Best Movie Computer NamesBy Raymond Lockley
Among the many things which I've done in my career, I've enjoyed
being a system administrator. Every true profession has its own
culture; and part of the sys admin culturepart of the fun
of being a sys adminis the ritual of naming computers.
One's reputation as a new sys admin in a shop can sometimes be
made or broken by the names you pick when you are first accorded
the honor of naming a set of computers.
Naming computers has a well-established cultural ruleset, which
while varying somewhat from server room to server room, is fairly
consistent across geographies and business types. Generally,
names have to be a bit clever and humorous (or a least considered
so by the local engineers and IT team members). A good name
should somehow prompt you to recall some important fact about the
computer; and so computers which are puchased in sets are usually
given names which are related to one another. For example,
mini-computers might be named after famous dwarves (Tolkien or
Disney), servers bought to construct a "B lab" might all begin
with the letter B, and a cluster of Sun servers might all be
named after sun gods from ancient religions. If a terrible pun
can be worked into the scheme, so much the better.
Given how the activity of naming computers brings out the
creative side of a sometimes overly left-brained profession, I
find it interesting that the names of computers generated by the
highly creative professionals who write and make moves are
generally rather... dull. I sat down to come up with
this list of best names of computers from movies, and had a hard
time remembering more than a handful; and most of the more
memorable ones are really based on the role they played in the
movie's dialogue
("Open the pod bay doors, HAL.")
and not on their cleverness or humorfulness.
So, FWIW, here is my subjective list of the best movie computer
names:
Joshua comes in second because of the role the name plays in the movie:
true fans remember not just the electronically-produced voice saying,
"Greetings, Professor Falken", but also remember the tenderness with
which Professor Falken greets the WOPR by its "real" name (which came
from his deceased young son). [The military would argue that the real
name of the computer is the WOPR (pronounced "whopper"), which stands
for War Operations Planned Response.]
Note: If you'd like to dig around and argue the point,
Wikipedia
has a fairly comprehensive list that includes computer names from other
sources, as well. Feel free to check it out, and argue away! To quote
my old boss, "Arguing with a sys admin is just like wrestling with a
pig: after a while, you realize that the pig just enjoys it." However,
I'm fairly certain I'm right. I checked it very thoroughly, and that
quite definitely is the answer. I think the problem, to be quite honest
with you is that you've never actually known what the question was.
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