TLU Three Letter Username Obsession - Computerphile
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- čas přidán 17. 11. 2015
- DFB explains why three letter abbreviations are so common in computer science. Unix & Bell Labs have a lot to answer for! (Professor David F Brailsford)
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/ computer_phile
This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at www.bradyharan.com
“I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First Linux, now git.” - Linus Torvalds, 2007
are you still alive?
DEK = Donald Knuth
AVA = Alfred Aho
+PowerChannel88
Aho is the A in AWK :)
+Tanooki100 I've met the 'W'.
+Tanooki100 My dad's name was Arthur William Kent. He was a computer (a person who calculates, to keep the accounts of a business back then). I'm pretty sure he never did any lexical analysis. Please ignore this comment.
writers of AWK? :D
BSS = Bernie "The Socialist" Sanders
I was 'tjr' at Bell Labs in the '80s and one time, a woman there, confused me with someone else whose initials were also 'tjr' and sent a love letter to me by mistake. So three character logins can lead to embarrassing ambiguities.
Sometimes it's inevitable. I had the exact same name as the HR director at my high school. I got multiple sensitive emails intended for him. The administration email format was different from the student format, but similar enough for people to screw it up.
It's 9:18AM, I've got a donkey sack of work to do, but instead I'm watching a video about 3 letter user names, and absolutely loving it
Nostalgia Nerd me too, almost exactly the same time 🤪
same here, just 5PM.
If I had a nickel for every pointless comment like this I’ve read, I could retire. If you don’t have anything to add to the discussion, nothing more productive than “first” or “(number of dislikes) people _____” or “who’s watching in (time)?” or something like that, you don’t need to hear yourself talk; it just clogs up the comment boxes and makes it harder for people who actually want to start a conversation to make themselves heard!
my username is a tlu of my college, it was initials plus date of birth
People are already shouting that DEK is Donald Ervin Knuth, but AVA is a lot harder to Google (since there are many women named Ava). But I believe that Alfred Vaino Aho would fit this TLU. According to Wikipedia, he's one of the big names in early compiler construction.
I love these mostly non-technical videos, just random stories from older times. And the casual name dropping of a dozen famous computer scientists and mathematicians.
Imagine being called Gerald Irving Farnsworth and having people call you jif
well... in that case, it'd be understandable. Gerald is pronounced with a soft "g", where as .GIF comes from "Graphics Interchange Format", and therefore a HARD G. "gif" is correct when speaking about .gif, "jif" is not and it drives me crazy. just like people who pronounce "sysop" "sci-sop"
Aurelius R sci-ops is the pronounciation of psy-ops aka psychological warfare. It's an infamous part/tactic of the secret services, especially the more sophisticated operations that really mess with people's minds.
So calling sysops psyops is really bad.
+John Francis Doe I guess you never heard of sysop as in system operator hence his point :)
gif being pronounced jif? The correct way? Yeah, that's fine.
Jraphics Interchange Format
I recall that at IBM that the little electric windmills everyone else knows as Fans were termed AMD (Air Moving Device) simply because someone had used FAN to refer to something else.
NMI made me think "Non Maskable Interrupt" :\
***** STOP INTERRUPTING ME! (wow much joke very funny)
+Twilight Sparkle DI :)
+TheChipmunk2008 but in the end we got around that and "run/stop restore" got masked too... cause vecors are ment do be bend :-)
+Twilight Sparkle dat MIPS
Hardcore x86.
this makes me sentimental for the days of 3 letter high score tables. I either do sjl, or sam
+veggiet2009 There was always that guy with the initials AAA. lol
+veggiet2009 Although my initials are GDH- I always entered 'RAT' on video games. I liked picturing the people looking at my score thinking "I'm gonna beat that stinking RAT this time!"
+GruntUltra RAT are my actuall initials :))
+veggiet2009 Was just about to post a very similar comment. Devs in the credits back then used nicknames/handles too. Some like Knoami still do it from time to time.
+veggiet2009 "TOM" for me :)
AVA - Alfred Vaino Aho
DEK - Donald Ervin Knuth
boom, there.
power of the internet in searching data is incredible
Professor Bradford is so human! There's NO video where he does not make a little fun about himself. He's surely a great man.
Some guy named "sysop" was on every system I used.
lol
He must have been a friend of 'root.'
@@tibfulv Charlie Root
7:29 I had a lecturer at Uni who also had that “NMI” as his middle initial.
