From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: tfb@tfeb.org (Tim Bradshaw) Date: Fri, 3 Feb 2017 12:59:04 +0000 Subject: [TUHS] Names of famous, historical UNIX machines? In-Reply-To: <28ebecfb41ed0b72b45f1cd2ae99c3a4@xs4all.nl> References: <20170201204327.GU21797@yeono.kjorling.se> <28ebecfb41ed0b72b45f1cd2ae99c3a4@xs4all.nl> Message-ID: I am not sure if I remember this or if I was told it later, but mcvax was a very important machine for people in Europe (like me) as it was a big gateway (for usenet? I forget). Its name was in lots of people's heads and probably lots of scripts &c. So at some point they got a new machine which, obviously, was a Sun. So, at that point they had two choices: - keep the old name, even though it wasn't a VAX any more; - rename it to something which was platform-neutral so the pain would only happen once. And they took the third option: rename it, but wire-in the platform *again* thus causing pain now and more pain later. Oh dear. On the subject of hostnames, has anyone mentioned prep / prep.ai.mit.edu? All the GNU software came from that in the mid 1980s, anyway. I think 'prep' meant 'document preparation', I don't know what it was. --tim > On 1 Feb 2017, at 22:54, Jacob Goense wrote: > > - mcvax, mcsun > Suitable for anything related to europe.