It's all about being in the "In Crowd" and I've been reflecting about this, you know,
and sociologists would have a field day about it.
Yeah, at Bell Labs they, of course, were the Computing Science research section. They
could afford their own computers but I think, even there, they liked the idea that
it was THEIR computer and it wasn't the Computing Center's computer, although
there was one. Let me go way back to the sixties and seventies when multi-user
computing came on the scene, even here at Nottingham. It was batch, it was cards and
paper tape in those days.
But, of course, the university had to make quite sure that your username
reflected a fair bit about you, so they could categorize you. I remember, I think
I was PMZDFB. P [for] Pure Science faculty; M [for] Mathematics department; Z
(don't me why!) [for] member of academic staff. DFB - 6 characters. We were all
like that. But when we could afford our first UNIX computer we thought: "We can
be like Bell Labs. ! " I could be just "dfb". We're in with the in-crowd! We've got our
own computer and it's all ours!
I'm sure that was an awful lot of what was being reflected in that. If you say
BWK, way over 90% of the computer science audience will tell you
who that person is.
But I've checked back with Brian about this and I said: "Well, was it always
initials?". Because I know in North America, y'know, "First name, middle initial, surname" is
very common. He said: "Well, almost always"
And I said: "Well, what about Ken Thompson then - he's 'ken' isn't he?!". And it was more or
less: "Dave are you going to tell Ken can't he can't be 'ken' ?!" No, apparently
Ken, because he was so early on was on MULTICS, not just on UNIX - an absolutely
ground-zero multi-user system and which he was helping to design. He was 'ken' and
that was allowed you see.
So, I think the rule came about that if you'd got a short first name then fine,
that might be used as well. So that was part of the whole thinking behind all
this. And I guess the next question I asked Brian - because I know how it
evolved here - was were you allowed to have more than three letters? And he said: "Oh yeah! yeah! There was a guy,
I think his surname was 'Chesney'. He was always 'ches'. No problem, y' know. And so oh!
and Rob Pike, I think, was allowed to be 'rob' y'see. And I said: "Well, did
anybody try to pull rank and say 'I'm senior, I want that [acronym]' ?" Again, according
to Brian : "No, no it was first come first served;
if you got the acronym then that was yours". So it started me off
on thinking, well, if I'd only been fortunate enough to stay longer at Bell
Labs. - in my brief visit in 1986 - I didn't stay long enough. But if i could
only have had a username could I have been 'dfb' at Bell Labs. ? The answer is "yes", but
here's the sad story: Dr. Heartbleed - he's 'srb' - so I said to Brian: "How about
'srb' at Bell Labs.? He said: "Sorry Stevie -it's gone already,
[to] Steve Bourne, inventor of the Bourne Shell. We would have had to find something else".
When you think about it you can see some of the perils and pitfalls and this
what about if two people have very nearly the same three-letter codes but
not quite and you accidentally send the wrong email to the wrong person. That has
happened to me with Steve [Bagley] a few times. In fact with two Steves, that are a bit
ambiguous, in fact both are on Computerphile. Steve Bagley is 'srb'; Steve Benford, of
blogging guitar fame, is 'sdb'. And I have from time to time, had a baffled visit
from 'sdb' saying: "What on earth do I know about document engineering", or something
like this.
The virtue was, of these very simple three-letter names
was - you've got to remember is that you're back in the days of dumb terminals here. Pretty
well keyboard, character-driven terminals What you type is what you get. It could
have auto-completed but that would have been in its infancy. The idea of auto
completion and, yes, then you can click on it
No. That had to come in the future - that came in with graphics terminals, later
UNIX, Windows, Macs, all that. So there you are out in a .... visiting Bell Labs. You've got
a dumb terminal. You want to send somebody an email. Being able to type,
whatever you would be, 'sar', at something. Easy to type - that mattered a lot. I
still routinely type three-letter acronyms to get through to people on
email. Unless I'm replying to something, of course, then that's all automated.
It's not just computer scientists - although we're probably the worst about it.
But, as you know, in high-school teaching, in in any organization where somebody's
trying to say: "Who's in charge of this item on the agenda? Who's the person
responsible?"., rather than writing a full name you'll often just put three
initials at the bottom. Again, it's in the "in crowd". We board members know who each
other are and 'abc'is in charge of this particular matter. When we come to doing
our grading sheets - our mark sheets - here. every year, and we look at each student's
individual performance there's always a little bit added on in the corner - the
three-letter login name of the academic member of staff responsible for that student
- and that helps enormously. >> Sean: What happens if you've got initials that don't really ...
let's say they're not they're not something you want to be known as ?!
>> DFB: Yes .... >> Sean: There are some rude examples of this but let's try one that isn't maybe so ...
Well, I know that many of the viewers here are very familiar with things like
github. Now I know what git means but I've wondered: "Well is there some other kind
of more universal meaning, of git
than that?" And i looked it up and it says, on Wikipedia no less, that 'git' is
a UK-inspired prefix for a person who's just very very annoying, which is
true. I don't think there's any other meaning behind the 'git' in 'github'
other than that. So, y' know, somebody called George Ian Taylor might not
like having the three letter acronym 'git'. The only other thing I
think we haven't covered is: "What happens with people that have only got two
initials, yeah?" Now apparently at Bell Labs Brian tells me that Tom Duff who is
really famous - fabulous computer graphics guy and, everybody, the inventor of Duff's Device,
Look it up! I might even do a separate video on that at some stage. Yeah! Tom Duff. so
famous he was just allowed to be 'td'. Now has amazed me because my Dad - and we can
refer back to YouTube videos again - when he was with his Type X machine, out in
the field, he had to have US Air Force accreditation because he was reporting
as a cipher clerk, to the US Air Force. He got his documentation. You know what it said
at the top? "Frank NMI Brailsford". So what does NMI stand for? >> Sean/DFB (in unison): "No Middle Initial!" (laughter)
So, y' know, I'm surprised to find that Tom Duff has no middle initial.
I'm not saying it's quite unique in North America but there we go. >> Sean: I would
have thought, perhaps, lots of systems required that this had to be of the same format?
>> DFB: Yes again you know in asking Brian about the background to all of this he
points out that there was a sort of feeling that maybe not going beyond four
would be a good thing because - again it's something we hope to get on to in
other videos - there was some weird word lengths in early computers and for
example i remember that on the ICL series computers there were 6-bit
characters - not 8-bit characters - and 24-bit integer words. So four
characters - four sixes are 24 - would fit into
one word on a computer like that. I think he said, similarly, one of the machines he
was on, it was fine to have up to six characters - it was all efficient because
six sixes are 36 - it was a 36 bit machine. So those kinds of considerations because we're
computer scientists, were background factors as well. Should we set a quiz?
Right. Just a little quiz. Who can be the first commenter not to say "first", but to
tell you, Sean, the answer to the following question: "Who is 'dek'" >> Sean: Any clues? Is it a bit ...
>> DFB: I don't want to give too many clothes except to say he's a computer scientist,
yes, and a second and rather harder one. Another very famous computer scientist
who was at Bell Labs. but is no longer there. But he's very famous and it's a he.
His acronym at Bell Labs was 'ava' and it's not female,
it's male, it's not a surname. He was 'ava'
Who was that? >> Sean: Good! I hope these aren't just available on Google and people just go ...
>> DFB: Oh they might do. They might be . I don't know.