Of course, in computing, “NMI” more commonly stands for “Non-Maskable Interrupt”.
and of course these day a Non-Maskable Interrupt is more commonly known as Karren.
I remember working in IT support for a company whose username policy included the rule [F]irstname [LAS]tname, so Marvin Jenkins → MJEN.
Was kinda funny when they insisted on that rule when Ms Susan Lutrick hit the scene.
David Icke?
Former British sport commentator, now a complete conspiracy theory nutjob.
@@auntiecarol lol
Git is named after Linus Torvalds
+Jan Sten Adámek It's not named after him, he chose the name Git because it reflected him.
+scbtripwire woosh
+meridious3 he could be trolling
Of course it's Torvald's joke. Whoever does not get it, well, Git is named after him as well :-)
scbtripwire is being facetious to parody your seriousness
I feel sorry for anyone who happens to be named Stanley Theodore Dalton.
+Ze Rubenator oh there's worse things out there. Henry Ignacious Voltaire, Aron Stanley Simmers, Frank Alphonse Gadd
+Ze Rubenator | Simon Osgood Barrett sounds wonderful.
+Ze Rubenator std, in comp-sci so often refers to "standard" that that's probably what people would think of first. have fun googling for info about "std list" in the CPP reference. Often mixed results there.
+Greymerk I thought of the std lib just before reading your comment! :D
+side2sideful (example) Leo Ian Bradford worked with Steven Thomas Dunn
Excellent work on the audio. It's very warm and clear.
BBM. Benoit B. Mandelbrot. It seems he inserted the middle initial and it stands for "Benoit B. Mandelbrot". And GNU is Not Unix.
I love these anecdotes. Informative and funny at the same time. :)
Back when i started working with UNIX, my user name was "gue" because that's how the letter "G" is spelled in portuguese.
Why "G"? Because that's my last name's initial: "Gonçalves".
Then people started calling me "gue" (even outside computing environment) and the nick stuck...
Thirty years later, i still have friends that call me "gue".
i still use the tlu given in college, it was initials plus date of birth
3:58 Note that the "r" and "d" of srb and sdb are next to each other on the (US, at least) keyboard, so such a typo is easy to make.
"I love naming things after myself - first Linux, now Git."
-Linus Torvalds
I remember being quite proud of the login acronym I had while working at my University. It was rsa :-)
In Finland in universities it was (at least a couple of decades ago, I don't know the current system) common to get your username as your first initial + the letters from your surname up to 8 characters total, and perhaps have your second initial embedded if a conflict existed. That was the default, but if you were clever enough (to know of the possibility) you could request an id of your own making with a minimum length of three letters if it was not already used by someone else. I don't remember if there was a maximum length limit (must have been, I guess).
HUT physlab and CSC used TLUs, mostly.
DEK = Donald Ervin Knuth?
+Kristoffer Rødsdalen Hagen If that's true (and many others are suggesting it) I believe you are the first along with Bart Kevelham. You both commented 37 minutes before the comment section loaded for me (according to the time stamp)..
So.. Congratulations I guess :p
+Little Lion Hehe. Then I have to say thanks I guess ; ) I admit that I take far too much pride in this than is sensible so be aware of that when I say that on my end it shows that I beat him with about 2 minutes. I want my recognition for being first on the internet! (Not really though, but I'm not against milking all the possible fun out of it)
Kristoffer Rødsdalen Hagen haha, yes but thinking about how the time stamps work, the fact that they are slightly different on your end than on mine seems to suggest that they are in some way connected to your local YT server or something similar. It would make sense that you both see your own comment as being registered earlier than the other's.
So in that case it makes sense to remove that "bias" and call upon an third source that might use a different local server. And for me they are shown on the same minute ;-)
One of you two was probably earlier, but I don't think we'll ever know for sure who was first. The difference will be smaller than within the delay margin..
(unless of course I'm closer to you or to him from a server perspective, But there's no way of knowing that.:p)
+Little Lion I'm going to beat you clean out of the water when it comes to time commitment on this. I have now decided to look into the CZcams API to see if I can retrieve the actual timestamps as seen by CZcamss main servers to determine who was first. I should note that I'm not claming to be that first commenter, only the first to name DEK. Side note: This is the first (atleast that I can remember) time I bother commenting on a CZcams video and I intend to get my moneys worth! Besides, I needed an excuse to test out the API anyway.. : )
Kristoffer Rødsdalen Hagen Nice!!
