We Named the Lab Machines After the Seven Dwarfs

Naming computers in the early internet era. Mine was called Sneezy — and it had six siblings.

A look back — long before any of the tools we argue about now.

This is from the turbulent stretch when the internet was being wired up in a hurry. At home, the internet barely worked; modem-based dial-up services had spread a bit; a leased line was something only public institutions had. Korean universities held class B address ranges under ac.kr, and my school, under snu.ac.kr, had departments and labs staking claims to address ranges and names. As the most junior grad student, I ran the errands and soaked up all the rumors that came with it.

archi.snu.ac.kr

Our lab — the Computer Architecture and Networks Lab, usually just “Archi Lab” — used archi.snu.ac.kr. The convention for accounts was to use your own name as the login until it collided with someone else’s, so mine was [email protected]. You registered an account with the lab’s admin, but machine names had to be requested and approved centrally. The unwritten rule: you never named a machine after a person.

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My advisor, Professor Sang Lyul Min, loved dandelions, so the computer in his office was dandelion. Scanning my memory now, familiar names still surface — iris, theory, davinci. Come to think of it, the cse that the computer-science department uses today might have been a neighboring lab’s. This was a time of turf conflicts between the CS and EE sides, and I remember the database-lab seniors celebrating that they’d won db away from the CS department. Something was given and something taken, I think…

sneezy

Before personal PCs in the lab got their own internet connections, a handful of workstations already had names — and the one I worked on was called sneezy. A poor thing that suffered through two years of a bad owner. It was an assembled MIPS box, its case usually left open with a hardware performance-counter patch board fanned out across the top — the kind of rig you put together when you actually want to watch the cache behave. The name itself is one of the seven dwarfs from Snow White, the one who can’t stop sneezing. I only ever met Snow White in an abridged version and took the seven dwarfs in as a single bundle, so honestly they all blur together for me — but apparently, in the original and the animation, each one has a real pedigree.

more dwarfs

Whether or not the professor foresaw the storm of a future bearing down on us, he’d reserved all seven dwarf names for the four or five expensive machines we had at the time.

I knew even then that grumpy, sleepy, and dopey — the ones my labmates used — belonged to the same set. Bashful makes me nod now, and looking again, happy was clearly part of the family too. I remember someone grumbling that such a cheerful name didn’t fit the gloom of the lab. Doc, I think, never really found a use.

After that, the machines and names multiplied beyond anyone’s ability to keep up, and most labs drifted toward appending numbers to the lab name, or just naming machines after people. A little of the romance draining away, you could say. :)

Part of 90s Computer Science Stories — first-person notes on growing up with computers and studying CS in Korea in the 1980s and ’90s. See the full series →

Adapted from my Korean essay on Brunch: brunch.co.kr/@chaesang/51