5 ms·
Is it okay to give a technology the name of a serial killer?
by delano 18y ago
Is it okay to give a technology the name of a serial killer?
- jrockway 18y agoIf you are Zed Shaw, yes.
- corentin 18y agoI think he chooses names just to offend the kind of people who would find those names inappropriate in a business setting.
- kragen 18y agoBell Labs named three of their operating systems after castrated men, a notoriously bad movie, and Hell itself. Names that make marketers cringe have a long tradition.
- wmf 18y agoAnd let us not forget SATAN.
- SwellJoe 18y agoWhich was written by Wietse Venema, who went on to write the finest general purpose SMTP server in existence. But, he chose a more suit-friendly name (Postfix) for the mail server.
- kragen 18y agoDon't forget Dan Farmer also worked on SATAN. And FWIW the name history on Postfix was: VMailer, then (in parallel) IBM Secure Mailer (forgotten) and Postfix (alive). Wietse's previous work (tcp_wrappers?) didn't have particularly suit-unfriendly names either. Maybe it was Dan who suggested SATAN?