Dude, that's pretty impressive. Can you explain how you got the id of both comments?
What if your corporation has more than 17,576 employees?
+Just a HKer thats... awfully specific
+Just a HKer Then they do it like the university done it. Faculty, department, position, initials, etc. You could add so many variables. Anyway, this kind of system is kind of outdated from a technical standpoint and therefore not that common anymore. Our local newspaper over here uses it though.
+EnderCrypt Specific, maybe. But it's certainly not arbitrary. 3 letter usernames, 26 possibilities for each of the 3 characters. That's 26^3 possible usernames. 26^3 = 17,576
Ahh sorry, misread that.
+Just a HKer I'd allow numerals and underscores.
Lots of baby name books advise to consider the initials when naming your child so that doesn't create the sorts of initials one might prefer to avoid. Issues can still arise as language evolves, but many of these examples just make me ask "why would inflict that on your child?"
Please do a video on the duff's device! It's completely useless in sufficiently high-level code, it makes the code unreadable and it bakes the noodle of anybody who doesn't already know what exactly is going on (like reflection in Java, casting in C# and Option Strict Off in VB).
But most importantly: It's interesting.
Ihrbekommtmeinen Richtigennamennicht I find that it only falls short once optimization is considered, as all the full iterations could be compiled more efficiently if the increments could be moved and/or combined by the optimizer.
I can’t imagine using C# efficiently without understanding how casting works. It’s not a particularly complex process. But I’ve been using C++ for 20 years and most days I forget all the kinds of initialization you can have in C++. There’s like a couple dozen ways, all with their own quirks. Now that’s nuts. And even then, I like both C++ and C#.
My first timesharing account as a member of staff was [2, 4]. We didn’t have names in those days; just numbers.
Tell that to the kids these days, mumble mumble ...
Lawrence D’Oliveiro On the kind of system he mentioned, you would have been [ 11, 4, 21 ] or just octal 26225 Typed in as ldo on a 5-bit teletype and loaded straight into a 15 bit register. The same coding would be used for command parsing, assembler mnemonics, variable names etc. Heck, smart cards still use 16 bit file names!
Guys just turn on the captions for this video. It's incredible.
Now I'm soooo curious to see the video on the Duff device.
I personally used it to speed-up some code, but the result was not for the faint of heart
When I first got on BBSes in the 80s and early 90s you were limited to 8 character names. I still miss those days. :)
Linus names all the software he creates after himself, Git included. He knows he's not exactly the friendliest.
+Kasper Guldmann True story
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"I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'git'." -- Linus Torvalds.
Love your histories Professor
Lovely video. Great guy. :)
At Imperial in the late 80s we had 8 character usernames which was just the truncation of our initials plus surname. I still use mine for a lot of things because I can type it so quickly.
Same thing with the student emails generated at Trinity College Dublin today.
DFB tells the best stories
My university just assigns full last names as accounts. Which is not only boring, but is so much more likely to be the same name as many other people than if they just used initials. To get around this, most people have their last name and a number. I don't, but my younger brother does. Boring, boring, boring!
When I started in college doing physics I had some computer science modules, I was given the username twj (my initials) for the CS machines login. The next year I switched degree to computer science instead and was given twj1...annoyed me to no end.
If you get a good enough score on an arcade game on many older machines you get to enter your name which is three letter name. My oldest onlime moniker (not used on CZcams!) of eight is a throwback to those very days and was invented iin October 1990 and made official in January 1991.
Completion of commands: would be fun to see something about text terminal input and command lines from ITS, TENEX, "Twenex", Tops-10, TOPS-20 ... Loved to be able to press ? and ESC to get to see possible options and completing files names and names of commands and switches/options/flags.
Univ of Nottingham still uses usernames of the format described in the beginning of this video, but they've had to add an extra letter. I was mrxdhdy when I was there.
Yes! Do a video on Duff's device!
Two more well known usernames - "esr" and "rms"
I use PEZ as my username because it's short for my family name and in arcade cabinets (I'm 22) as a kid, I wanted my name at the top.
Man, so many euros thrown in games.
Where they really euros ?
Sadly never got 3 letter username. I was pjj125 on bitnet, but then on a Vax account I had tonypo. Usernames were formed by first name + first letter + last letter.
Of course now I have an alias for my work email - just my first name @site.
