Monthly Archives: April 2006

Computer Names: Etymology

I recently bought a Mac mini (yay! yay!) and it started up and asked me for a name. This got me thinking about how I name computers. My first several computers (A 286, 386, and a 486) remained nameless, but every one of them after that had a nice glorious name.

Almost always female, this name was devised mostly at the spur of the moment, often from books that I’d be reading then. Ione for example, a lean P-166 machine, was named after one of the AIs in Peter F. Hamilton’s Night’s Dawn trilogy (btw, that’s still one of the best non-core Scifi books I’ve read till date).

My bro named my current primary machine (An Athlon 1800). He calls it BLAZE. It’s a name that I’m admittedly not too fond of :-). There was also a machine called Seven (A P3-500) of the Seven of Nine fame. My notebook (A Centrino) is Athena, the Greek Goddess. You get the drift ;-).

What’s up with those machines now? Ione, which currently my mom very sporadically uses, is probably going to be given away soon. Seven, which I’d been using until now as my secondary box is going to be offloaded to her, and Blaze, well, it still has a few years up its sleeve, especially with a stock new 7800GT 7900GT in its innards. My notebook is still the box I do most of my work on, although I’m slowly offloading a lot to my Mac.

Well, what did I name my Mac mini? Ayesha, She who must be obeyed. [2] 🙂