Name Your PC Day

What the day is

Name Your PC Day is observed on November 20. Naming a personal machine sounds like pure whimsy, and it was once formal enough to warrant its own standards document.

Origin and background

The origin of the observance is not documented.

The reference text is RFC 1178, Choosing a Name for Your Computer, published in 1990. It is short, dry and genuinely useful, written when every machine on a network was named by hand. Its advice has aged well: pick a theme with plenty of unused members, use real words that are short and easy to spell, avoid your own name, avoid words that are also commands, avoid digits and hyphens, and do not name a machine after its function or its owner, because both will change while the name will not.

That last point is the substance of the whole document. Naming by function guarantees an eventual embarrassment, as the machine called printserver ends up running the database. Naming by owner guarantees confusion the week that person leaves.

The themed conventions that grew up afterward are a real piece of computing culture: Norse and Greek gods, Tolkien characters, planets, rivers, cheeses, cartoon characters. They worked well at the scale of one department.

They stopped working at the scale of a data center. Once an organization runs thousands of machines, nobody can recall what thor does, and naming moved to structured identifiers encoding role, location and number. The shift is often summarized as treating servers as cattle rather than pets, because an individually named machine implies somebody will nurse it back to health, and at scale nobody will.

Home networks are firmly pet territory, which is why the tradition survives there.

How to take part

• Name your machine, and choose a theme rather than one clever name.
• Read RFC 1178. It takes five minutes and the advice still holds.
• Rename anything currently called desktop, laptop or new-pc.
• Check what your devices broadcast on shared networks before naming them something you would not say aloud.
• Write the scheme down. The one you forget is the one you never recorded.