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.