AVA = Alfred Vaino Aho. That parsers guy. You can also ask what AWK (the name of text processing program) stands for - guess the first letter?
There are also a few people (where "few" is a number strictly less than 27) who have a one letter user name.
I'm not sure what user name Rob Pike had when he was at Bell Labs, but he currently uses "r" - I suspect, but am not sure, that this may date back to the Plan 9 days ...
On Plan 9 he was 'rob'.
Some more Plan 9 names that buck the trend: seanq, presotto (at least).
Edit: and td
Presotto also went for the minimalist approach at Google, with "p" ...
I can't help putting Professor Brailsford over the logo of the Deutscher FußballBund...
Susan Emily Xavier
Walther Thomas Fredericks
Arnold Samuel Simmons
+YouHolli Frank Ugo Quaid, Dorothy Inger Kristiansen, Carl Oscar Karlsen
+Koppa Dasao Lionel Oliver Lesson
Benjamin Ulysses Marx
How about recursive accronyms?
Donald Oliver Naysmith
Daniel Arthur Nesbitt
Victor Iain Chesters
Darn, I kind of which my name was like that now!
My surname begins with a B so:
Rebecca Elizabeth Burt
Deborah Elizabeth Burt
Robert Oliver Burt
Sebastian Eric Burt
Pablo Andrew Burt
+YouHolli Paul Oliver Orson
*tee hee*
Shirley Holbert Thorson
I work for a company that assigns 4 (mostly) random characters logins when one joins. I wonder how common that is nowadays. Who has something like that and who doesn't?
is this part of where 'clu' came from(Tron)?
i still use 3 letter usernames to this day.
alj reporting in
Interesting backstory there.
My university does 3 letters of initials followed by 4 numbers (seemingly random 4 numbers) to prevent collisions. There were no college or program distinguishing characteristics. Not sure what happens if there's no middle initial, but I've never seen a 2 letter UN there..
in my college it was 3 initials plus date of birth
as it happens i still use the tlu today
@@fss1704 Haha, me too for some things.
Try googling any random 3-letter combinations from your keyboard. It'll always suggest you some university, company, facility etc.
American Amateur Radio operators have always been snobbish about their callsigns. Since as far back as the 1950's Ham's could show off their moniker on special issue license plates, often along with the words "Amateur Radio". In 1995 the FCC allowed "vanity" calls on a first come, first served basis. Now whenever a desirable three letter suffix like K2HAM or W1VHF becomes available (2 years after the original license lapses) there are a rush of applications hoping to score the rare call.
DEK = Donald Ervin Knuth I suppose? Very nice video! :)
yeah I knew of rms, esr and ast
+Dan Dart I kno rms frm gnu and fsf too!
+Dan Dart Root Mean Square, Extended Support Release, Abstract Syntax Tree
dmr!
This might be anecdotal and not very rigorous...
On UNIX commands often have very short names of 2 or 3 letters.
I found that after my memory became comfortable with it I started to appreciate the brevity; it made things faster to type.
But then with vi/vim "/" search I found that very often 3 characters is almost always unambiguous enough to jump to what I want in very few keystrokes.
I think there is something special about three letter sequences; I feel like it's just enough characters for things to become acceptably specific. (Usually...)
Consider: 26 * 26 = 676, but 26 * 26 * 26 = 17576!
Maybe there is something rational about these ubiquitous TLAs!
I wonder what these giants of the early shared computer systems would have thought if back then they went into a computer room and found a Raspberry Pi 2 instead of the massive architecture they expected.
Darrin Swanson Writing in C and keeping things light, you could run an entire university on a raspberry pi. 64k core per user goes a long way. You could splurge and give them 512kb of disk :)
dek is Donald Ervin Knuth, but I have to pass on the other one.
+Bart Kevelham If that's true (and many others are suggesting it) I believe you are the first along with Kristoffer Rødsdalen Hagen. You both commented 37 minutes before the comment section loaded for me (according to the time stamp)..
So.. Congratulations I guess :p
Aho, Alfred Vaino, of awk and egrep.
I knew DEK right away. Didn't even know his middle name.
fun stuff, i still use the tlu of my college, it was initials plus date of birth
I just come here to listen to Dr. Brailsford's voice.
Is NMI taken then?
DEK: Donald Ervin Knuth
AVA: Alfred Vaino Aho
Also not google wikipedia went to the bell labs page and just read for names... matching haha. (also the edit was to fix my misspelling of Knuth...)
