Best Movie Computer Names

By 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 culture—part of the fun of being a sys admin—is 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:

  1. HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)
  2. Joshua in WarGames (1983)
  3. MU-TH-R 182 model 2.1 terabyte AI Mainframe ("Mother") in Alien (1979)
  4. Colossus in Colossus: The Forbin Project (1970)
  5. Deep Thought in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (2005)
Why does ol' HAL make the top of the list? Well, in addition to his/its memorable role and lines in the movie (and sequel, and yes of course the books), the name is not just an acronym, it's also a pun. Yes, any nerd or geek can tell you that HAL stands for "Heuristically programmed ALgorithmic computer". Many of us, though, can also tell you that if you increment each of the letters by one—that is, the H becomes an I, the A becomes a B, the L becomes and M—you get...

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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