This is going to be a truly boring read, but it was fun to recall all the different computers I've had... so I'll write it anyway
The first computer that I owned, a 486 DX-2/50mhz Dell running DOS 5.x and Windows 3.1, was named
WOPR (from the movie "War Games"). My main gaming computer at any given year since then has inherited that name. ("Would you like to play a game?")
Other computers around the house are Hitchhiker Guide inspired, given the names of the main computers represented in the books:
Deep Thought
Eddie
EarthEarth from THGttG somehow spun off a planetary theme in some of my other computers and gave rise to
Moon, a laptop (the original one was a Toshiba
Satellite...get it?) and now the main PC laptops since then inherit that name. The main Mac desktop sometimes gets named
Lisa, an obvious choice for any Apple historians out there, but the past 2 iterations have been planets... usually
Venus, mostly because Macs seem more feminine to me for some reason.
A pair of old-world beige G3 towers that I nearly tossed out are now revitilized thanks to Ubuntu and Edubuntu Linux and in use by the rug-rats in the household. I wanted the kids to have internet access, but there was absolutely no way to do that safely using the now-unsupported Mac OS8 and 9 installed on those G3s. Luckily, I learned a bit about what Linux could offer for old and otherwise trash computers, so there are now a
Mars and
Saturn on the home LAN. Both are planets, continuing the secondary theme in my home network naming convention, but they are also both names of gods of war... which somehow fits given that my two sons are always fighting between themselves.
P.S. I've a recent Vista laptop (a tablet convertible) that seems to be unstable coming out of sleep mode. (Due to the now out-dated ATI Mobility drivers that Gateway hasn't provided an update for going on a year now...and ATI doesn't publish drivers for this particular chipset, and leaves that to the OEMs unfortunately). Anyway, I may rename it to
BSOD, for reasons that are clear (at least to me).