+Matthew Sitton Seems like you're the first one to get Aho.
I have luckily been able/allowed to be known as "tml" in all the places where I have worked;)
What no god? :P Well Duff's device wasnt quite what i expected. I kinda thought it to be somekind of physical machine of sorts. :D
rhh -- at the Labs, our Jedi Master
3 letter followed by 3 numbers is the rage.
Ulysses Simon Rogers, Oscar Peter Thompson and Benjamin Ian Norris all seem to have access to my machine.
Neophlegm Just try not to let in Ulysses S. Grant.
Nice.
In the US, you aren't required to have a middle name, but on the birth certificate, if one is not provided, your middle name is NMI or NA(not applicable). That actually becomes your legal 'middle name'. Either way, the initial is N.
Richard Smith That must be the stupidity they insist on in some backwoods state perhaps. Birth certificates are regulated by the state they are issued in, and thankfully most states got their act together and tweaked the rules to accommodate other cultures.
DFB is referring to 1964s hit "The 'in' crowd"...
+11Kralle
Yes indeed! Although my favourite version is probably the one by the Mamas and Papas.
7:30 Uncanny: I had a graduate CS lecturer who reported the exact same experience.
My last TLU dissapeared a few years ago... fell victim to take overs and new top level domains... rip pkr
dek Donald Ervin Knuth, duh!
Don't Even Know
Avi Silberschatz was just avi. I wonder how Jerry Foschini got the username gjf.
Bjarne Stroustrup, inventor of C++, was BS!
Frederick Alan Godfrey
I managed to take over the “rob” user name at my university circa 1994.
Apple has a similar frenzy for two-letter usernames @apple.com, I've known two of these individuals personally
i have 4 initials if i include my middle name (MKTW) or only 3 if i leave off my middle name (MTW) and 3 if i go w/ my middle name and my preffered surname (MKT) or two without my middle name (MT)
Where are you from? In the USA usually only the fathers surname is carried on
crunch9876 UK, normally it's the same sort of thing, but on my birth certificate i have both my mother and farther's surname. even if it was only my farther's name, however, i'd still chose my mothers last name, since my dad died when i was too young to remember.
:D I like Professor David
RMS > ALL
Also, the "git" in "github" comes from, well, *git*.
You know, *the SCM system that the website is built to complement?*
I'm so tired of people talking about Github when they're really talking about git and misleading people into thinking git is coupled with Github *at all.*
I swear, if one more person tells me they're not using git because they have some grievance with Github, I'm gonna punch someone.
+Major Gnuisance I was expecting you would bash them instead. :P Anyone who thinks they need GitHub to use git can fork off!
Pyramid
*ALRIGHT, YOU ASKED FOR THIS!*
_punches self_
+CowLunch Very punny.
I use git with Bitbucket.
TRiG (Ireland) Right.
And the thing is, you don't need to use git with _any_ such service.
I'm going to guess DEK is David Korn, creator of the Korn shell, and AVA is Alfred Aho, the 'a' of the awk command. Thank you Wikipedia!
David Korn is (was) dgk. Not sure what the G stands for. (I say was, because he's no longer at AT&T, and at Google I doubt he is still dgk.)
Ohhh. That is why my granddad (who worked on a university) had three letter e-mail address. This aways bothered me... Well, now I know.
Hehe, my mortgage here in the US has me listed with (NMI) in my full name as I don't have a middle name and they needed something in there.
Github is, of course, named after the Git DVCS, which in turn was named by Linus Torvalds with the following motivation: "I'm an egotistical bastard, and I name all my projects after myself. First 'Linux', now 'Git'."
So I guess the video is right in that it really does refer to the british slang.
DEK is Donald Knuth, right?
my username at Louisiana Tech is ass018.
I am sad that my initials spell that word. :(
You are slightly wrong that command line (auto)completion would have come only with graphics terminals and workstations, though. Personally I used completion on TOPS-20 in the late 1970, and that was a command-line based timesharing system, nothing graphical at all.
don't forget the allmighty AST Andrew Stuart Tanenbaum
36bit? Xerox Sigma 9 FTW! :)
IBM should fly you out to do a bit on Watson
Suddenly my university username makes sense...
I would be CRC, so would my brother and my mother would be ECC.
Cadde Do you all work at the DRD (Department of Redundancy Department)?
AVA: Alfred V. Aho
Donald e knuth! Big fan!