names, iSeries, AS/400, IBM[/tags]

4 Replies to “What’s in a name?”

  1. We use names like the original name of the first company that the owner started, Concepts

    Then we have iSeries dedicated to the transaction processing that we provide to our customers. They are AUTHxxyy where xx is the city such as CH for Chicago, and yy is the State, such as IL for Illinois. We here in CA call it AuthCHIL, brrr…

  2. We name our systems after function and location, too.
    We have accounting “FIB”, Warehousing “LAG” and lostics “SPE” systems.
    The next three letters describe the location the system is at.

    So we have systems like “FIBAOW”, SPEAOW” or “LAGAOL” and “LAGOLA”.

    Our windows pcs and servers follow the same sheme.
    “PCAOW92” or “SVAOW03”

    I always wanted to name them after anime or book characters, too.
    But that naming sheme was decided 10 years before i even knew what an iseries is 🙂

  3. I have once worked for a small company, where naming schemes were definitely not in use. Thus, creativity abounded. For example, the first systems (a development and a production system) were named after characters from The Lord Of The Rings (FRODO and GANDALF).

    Once, when a new, far more powerful system was brought in, it was called BERTHA, after the famous German howitzer ‘Fat Bertha’ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Bertha_(Howitzer)).

    Yet another system was installed on the very day the name of the Dutch little princess Amalia was announced. It was a system with two partitions. The partitions were called AMALIA and CATHY (a popularized version of Amalia’s second name, Catherina).

    I wonder what the names of the systems-yet-to-come will be!

  4. Our systems are named after star trek:

    borg – the AS/400. You will be assimilated. (Ironic, as we were initially a UNIX shop!)

    sulu – the data warehousing machine. (RS/6000)

    spock – the data repository

    All other windows servers have functional names, no fun.

    (we used to have other machines, now retired: kirk, scotty, bones, starbase, klingon.)

    At another place I worked, the machines all had names from the flintstones. (fred, barney, wilma, betty, bambam, pebbles, dino, etc)

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