RFC 1178 (rfc1178) - Page 2 of 8
Choosing a name for your computer
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RFC 1178 Name Your Computer August 1990 Don't overload other terms already in common use. Using a word that has strong semantic implications in the current context will cause confusion. This is especially true in conversation where punctuation is not obvious and grammar is often incorrect. For example, a distributed database had been built on top of several computers. Each one had a different name. One machine was named "up", as it was the only one that accepted updates. Conversations would sound like this: "Is up down?" and "Boot the machine up." followed by "Which machine?" While it didn't take long to catch on and get used to this zaniness, it was annoying when occasionally your mind would stumble, and you would have to stop and think about each word in a sentence. It is as if, all of a sudden, English has become a foreign language. Don't choose a name after a project unique to that machine. A manufacturing project had named a machine "shop" since it was going to be used to control a number of machines on a shop floor. A while later, a new machine was acquired to help with some of the processing. Needless to say, it couldn't be called "shop" as well. Indeed, both machines ended up performing more specific tasks, allowing more precision in naming. A year later, five new machines were installed and the original one was moved to an unrelated project. It is simply impossible to choose generic names that remain appropriate for very long. Of course, they could have called the second one "shop2" and so on. But then one is really only distinguishing machines by their number. You might as well just call them "1", "2", and "3". The only time this kind of naming scheme is appropriate is when you have a lot of machines and there are no reasons for any human to distinguish between them. For example, a master computer might be controlling an array of one hundred computers. In this case, it makes sense to refer to them with the array indices. While computers aren't quite analogous to people, their names are. Nobody expects to learn much about a person by their name. Just because a person is named "Don" doesn't mean he is the ruler of the world (despite what the "Choosing a Name for your Baby" books say). In reality, names are just arbitrary tags. You cannot tell what a person does for a living, what their hobbies are, and so on. Libes
