"prod-web02" implies that this is the second web server in a cluster of web servers. That makes a lot of sense in 2021, where "prod-web02" is likely an AWS ins

"prod-web02" implies that this is the second web server in a cluster of web servers. That makes a lot of sense in 2021, where "prod-web02" is likely an AWS instance or a docker VM that is doing nothing but serving web pages, and which exists in some cloud server where you will never see the physical machine it is running on. This was written in 1990, though, and there was no cloud, and VMs were quite rare things, (and we had to walk to school uphill, both ways, in the snow). Machines were physical things, and no one had the budget to buy an entire computer to be the second production web server - a machine ran a lot of different daemons that did a lot of different things, and the roles and responsibilities of a given physical piece of hardware would change as time went on. Which is still true today, but today it's just that a machine runs a lot of docker containers instead of running a lot of daemons, and we don't care where the docker containers are running, whereas back then we very much cared what machine it was running on, because sometimes we had to go to that machine and reboot it or kick it or install more RAM. At the time, I was working at Alcatel (before it was Alacatel-Lucent, before that became Nokia), on a 450Gbps switch which was used for things like routing satellite TV feeds or handling distribution from big fiber backhauls, or running LANe for small nations. On the third floor, we had several racks of these switches in "the lab" which we used for testing and development work. While you could push a new software load from the comfort of your desk, if you borked things badly enough you'd sometimes have to go downstairs and plug a serial cable into the front of the control card so you could go poke around and force the card into a sane state. So, when a new hire came in, they might say, "Hey mrweasel, I uploaded a bad load to Spock, and it's stuck in a boot loop. Where can I find that physical machine?" And you'd say, "Head down to the third floor, turn left out of the elevators, walk to the second last row of racks. On your left there should be switches named "Picard", "Riker", "Deana", etc..., and on your right should be "Kirk", "McCoy", and friends. Spock is third on the right between McCoy and Uhuru." That conversation is way more confusing if all of these machines are named "test01-test20". You couldn't even name them that - there were lots of different products in different areas of the lab, so you'd need the product name in there, and they'd be "rsp7670-test01" through "rsp7670-test20". And, when you want to push a new build from your desk, it's way less likely you'll mistype "picard" when you want to update "data", but it's quite easy to accidentally clobber "rsp7670-test05" when you mean to overwrite "rsp7670-test06", which was sure to summon an angry developer to your desk asking why you just killed their 48 hour validation testing, 45 hours in.