Big Unix servers and workstations (often: the same thing) used to have names – real names, geek names, like thor or elvis or liberator or anduin or theritz or (for a golf fanatic) titleist; more mundane ones also had “service”-oriented names like bagsun or uk-usenet or aberda or something like that, but they were machines which less personality.

Back around 1995 I was charged with designing and building Sun Microsystem’s UK Internet firewall complex, a bunch of proxies and servers (in the days before the world became everything’s a HTTPS URI) and so I was also challenged to come up with a new naming scheme, distinct from the other 3 extant firewall complexes (in Milpitas, Boston(?), and Amersfoot, IIRC) and to reflect a new design.

So like any good graduate in stellar astrophysics, I picked something that was easy for me to remember; I’m pretty sure that I also remember the correct /24, so I can reconstruct the entire naming scheme even today:

129.156.81.0/24 IP Address Allocation

1. hydrogen – the Cisco 9000 router, that machine was a tank
2. helium
3. lithium
4. beryllium
5. …I’m pretty sure that by now you can see where this is going…

It was great, I never had to fight to remember the first 20..25 IP address mappings, although the ops team always complained that they couldn’t remember how many L’s to put for beryllium. These were the days before the web (let alone Google) was popular, so it wasn’t trivial for non-nerds to look up a periodic table. Each machine served a role (SMTP service, FTP service, HTTP proxy, SOCKS proxy, that sort of thing) and you could be certain which firewall complex the user was complaining about because each had a different naming theme.

I miss that era. Nowadays we have disposable “instances” with disposable names, and few if any people (beyond hobbyists) have the opportunity to use an actual computer — blinking lights, whirring fans, and everything else — which is literally directly connected to the Internet.