Mid-80s, the Stanford TOPS-20 campus timesharing system had machines named Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth which users called The Tragedies. The system admi

Mid-80s, the Stanford TOPS-20 campus timesharing system had machines named Hamlet, Othello, Lear, and Macbeth which users called The Tragedies. The system administrators did NOT like that. Names from Tolkien, movies, and tv got popular as workstations got deployed. Initially we thought the management had unclenched but learned that end users picked the names as these were machines deployed by individual research groups.