Originally, there was also going to be 0xCAFED00D - BABE was for the class file, and D00D was for serialized object files, and the two together would give you t

Originally, there was also going to be 0xCAFED00D - BABE was for the class file, and D00D was for serialized object files, and the two together would give you the ability to move programs over the network, mobile agents and "the network is the computer" being the vision at the time. However, that vision did not come to pass, so there was no mobile object format. 0xCAFED00D eventually got used in the Pack200 format, which has now also fallen by the wayside. I think if you were cool in the '90s, "babe" and "dude" seemed like perfectly natural, even rad, ways to refer to people. Particularly if you only had access to hexadecimal digits. You probably wouldn't pick those terms today, sure.